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RE: Citations (WAS RE: W3C suckered by Micros oft?)

• To: "'Bullard, Claude L (Len)'" <clbullar@i...>, "'Bob Foster'" <bob@o...>
• Subject: RE: Citations (WAS RE: W3C suckered by Micros oft?)
• From: "Hunting, Sam (LNG-EWR)" <sam.hunting@l...>
• Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 09:27:54 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

>If this was the street corner or agora, I agree and 
>even then, a good speaker cites.  But this isn't.  
>This is a medium that bots harvest, and the blogs 
>are made to be aggregated.  Think of it as a good 
>practice.

I think this depends entirely on the blog. To say that bots
harvest blogs is not to say that all blogs are made
to be aggregated. 

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
 > Someone came back offlist with the defense that
 > blogs are 'casual conversation' and therefore,
 > don't qualify for citations.

>That would be me. As I replied earlier, outside academia uncited 
>references are the norm. The average person can no more attribute 
>sources for his or her ideas than a cow can sing "The Star-Spangled 
>Banner" (Francis Scott Key, 1814).

I think again that it depends on the blog. Wearing my political
hat, I'm in the business of meme propagation. As long as people 
pick up the ideas, I'm happy. However, I also have a reciprocal
obligations in the community: If someone comes up with a really
great, thoughtful post -- an analytical "edged weapon" as it were --
then I believe I have a duty to cite it and point others to it,
not simply to appropriate it for my own blog. Pragmatically, it
makes sense for us all to adopt that ethic, since it makes the
linking structure of our community "bushier" and builds traffic.

> A blog is like a spot in Hyde Park where the 
> crowd can't talk back. It's a monologue in public, the crazy guy on the 
> corner.

Again, it depends on the blog. However, several large-scale blogs
(one thinks at once of http://atrios.blogspot.com or http://www.dailykos.com
act a lot like more like a bar than Hyde Park Corner. When a blog reaches
a certain critical mass, readers come to talk to each other in
the commments section, and that conversation can continue even when
the bartender or putative blog author is absent.

> I do agree, though, that separating the "good" blogs from the "bad" is 
> about as good a use for the semantic web as I've heard. ;-}

Well, metrics are always useful. "The numbers tell the story," though
I don't know what numbers the SW would give us that readership figures
and link analysis a la http://www.technorati.com don't give us.

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