[microformats-discuss] reblogging needs proper citation, source attribution, as does localization/translation

[Tantek Çelik]

On Jul 14, 2005, at 1:52 PM, Kevin Marks wrote:

>> We can copy data from one site or page to another without losing the
>> structure.  For example, we can reblog a blog entry without losing the
>> original comment-submission URL.  Or, we can copy an event listing
>> from the promoter's site to an event aggregator and from the
>> aggregator to the user's calendar.  ...all with plain old web apps.
>
> Lucas, I've been meaning to ask you about citation-wrapping on that - 
> some of the examples I've seen have made it hard to tell which is a 
> reblogged element and which is commentary by the reblogger. Perhaps 
> you can join in the
> http://www.microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming
>

Agreed. There needs to be proper <blockquote>ing built into any such 
reblogging with use of the 'cite' attribute to link to the original, 
and perhaps a user-visible hyperlinked <cite><a href="...">blogged 
from</a></cite> as well.

Reblogging should not mean stealing, but right now, this is what often 
appears to happen -- bloggers stealing content and not giving 
attribution, nor linking to the source, nor distinguishing it from 
their own content.  I'm sure we've all seen examples of this.

As Kevin pointed out, this problem has a lot of overlap with the 
citation-brainstorming efforts, and solving this problem seems 
*especially* critical for reblogging, especially perhaps citing the 
"original" source (rel="original"?) in addition to citing whereever the 
content was reblogged from.

The "what was the original" problem also has overlap with the problem 
of localizations/translations of sites, where it is not always obvious 
what was the original (certainly not mechanically), though while 
rel="alternate" helps to at least say "here is an alternate 
representation".

Thanks,

Tantek