Crediting Content–Attributions and Citation

There’s an article on Lifehacker, “What’s the Proper Way To Credit Stuff I Share on the Internet?” by Jason Chen.

It’s relevant because I’ve gone out of my way to try to cite and attribute content appropriately on my site. So far there have been two examples of misuse of my content (stealing it, linking to it without regard for impact on my site.)

• For my longer posts, I use a mostly-APA style to reference quotes and ideas from relevant web and print articles.
• For my Posts of the week, I’m using a short hand that lists the site/source name and date for where I found out about the link. Since most of the links that I share came in via email, it’s not practical to create a link to them. For the content from the original source, I use the author’s name (when possible) in my annotation of the link, along with the full title of their post with a link back to their site. For the posts of the week, it feels a bit overkill to use APA-style for a truly annotated bibliography style listing. There’s more than enough information for (a) me to create a formal citation and (b) for someone else to find it.
• When I include media in posts I use “Photo Credit” or “Source” and then either (a) create it myself, (b) use the attribution style the creator specifies (i.e., per Creative Commons license requirements), (c) use Creative Commons-licensed materials and include a link back to the author using common conventions (e.g., For Flickr I use @username/flickr and include the license), or in rare cases (d) use materials under fair use guidelines (i.e., news reporting and/or commentary) and note that I’m doing so.
• For media from Flickr, I use Image Stamper a bookmarklet (that works better in Firefox, for some reason I can’t drag and drop it to my Bookmarks bar in Chrome) to track the images I used from Flickr.

I also do a number of things to make it easier to provide attribution back to my materials (even if people are too stupid to pay attention).

• I include a Copyright and license terms in the footer of every page. The license is also included as XML.
• I use a plugin (currently two plugins) to associate a license on my posts. This license is in human and machine readable (XML and/or Meta Tags) formats. Technically I should rewrite the code that is used to create these licenses so it reads as a citation, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.