Source Linkage Confessional

Doc Searls, A-list blogger (but not Zuul the Gatekeeper who, as we know exists in the form of Dana Barrett and is waiting for Gozer Gozerian), says…

I think it’s both right and responsible for
bloggers to point to their sources, especially to other bloggers. It’s
also essential to recognize the abundance of excellent sources that
aren’t in some search engine’s "A-list". Finding and crediting those
sources is one of the things I’ve always liked best about blogging.
There are posssibly dozens of metaphors for that activity (just
starting with searching and browsing). If "gatekeeping" is among them,
it’s only because the list is streched to include the most negative and
cynical candidates.

Here’s the deal.  Sometimes I get sloppy.  Sometimes, in fact, I get dishonest and simply steal a link.  Someone (like Doc!) is blogging about something and I think that’s cool so I riff off of that and I don’t credit it with a link and maybe that makes me like George Harrison ripping off He’s So Fine from the Chiffons, but I doubt it for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m not as talented as George Harrison so when I adapt prior art to my work product two things don’t happen.  One, people mostly don’t notice; and, two, I don’t make any money from it.

So shame on me, because the people from whom I’m most likely to take inspiration regarding subject matter and from whom I’m most likely to steal a link without credit are people like Doc.  Now in the reference to Zuul above, I sort of did that, because Doc linked to Derek Powazek on gatekeeping, and I just stole the reference… everybody gets it because we all saw Ghostbusters, but Derek deserves credit for bringing Zuul back to our attention in the current context.  And here I’ve given him the link, more as a recursive gesture to explicate my process, than as a righteous gesture to give credit where credit is due.  But I have a long history of ripping shit off from Derek that goes back at least to my favorite poster of rose petals on the steps of SF City Hall.

The thing is, there’s a twinge of conscience that occurs when somebody else comes up with something fine and I just write about it without mentioning that so-and-so was writing about this too.

So here’s a disclosure:  From time to time I am likely to follow a chain o’ links from any of the people I link in my sidebar and people they link and so on until I find some bizarre circumstance, funny item, technical forehead slap, or whatever strikes my fancy to write about.  I will not remember all the links in that chain, and I will not spend the time inserting html anchor tags every which way to document my inspiration.  But I want to thank you all for inspiring me.

The irony is that the so called A list is the most likely to be slighted in my credits.  Powers, Weinberger, Sessum, Locke, Searls, Winer… I read these people pretty much daily.  I link to them from time to time, but certainly not as often as they deserve.  If there’s a conversation going, I’m shameless about jumping in, and if there’s a link to something far-out I’m happy to follow it up with a post of my own.  But in order to dull the odor of sycophancy, to avoid the appearance of total suck-up, I probably don’t credit the A list as often as I should.

There are other people like Michael Arrington whose coverage is so complete that when I link through to something from TechCrunch, I don’t always credit it as my source.   And I’m not sure I need to give that kind of second order credit, except from time to time - as I’m doing now - with thanks for the good work, for the inspiration.

Once again, thanks everybody!