I'm guilty.

If you look throughout this blog, you will find many images and quotes without proper attribution. I know I am not alone in my guilt.

Yeah we link to the original blog (most of the time), but the content that we quote/use is often not clearly associated with the attribution. It should to some extent be machine readable: THIS quote/image came from XYZ site. At our company we are building some web services that need to understand/read/display both license and attribution. So we looked at Microformats.org, for some guidance, but the attribution microformat is not complete, it is going to be part of the next version of Rel-License. However, considering most content being quoted in blogs is often being used within 'fair use' commentary regardless of license, a simple academic-like attribution would be very useful sooner rather than later.

So, if I wanted to comment on a picture from wife Mandy's blog post about the family playing Rock Band and my son's fascination with R.E.M.'s Orange Crush, I could post the image below and hyper link it to her blog post blog post where the image came from.


I could also put an anchor on the image to link back to her. However, it would be preferable for "machines" if the attribution maintained tighter context with the image as I have done below:



Using the mark-up:

<div class="hsnip">
  <h4 class="entry-title">Orange Crush</h4>
  <span class="entry-content">
     <img
src="http://bp3.blogger.com/
_dPEXnRmZGH0/SBVGeSCvf0I/AAAAAAAAA84/qUL_jTm5bQ4/s400/DSC_3076.jpg" />
   </span>
<br />
<br />
   <a rel="attribution" href="http://mandygratton.blogspot.com/2008/04/orange-crush.html"
title="http://mandygratton.blogspot.com/2008/04/orange
-crush.html"target="_blank">mandygratton.blogspot.com</a>
</div>

Now if we wanted to add an author, we could include hcard within the div.

What I like about this attribution solution is that it works nicely for text blockquotes. Where it can be argued that by embedding an image using the source URL gives the best attribution (bandwidth issues aside), this cannot be done for text quotes. So I can quote from Mandy's blog and include the attribution as part of the div.


The blockquote is an identifiable piece of content by both humans and machines and it is clearly attributed to the source blog post.