Kottke on Extreme Borrowing

Jason Kottke compares AllThingsD’s “Voices” to Boing Boing:

Metaphorically speaking, the ATD post is like showing the first 3 minutes of a movie and then prodding the viewer to go see the rest of it in a theater while BB’s post is 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.

What ends up happening is that blogs like Boing Boing — and I’m very much not picking on BB here … this is a very common and accepted practice in the blogosphere — provide so much of the gist and actual text of the thing they’re pointing to that readers often don’t end up clicking through to the original.

I think this is a real issue, and a serious defect in the format of many popular weblogs, insofar as they deliberately attempt to entirely summarize the article they’re linking to (sometimes with odd results), and therefore discourage rather than encourage readers to actually go read the original. Ostensibly high-traffic “summarize” weblogs, like TechCrunch for example, send surprisingly few referrers when they link to me. But this is a separate issue from the AllThingsD thing.

And yes, this is yet another instance of me standing up and saying that I’m doing it right where others are doing it wrong, so suck it.

★ Thursday, 9 April 2009