Doyce shared* via Google reader a Kottke article about “Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere.” Kottke compares the excerpting used by Dow Jones’ All Things Digital site (excerpting the first few paragraphs, followed by a link to the post) vs. BoingBoing (summarize the content, with perhaps a personal observation, then quote the jist of it).
Kottke’s conclusion is that, aside from not fully representing the (lack of) relationship between the original poster (OP) and ATD, the ATD site is pretty good (his metaphor is “showing the first 3 minutes of a movie and then prodding the viewer to go see the rest of it in a theater”), while BoingBoing (and most of the Blogosphere) make it less necessary to actually see the original because it’s so neatly summarized and extensively quoted (“like the movie trailer that gives so much of the story away (including the ending) that you don’t really need to watch the actual movie”).
I think Kottke makes some good points here, but misses on a few others. Part of it is that his own blogging style tends to be personal impressions + a short excerpt + link to the original, more like ATD than BoingBoing.
To be fair, there are a lot of people who do something like what BoingBoing does. I’ve done it myself sometimes, because the OP has said something so sweetly I don’t want to water it down by reformulating it. I would agree, moreover, that simply quoting the entirety (or even most, or even just the pith) of a post is pushing Fair Use beyond its ethical shape.
But that can be substantially mitigated by personal commentary. At least that’s what I tell myself. Introducing a point, then, if quoting extensively, doing so to provide context for responding, mulling, countering, agreement, etc. That makes a huge difference, as you’re then actually turning it into a dialog.
Kottke also touches on, but misses, a truism about attribution. Certainly posting content without a link back is unethical (or, when I do it, a case of forgetfulness during the writing process). The original authors of the piece Kottke discusses are clear that their objections were more the ATD site made it look like they worked for ATD (a fair enough concern). Kottke’s assertion that the BoingBoing version of the article might be unclear that the excerpt isn’t BoingBoing/Doctorow’s is absurd, since even the reduced screen shot clearly shows the original author’s name, and the clear blockquote has a massive red quotation mark in it.
(I sometimes have trouble on BoingBoing finding the link to the original, but that’s another matter.)
Kottke also argues:
To make matters worse, some readers will pass along BB’s post instead of Schachter’s post…it becomes, “hey, did you see what Boing Boing said about URL shortening services?”
That does happen (and I’ve sometimes done it), and it’s a fairly common phenominon around the blogosphere. I usually try to drill down to original articles from BoingBoing, etc., just because that sometimes raises some interesting new info. But even in Kottke’s case, I’m more likely (esp. in a Google Reader share) to just have the Kottke link which then points to the OP’s article.
And occassionally (but more often than you might think) someone will write a post about something interesting, it’ll get linked by a big blog that summarizes and excerpts extensively, and then the big blog’s post will appear on the front page of Digg and generally get linked around a lot while the original post and its author get screwed.
Again, altogether possible. But I’ve been linked to (once) by BoingBoing and had a huge surge click-through traffic. I suppose if BB just said (Kottke style) “Hey, great article here about something you should read about,” more people would go to the original. Or maybe they wouldn’t, but would just stick with reading the next BB article (esp. if they’re browsing via feed reader on a mobile device, when clicking through to another article creates a whole world of mobile hurt).
One thing I do not do enough of (and I’ve been pondering it of late) is cite the author name in my blog posts about what someone’s written. “I found an interesting post here about X …” segues directly into an excerpt paragraph or two, whereas it would probably be polite, beyond the link, to say, “Fred Smith has an interesting post here about X …” (I note that BoingBoing is diligent about this sort of thing).
So, to summarize:
- Make sure you link to the source article.
- It’s better to link to the original than where you found it (but it’s also polite to hat-tip the place you found it).
- It’s also polite to include the original author’s name; if you’re an aggregating site, don’t make it look, though, like the original author works for you.
- If you are going to excerpt extensively, make sure you are contributing something to the discussion, not just repeating the original. Breaking up excerpts with commentary is probably a good rule about this.
* sharing via GReader has its own moral conundra. I tend to dislike RSS excerpts, since they require clicking through to read, and, as noted, on a mobile device that can be a pain. Google provides a nice scraper to create a shared post from a web page — is it ethical to scrape an entire article that does not have an RSS feed, or that you don’t suscribe to, or where the original author is just putting out (exceedingly short teaser) RSS blurbs?