In one of my occasional fits of madness – wherein I switch off my natural cynicism and try to pretend the world is a nice place – I skimmed [diveintomark.org] and found the following piece of wisdom:

How to credit people whose links you republish

Ever since it was discovered that bloggers kill kittens plagiarize constantly tend to republish links without saying where they found them, the concept of a “via” link has risen to prominence. Simply put, a “via” link is a link back to where you found the link you’re posting.

In this example, I discovered the article on setting up a FreeBSD iTunes server via Jeffrey Veen, so let’s give him some credit:

…

…but unfortunately soon after reading this, I switched my cynicism back on whereupon it leapt into my forebrain with the following rant:

Sincerely, who gives a flying fu^H^H damn toss about doing this? I know that academics love having chains of citation, but in the big wide world of blogging that largely comprises teenage/post-teenage angst such as you can find by hitting [www.livejournal.com] a few times, who really is going to use functionality like this?

Yes it’s polite, yes I personally strive to do this sort of citation, but not to the extent[1] where I am going to hand-hack XML to do it for me, nor would I bother to use a GUI that walked me through pages of options to bless my posting with citation when all that is really necessary is to send my readers directly to the punchline.

If this is a problem, technology will not be a solution – it goes directly against Ranum’s Law in the same way / for the same reason that document metatags persistently fail to work: because the majority populace of the Web are lazy, selfish, ignorant or stupid.

Good idea? Certainly! Well thought-out? Indeed! Practical? Probably!

But will it – or any other voluntary “let’s fill in some extra XML metadata tags to link the WWW back into some a homogeneous and indexable resouce – be adopted and used?

Well, let’s just say that these are the final words that my cynicism co-process recited before it went offline on a coffee break…

I Blogged it from Boing Boing
Alec Muffett
[www.crypticide.com]
With Apologies to Tom Lehrer

I got it from Boing Boing!
They got it from Fark!
But everybody does suspect
Del.icio.us dove into Mark!

He got it from MF,
They got it from Fazed,
if they didn’t get it from Slashdot,
then we would be amazed!

They got it from Scoble,
where he got it from we’re not sure
but regardless if this is a problem
they’ll tell us that ATOM’s the cure!

[1] Update: Especially if I am some sort of spotty teenager or someone else who has never heard of XML, nor sees the value of formally formatting his/her postings for the benefit of mankind at large; of course it could be argued that I miss the point, and Bloggers are not going to be the consumers of this sort of functionality or somesuch, but if so it’s just a 10% solution, and why is it being positioned as a blog-enabler?