A subtle shift occurred on the Internet over the weekend. Maria Popova unveiled at South by Southwest a project she’s been working on for the last year called the Curator’s Code. Popova—a serial aggregator on her site and on Twitter—is hoping to encourage content aggregators to give a little back to the original source through links that trace the origin of the work. The site isn’t much—it’s a plea for transparency coupled with a few tools to facilitate citations—but Popova’s idea has made a palpable splash.
The Curator’s Code is only a start, but I’m happy it’s out there for two reasons. One, I’m a writer. I want my work to be spread as far and wide as possible, but I’d also like to be noted as the original source. And two, I started dabbling in aggregation—sharing, really—two months ago when I launched the Linked List. Before that, I thought a lot about what it means to be a responsible and ethical aggregator. In the process, I developed my own code of conduct which I think does more to respect original content than the Curator’s Code.
The entire point of the Linked List is to send people out to other sites. That’s it, really. I view the Linked List as a themed Twitter account without the character limit. If you think that way, everything else follows naturally: Don’t copy too much of the original article. Don’t summarize it, either. Get people to click the link. Even the design I chose for the Linked List emphasizes outbound traffic. The headline—often the most visible link in the post—is a link to the article itself. The permalink to my post—the infinity symbol just to the right of the headline—is almost an afterthought. Everything about the Linked List is meant to send you away from Per Square Mile. (Just don’t forget to come back!)
Oh, and there’s one more principle I follow—don’t be a dick. When I’m crafting a Linked List post, I think to myself, Would I be OK with my work being shared in this way?
That’s an easy question for me to answer. I’m a writer, and I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of some, ahem, aggressive aggregation. Take my article on income inequality in the Roman Empire. Russia Today repackaged it without a link (an oversight they later corrected). Business Insider and the Huffington Post excerpted a small paragraph and summarized most of the rest. I have no idea how much traffic they got from their versions, but I do know that among the three of them I received well under 1,000 hits.
Fortunately, not all aggregators are created equal. From that same post, Matthew Yglesias on his blog at Slate pulled one factoid from my article, added a quick take, and sent me over 1,000 visitors. On other posts, the editors at Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish have sent me a few thousand readers by tastefully excerpting. And I have great respect for John Pavlus: Where Gizmodo and Business Insider were happy to copy and post one of my infographics—sending me around 1 percent or less of the traffic their posts received—John not only asked permission to use the image for a post at Fast.Co Design, but he interviewed me for his piece.
It would be great if “overzealous aggregation” meant the sort of effort that John put into his post, but it doesn’t. The Curator’s Code is a first step, but it’s not a complete solution—it would be easy to use the “via” and “heard through” links as a license to over-aggregate.
I signed a pledge to honor the Curator’s Code, but I’m also sticking to the principles I outlined above. They may not be perfect and they may not work for everyone, but I think they’re good signposts for when I’m working on the Linked List.
What do you think? Do Linked List entries catch your attention enough to send you away (and then hopefully return)? Am I striking the right balance between aggregation and original content? Does the Curator’s Code go far enough? Or do my principles do more to respect original content?
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said. For me, I like using the Curator’s Code because I keep a Tumblr primarily of art images – it’s a great way to show where the work originated, but also where I found it (as it’s rarely through the original site). Showing the image makes more sense than sharing a link to the image. I like the idea of a linked list for longer/bigger pieces of work, such as blog posts or news articles. I’ve been reading Dark Roasted Blends for years and my favourite part is their Link Latte; I like reading through all the links and clicking on what interests me to read the full piece. I think the Curator’s Code and Linked Lists have their own place in the internet, depending on what you’re aggregating.
Thanks for the thoughts, Reno42. I can see where images would be a different ball of wax. That said, I think reposting images is trickier since you have to post the whole work—it’s more similar to blockquoting an entire article (unless it’s a photoessay). I think the way you do it—showing where the work originated—is probably best.
I’m curious to see if attempting to formalizing Web citation practices that have been in use for at least a decade (or longer, if you consider the hyperlink itself a form of citation) actually affects people’s behavior, particularly on sites like tumblr and Pinterest where the emphasis is on aggregation and *not* on attribution (strangely, Pinterest’s design favors the original *aggregator* over the creator of the work). My guess is that “good” attribution practices will never catch on broadly because it’s extra work that even well-meaning people won’t do. One could imagine making it easy for people, though, like some kind signature code that one could embed in a web page or tack on to an image file that includes attribution info that aggregation sites could display automatically without the aggregators having to do anything. No doubt such things have been proposed.
It’s amazing to hear how your own work has been used and misused. It’s *really* galling that journalists and bloggers have done so little to cite your work. They should know better.
In my experience, reading your blog and others, I generally do not click through to aggregated content. Exceptions are 1) wanting to see a bigger image, 2) reading a sentence that’s so fascinating I want to learn more, 3) reading a sentence that I want to be true but that reeks of BS so I must verify the source material.
I think you hit the nail on the head. If there’s one thing that will keep the Curator’s Code or something like it from catching on, it’s this.
Good to know. I’ll be sure to bait you with either amazing writing or pure crap.