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Atrios argues that "you link it, you own it" is an "unwritten but well-understood blog issue." (Referenced in comments on my post below.) Not in my neck of the Web. I own my own words. I don't own yours, and I certainly don't own yours just because I happen to link to your page.
I guess that just shows you how tough it is to generalize about the blogosphere. Here's the thing: Linking is all about context, right? What words do you link on, what do you say about the site you're linking to. If I just posted a link in my blog here, without comment, to, say, an anti-semitic Aryan Nation site, that would leave my readers at the least scratching their heads and quite likely thinking I'd lost my marbles. But if I were posting a long commentary on the subject and referring to such a site as an example of a particular kind of right-wing rhetoric, for instance, I'd link to it. I wouldn't "own it." If I didn't link to it, (a) I wouldn't be using the Web to its full extent to document my argument, and (b) I'd just be making my life hard on my readers -- I've got the URL already, why should I make them go to Google?
The context for this discussion is not experienced bloggers, who tend to understand how and when to link because it's in their blood, but non-Web
journalists and editors moving online who get their heads in a tizzy because linking is new to them and they don't really understand it. Telling them "You link it, you own it" is tantamount to telling them, "Go back into your holes, don't even try to link, because once you start linking we're going to hold you responsible not only for everything you publish but for everything everyone you link to publishes." This is a good way of shutting down the Web's giant conversation, not opening it up.
Furthermore, the "you link it, you own it" principle would spell legal disaster for bloggers if it became widely accepted. It's just a bad meme, all around.
Here's what Atrios might be trying to say -- or rather, here's a reworded version of his principle that I could get behind: "You link it, you ought to check it out." Say you stumble upon some crazy rumor about, er, a politician's sex life, on a site you don't know much about. You could, in ascending order of rectitude, do the following: (1) Instantly publish a link to it without comment; (2) publish the link but say that you have no idea if it's true; (3) publish the link only after you have satisfied yourself that the rumor's original publisher is trustworthy; or (4) get out your notepad, pick up the phone and try to verify the rumor yourself. Different bloggers will do different things here, and their choices will affect their credibility. Those choices will also, to be sure, affect how widely they're read. There's a reason Matt Drudge has such an unmatched record for high page views and low trust!
POSTSCRIPT, Thursday A.M.: Atrios clarifies with some good points, and I think we're pretty much in agreement at this point. The following seems to be the practice that he's focused on, and I imagine it is more common in his particular realm of the blogosphere than in mine: "If I link to something saying 'go read this' then I've put my stamp of approval on it. It's bullshit to come back two hours later and say 'uh, well, I didn't write it, I just linked to it... not my problem.'" The point here is, it's the "Go read this" that's the endorsement, not the link itself. A small point, maybe, but these distinctions matter...
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Having heard Alan Kay's inspiring talk at the 2003 Emerging Technology conference, I already knew how much of modern computing Douglas Engelbart's famous 1968 demo of the NLS ("oNLine System") contained within it -- and how far we still have to go to match the stuff Engelbart showed off then, not only in its individual elements (graphical interface, hypertext, advanced input devices, distance collaboration, and so on) but in their total integration.
What I didn't know was that the NLS appears even to have had a kind of blog capability as one of its many tricks.
I've been watching the amazing videos (shot by Stewart Brand) of Engelbart's demo -- all available online, here. If you take a look at this one, you'll see Jeff Rulifson explaining that the NLS programmers -- who, in true bootstrapping fashion, seem to have maintained all their code within the NLS itself -- kept a kind of bug log. Since NLS tracked who was using it and what everyone did when, each entry in the bug log has a little subscript line, flush right, with the name of the person who posted it and the time it was posted.
Sure looks like a weblog! And if you were logged into NLS you could even add comments. (I'd clip a still from the Real stream but haven't been able to do a screen capture -- perhaps part of the Real format's DRM, or I'm too much of a klutz. Anyway, the video clip is under a minute.)
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There's a conference at Harvard this weekend about blogging, journalism and credibility. That's a reasonable topic. The invitee list has caused some discussion in the blogosphere -- too many pros? not enough bloggers? Some of this, I think, is just natural "why wasn't I invited?" peevishness. (I froze through enough Januarys in Cambridge to cure me of any envy.) But reading Rebecca MacKinnon's FAQ on the conference leaves me with a small sense of deja vu.
There are questions about how blogging and journalism intersect that are worth talking about more, even though we've already talked about them endlessly. But there are other questions that arose ten years ago when journalism and the Web first collided (pardon me for donning my old-timer's hat, but it happens when you've been doing something long enough), and that ought to be settled by now.
For instance, MacKinnon asks: "What happens if one of your news organization's blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate (despite being interesting)...?" This question was first raised in the mid-'90s by mainstream news editors who were hostile to the Web. They asked it because they already had their answer: Links were scary, so let's not link at all, or only link after a committee of poobahs has said that it's OK.
The notion that a link is an endorsement is something that died a slow death in the mid and late '90s, as people who actually spent their working lives on the Web -- as opposed to the editors who ran newsrooms and still didn't know what an URL was -- came to understand that an editorial link (one chosen by a writer rather than paid for as part of a business relationship) can be a reference, a courtesy, a footnote, a means of documentation, but that it is not an endorsement. The "endorsement" concept enjoyed a brief revival when Google came along and people worried that if, say, they linked to a Nazi site when they were writing a story about anti-Semitism, they were helping that site out by boosting its page-rank or "Google juice." Google's new scheme to defeat comment spam provides the ultimate technical fix to that problem. But even without it, choosing not to link to a site you were writing about, but didn't approve of, was never much more than a discourtesy to your readers, who'd now have to go Google the site themselves.
Links are part of the vocabulary of writing for the Web. Telling Web journalists they can only link to "approved" sites, or sites whose accuracy is pre-vetted, is like saying, "You can only quote people who you agree with." If a Web journalist or blogger links to a site and later discovers that it's "not accurate," why, then go edit the original story or blog post (and note that you've made the edit). Or post again with the new information about why the original link was inaccurate. Or both. The answer is, and has always been, more information, not less linking.
I sat through many conferences in 1996 and 1997 and 1998 that hashed all this stuff over. I'm sure the folks at Harvard have plenty of new controversies to explore; I hate to think Web journalism will be reinventing its own wheels every few years.
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