Guidelines Proposed for Content Aggregation Online - NYTimes.com
Connotea Imports 2012-03-12
Summary:
"So where is the line between promoting the good work of others and simply lifting it? Naughty aggregation is analogous to pornography: You know it when you see it....Two approaches to giving credit where credit belongs were announced at the South by Southwest Interactive festival here in Austin. In one instance, an ad hoc group is using a kind of trade association approach to articulate common standards. In the second, someone who makes a living by mining the Web is deploying symbols to create a common shorthand for attribution....Buckle up, here comes the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation....On another panel in Austin, one in which I participated, Maria Popova, better known as brainpicker on Twitter, suggested that the failure to give credit was growing endemic. On Friday, she and her collaborator, the designer Kelli Anderson, announced the Curator’s Code, a site that offers a way of expressing where things come from. The Curator’s Code will use a symbol resembling a sideways S to express that a piece of content came directly from another source, and a different figure — a curved arrowlike symbol — to signal what is commonly known as a “hat tip,” or nod to a source that inspired a further thought. The Curator’s Code supplies the appropriate symbol and then the blogger or writer simply puts in a hyperlink behind it as they normally would...."