Dale has been trying to grapple with this issue for a while. Some folks have come up with their own methods for handling this. The issue is really about providing proper attribution to the appropriate people, as things get blogged. I have noticed that (no suprise) folks in academia (K-12 and *ahem* 'higher' education), and folks with advanced degrees tend to be pretty good at providing attribution, even when pulling posts from other sources, while many other folks don't -- exactly the same situation that leads to many students becoming accused of plagiarism.

More mobius blogging.

My contribution to the thread...

Mobius blogging.

I'm in, but just because Joe recently did and McGee usually will blog an entire post of mine. I wonder if Alwin can come out to play?

Life in the Aggregator.

An Experiment: Life in the Aggregator. How far can it travel?  Please play by passing it along, including all source links... [jenett.radio]

I'm willing to play

The trick with this one would be not just settling for a lame-o "me, too" response as this meme continues, and remembering to leave your own breadcrumb link. I suspect that may become harder as it grows...[gRadio]

This activity fascinates me...and makes me think I need to come up with a standard for referencing the content of others. I have all too often seen posts on a weblog that I believed to be by the weblog maintainer, only to find out later that they had simply entered an entire post from someone else's blog on theirs.

[Stand Up Eight]

The blogging tools used can enable or confound the ability to do this intelligently. Dale, I suspect many of the blogs you mention are using Radio, where it is very easy to move someone else's entire post into your own blog. But, as many have already pointed out on the Radio Discussion Group, Radio does not have any built-in method for providing attribution, beyond the link to the source in square brackets, which so many tend to remove anyway. Another problem is that Radio's aggregator plays serious havoc with HTML tags. Look at the HTML source of the quote above that came from my blog; the blockquote tag has an attribute class of "agPost" (that I'm currently doing nothing with, but could, if I cared to) that is no longer valid HTML, since the Radio aggregation process stripped off the quotes.

The true irony here is DaveW is so often concerned about proper attribution of his own and others contributions, yet that hasn't really followed over into the software as fully as it could -- Yes, I do realize these are extremely thorny issues to handle perfectly, but there is still room for improvement... And yes, a skilled user can try to make this happen on their own, by using CSS, or rolling their own macros. Radio certainly could automatically place some appropriate tags around the text coming from the aggregator to make this easier for others to implement. And it could be more repectful of the HTML code I try to use.

Then, if your browser allows it, you could set your own local cascading style sheets to override the style sheets of my blog, and make aggregator-posted material jump out at you, regardless of whether I tried to make them do so in my blog. A user could still monkey this up, but I'd bet that many of them wouldn't bother to, and these are the same folks who grab posts without providing attribution...

12:33:21 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Stand Up Eight ]