February 23, 2004
Blog Linkage
Terry had a post over the weekend about the decline in readership of magazines, which he attributes to increased interest in blogs. Terry makes the point that bloggers ought to give credit for the sources of their links and discusses his own policy for giving link credit. But, he adds,
Not all bloggers feel this way. Certain of our colleagues are bad—a few notoriously so—about giving credit to other bloggers. I’ll name no names, but I will say that the stingy practice of link-poaching has lately come in for quite a bit of backstage criticism.Jessa reacted to Terry's post angrily. She disliked the mysteriousness of the quote above. She doesn't dispute that she doesn't always credit her sources, but she attributes that to the fact that she bookmarks links and then forgets their source (Interestingly enough, Terry admitted to the same habit in his post.)
What's amusing about this little brouhaha is that it stands in sharp contrast to the view (most recently expressed by Jennifer Howard in that infamous Washington Post article) that lit bloggers are a clickish group who tend to uniformly praise one thing or berate the other.
In case you're curious, I always try to cite the source of a link plucked from a fellow blogger, even if the link is from a site as widely read as the New York Times. But there are so few sources of literary interest, that lit bloggers are going to the same places, so it would be really surprising if people didn't get to the same links independently. In fact, there are topics I won't even cover (e.g. the recent Woolf/Bloom allegations) because several other bloggers are already on top of them and I'm not sure there's much more I can say that I couldn't just add to the comments sections of their sites. At any rate, I don't see blogging as a zero-sum game where people compete for links and need credits. I'm too busy reading stuff to worry about who's giving credit to my links.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:35 PM
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