It usually all get woven into a long post, and I love linking out to new sites rather than being insular. It is my belief that there might be a search engine benefit from linking out to a wider variety of sources.

I also take care where possible to give anchor text some relevance.

As far as linking…I try to link to the first place I saw the story. If it’s a story with traction or from multible places, I try to link to the smallest site which links to the main source because I just think it’s a cool way to meet new bloggers.

As for my own blog, I happily link to anyone and everyone,
books, blogs, websites…
I link to the first or best source of the information
and when in doubt, multi-link.

However, on the flipside,
a blog with no original content,
no reason why the link is there,
or why the blogger thinks the link is important,
adds no value to me at all.

I’m the blogger who supposedly lifted the post from jkontherun.com and supposedly edited my post to edit out jkontherun.com. In all actuality, I did nothing of the sort and JK has shown superb gentlemanliness by posting a second follow-up post on his blog regarding this. The culprit has turned out to maybe be a glitch in Technorati and/or Blogniscient.

Regarding posting, I _always_ give linkbacks to my source, (yes Nick, I do read MacNN, and I do credit MacNN, as do other bloggers on TUAW. If you do a simple google search for macnn site:tuaw.com, you will see all the [via MacNN] chunks in posts on TUAW). I read quite a few indie blogs and I personally enjoy them as much, and often more than, “high traffic” apple and tech blogs. I always link back to my sources. My personal beliefs about the openess of information and software, and hardware (though there aren’t many companies that release schematics openly yet) would never have let me rip off jkontherun.com. If I go back and edit a post, it’s to correct an error or add a note, or some such thing. I have never and would never edit out a source.

Personally it was hard to be the subject of this “calling out” of supposed plagiarism, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I’d rather the news travel quickly than be squelched. That is, after all, why we blog no?

Cheers,
fbz
aka Fabienne Serriere
tuaw/hackaday/engadget

I do the same as you. I credit the first place I saw it and then I trace back and credit the original poster if I can… I am pretty strict on attributing sources. Wins you friends and tends to bring you traffic from the original poster as well…

I blasted WIN and on my blog and Jason, to his credit, explained that he thought it was a tech glitch. That’s also what the author at TUAW says as well (see comments on jk’s blog).

Who knows what happened, but maybe this will make us all take our link policies seriously?

Usually, I wrote that so and so wrote about such and such.

Other times, I will write about such and such, with a (Source: So and So) somewhere in there.

I don’t really see the problem. It is in a blog network’s best interest to link to themselves as often as possible. While it’s probably “bad form” to change a link once it’s been posted to credit another source, in general, linking to onesself is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your other material, both by increasing page views and for PageRank purposes, particularly if it’s on a separate domain.

The website I used to write for did this all the time (minus the link changing). Perhaps the editors of the big blog felt as though the story hadn’t been up for very long, and that it would still be okay to change the link address.

Just some thoughts. But insular linking, when possible, is a good way to get readers to read more of what you have to say, which isn’t a bad thing by any means. And doing so is *not* going to create an insular readership — it’s going to create readers that continue to come back.

i.e. I find a post on site A and post about it. A credits site B. B credits C. C is the one that originally broke it.
My credit will be:
[via C via A]

I’ve had problems with a big “blog-network” blog (well, one contributor to that blog) lifting my ideas/posts and not crediting me with a link. I’m documenting every one of them and will confront them with it once I get a few more concrete examples.

Brian

What rankled me about this case was the changing of a published piece to remove the source. It is just not right if we as bloggers are trying to remain some level of integrity. I don’t care about being linked as the source of this article or not. I was just passing along an interesting news item for my readers anyway. It just bothered me that a large blog like TUAW would change a published article so nonchalantly as this. If they want to link only to their network that’s fine, it’s their network. But don’t change published works to do so. That is just going to discredit themselves in the long run.

Once a blog network gets a reputation of only linking to internal blogs, they will be less interesting than other blogs to their readers. That could cause a ripple effect across all the blogs on their network. I guess they figure they will all have made lots of money by then.

Most newspaper sources are direct from Press Releases. Quality papers do this less than than others.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
http://www.boingboing.net/fakenews.html
http://rianjs.net/2005/12/teaching-the-controversy/

I’d figured out how the whole thing worked before I read the Paul Graham and boingboing articles because it frustrated me to no end as a writer trying to write original content. (There’s *very* little of that in the world; it’s mostly just meta-commentary.)

Side note: Digg is probably the worst place to get original information on anything. 90% of Digg posters are complete idiots. Pity it drives so much traffic. I used to think it was better than /.’s editor system, but it’s actually not. Reddit seems maybe a little bit better…