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Blogospheric Spats

I\’m afraid that there\’s something of a misunderstanding here:

The point at issue was the use of material laboriously put together by the editors of this blog, chiefly my colleague, by members of the MSM without any acknowledgement and the subsequent mutual admiration society between them, their friends and sundry bloggers. Devil’s Kitchen is excepted as are all bloggers who use our material and link back to the original. That is what the blogosphere is for and we have no desire to stop that.

There is no "what the blogosphere is for" at all, unless you want to make it something so wide and meaningless as "a method of communication".

Further:

Then we get Tim Worstall on his blog on The Business site currently singing the praises of the fearless young Daniel. He also refers to the Devil site, obviously not having gone through the links to see from where the information came.

By the standards of the rules above (somewhat arbitrary as they are) I in fact did exactly as requested. I linked to the blog which I quoted. That in that blog post which I linked to there were quotations from EU Referendum is an irrelevance, by those standards presented above. If we all have to link to the original source of every matter that turns up in a post to which we link then this very post should link to EU referendum another three or four times, to the Devil, to Dan Hannan, and so on and so on.

The etiquette is not that one links to original sources, it is that you provide links to "your" sources, and that people can then, if they wish, follow that trail to see where it came from.

That Helen and Richard did the original research I\’m delighted to acknowledge: I\’m less impressed with people getting into a snit about my linking to a blog post which I quote and not linking to one that I don\’t.

5 thoughts on “Blogospheric Spats”

  1. Very pompous to say “what the blogosphere is for” – just the kind of thing they would object to strongly in other contexts.
    (EUR don’t allow blog comments, only comments by “members” of their forum. I was not allowed to join because of my unacceptable name.)
    They were right about Rumsfeld, however; he is much cleverer than the smart-alecs on the News Quiz, &c who sneered at him.

  2. “The etiquette is not that one links to original sources, it is that you provide links to “your” sources, and that people can then, if they wish, follow that trail to see where it came from”

    That seems a fair summary to me, I thought that was the prevailing etiquette.

  3. Next on their list documenting your egregious behavior, Tim, will be evidence that you linked to someone who linked to someone who referenced someone who once sat next to a known [insert evil-of-the-day] at some public event or form of public transport. It was your responsibility to ferret out all these connections before posting anything, Tim. Don’t forget now. We, your readers, are dumb bunnies who have no idea how to operate a mouse, much less click on a link and follow-up. In fact, we require professional assistance just to turn on the computer. We are, in fact, mindless.

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