A week or so ago, I was thinking about reblog etiquette again, namely when/how to give credit to the originator. This is something that bubbled up a couple times but could never get a sample on before tumblr launched reblog tracking.
I’ve had many posts of mine reblogged without credit and that alone doesn’t bug me too much. Most of them were an image or video reposted to random tumblog anyway. There are two situations that do bug me however. One is when I’ve added comments that the offending site then takes credit for. The second is when a site repeatedly fails to credit content.
I don’t want to give the impression that there’s a ton of this happening to me, because there’s not, but it does bug me a little bit because I especially try not to do it. Nothing is set in stone but let me try to explain my general reposting practices. If I post content I found from a well publicized aggregator, like reddit, digg, boingboing, etc, I usually won’t credit it unless there’s additional content or context. If I post something from some someone’s personal site (including tumblr), especially if I wouldn’t have found the content otherwise, I will always try to credit them.
Where things get sticky is when I find content from multiple sources. If I find content on tumblr that came from a site (often a comic) that I regularly read anyways, what do I do? I know Marco used to talk about beating other people to post a quote from Scott Adams’ blog otherwise he’d source their link. I agree with this insofar as they’ve introduced some commentary or editing (for example, selecting a choice quote) otherwise I don’t feel bad directly linking to the original.
Also questionable is what to do when multiple people have already reblogged and sourced the content. Usually I’ll only source the last in the chain as the user can follow the chain back if they really need to know who posted it first. (Tumblr people can of course see it all at once.) Trickier is when I follow more than one person in the chain. In this case, I’ll usually source whoever posted it earlier since I most likely saw it from them first.
So this post ended up way too long but if you’ve made it this far, I’d like hear your opinion so please reblog (and truncate) this and attach your thoughts and practices if different. Also feel free to remind me that this is the internet and no one cares.
I’ve left the original post intact because I think it makes a lot of sense. I think Tumblr could make this easier if when you reblog a post the description text was automatically formatted to appear as some kind of quote. Either indent or italics or something. I’ve done that manually to the post above. That way when someone reads this reblog on my tumblr, they know quickly and clearly know what words are mine and what are the thoughts of the original post creator.
