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.

I've been thinking a lot about microformats lately. I tried thinking about them sometime ago, but I just didn't get it. It seemed like a solution looking for a problem, so I decided to give it no more attention. But after a recent exchange with Tantek Celik in association with Yahoo's recently released plug-in free music player, I got to thinking that microformats or something very similar ARE GOING TO BE the new widget. This is REALLY COOL.

I know Flash widgets are all the rage now. Most of the apps on FaceBook are Flash based media SILOs. Everything on MySpace most certainly is. On these sites and on many blogs, media is trapped within a proprietary SWF wrapper, even if it is dynamically loaded it is effectively only viewable within the Flash application.

Wouldn't it be better to simply publish the media or provide links along with some interaction rules as a microformat, then let the site hosting the microformat render the experience? Anyone could write players (Just like Yahoo). That's competition on the consumer experience.

Rather than copying and embedding Flash Objects, a user can just grab the HTML microformat and paste that. Then a Flash object, or the browser, or a desktop client like iTunes can have equal access to it and play the media or parts of the media depending on the player and device.

Now I may be implying a bigger role for Microformats than are indicated by hReview, hAudio, hCard, etc., but I think as this video shows here wrapping RSS with hAudio gives a playlist microformat? iTunes plays it now, but so can anything else that wished to adopt that standard.

This reminds me of a post I made back in 2002.