Blockquoting Heroes

I’ve stopped going to some sites on principle.

There’s so much great stuff out there, if they annoy me, I’m gone. Like HBR, for instance. It’s a great site. But I don’t go any more. I won’t even link to it. Here’s why:

The Huffington Post doesn’t fall into this category. I do most of my reading by RSS or through friends’ and followees’ recommendations. And the people I hang out with mostly hate HuffPo. So I never went there much in the first place.

I think most of them — though I may be presuming too much here as I’m basing this on a scant few snarky Tweets — would agree with Maria ‘@brainpicker’ Popova. Arianna’s outfit are a bunch of parasites.

(Just in case you’ve never heard of HuffPo, here’s the NPOVon the Wikipedia. Less neutral and probably more informative isAbout.com’s summary — ‘A Liberal Blog That Sparks Controversy and Accusations of Theft’. This Wired piece from 2008 is called The Huffington Post Slammed for Content Theft.)

It’s true, HuffPo does seem to do a lot of quoting of other sites. But I like quotes. Especially of the blocky variety.

Take Snarkmarket. Those guys are some of the best blockquoters in the business. I love the way they pick out splendid phrases and ideas from obscure (to me) interviews and literary blogs. They’re a regular little language foundry.

And, on occasion, I have found myself reading one of their blockquoting posts (like HuffPo, they do original content too) copying and pasting from something I’ve already read — and realised they’ve spotted something interesting I totally missed.

Take Marginal Revolution. This fairly typical Assorted Links post merely points to Various Sentences to Ponder, which is, in turn, simply four related interesting sentences blockquoted from four Econ-blogger types.

But, readers, that is some good blockquoting.

Here’s a blockquote which pretty sums up the appeal of Marginal Revolution to me — it’s from Marginal Revolution’s Most Popular Posts from 2011 (inevitably, a collection of links pointing to other links mostly):

A few other notable posts in the top 25 were my posts on cities, India’s Voluntary City and Cities as Hotels, Tyler’s post on the S&P downgrade, my post on The Fruits of Immigration, which was  mostly just quotations but I worked hard on the final line which many people then linked to. . .

And he’s right, that last line is rather good.

What about HuffPo, though? Do they work hard on their final lines? Does it matter if they don’t?

Money, Taste and the Little Guys

Marginal Revolution carries a few ads but, apart from the odd post promoting authors’ books, feels like something put together by gentlemen, not players. I’m sure Snarkmarket authors and Maria Popova make money out of their site too (after all, almost nobody comes to this site and I’ve made money, albeit indirectly, from it) but they do it in a tasteful manner my friends and followees probably approve of.

Huffington Post, on the other hand, is a money-grubbing behemoth owned by AOL, the people who brought to us the guide on how to ‘make content pop’ with headlines like Lady Gaga Goes Pantless in Paris.

This clouds things. Here’s Dave Weinberger:

It’s a very confusing issue if you think of it from the point of view of who owns what. . . It’s making money from those aggregations. Ok, but we are fine in general with people selling works that aggregate and attribute. Non-fiction publishing houses that routinely sell books that have lots of footnotes are not thieves. . .

But, HuffPo’s policy even in its best case can enable it to serve as a substitute for the newspapers it’s aggregating. It thus may be harming the sources its using.

Big ol’ HuffPo is harming the little guys. And we have to protect the little guys, right?

More from Dave:

If you think about the issue in terms of theft, you’re thrown into a moral morass where the metaphors don’t work reliably. Worse, you may well mix in legal considerations that are not only hard to apply, but that we may not want to apply given the new-ness (itself arguable) of the situation.

But, I find that I am somewhat less conflicted about this if I think about it terms of what direction we’d like to nudge our world. . . When it comes to news aggregation, many of us will agree that a world in which news is aggregated and linked widely through the ecosystem is better than one in which you — yes, you, since a rule against HuffPo aggregating sources wouldn’t apply just to HuffPo — have to refrain from citing a source for fear that you’ll cross some arbitrary limit. We are a healthier society if we are aggregating, re-aggregating, contextualizing, re-using, evaluating, and linking to as many sources as we want.

He’s right, I believe. I can’t think of a way to stop the evil menace that is HuffPo, or any of the other scrapers and aggregators, without severely affecting people like me. And Snarkmarket, Marginal Revolution or Maria Popova. And the little guys.

This pains me a little. Like I say, I’m indifferent to HuffPo, but I detest all those worthless sites spamming up my Google Search results. But, again, like I say, I can’t think of a way to shut down those pests without doing real harm to useful, or, at least, benign, stuff. Neither can you, I’m guessing.

Voltaire said (or didn’t say, you decide):

I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

I’m not sure I’d die for Arianna. But I can probably manage to resist conflating sanctimony, annoyance and distaste with principle.

Extra, Extra

Some more context.

Maria Popova accuses HuffPo of being ‘over-aggregating’ parasites because they lifted her piece called A Map of Woman’s Heart. Hold on, says Tim McCormick. HuffPo adds value by dropping in extra hyperlinks. Here’s the HuffPo version so you can compare for yourself. My instinct is to side with Maria. But that’s only because I like her and her site more. This isn’t enough.

Matthew Ingram makes a similar point. HuffPo is very good at adding more hyperlinks. Whether this is ‘enough’ is moot.