Citing Other Bloggers’ Articles: Sharing the Love

If you read here regularly, you probably noticed that on Wednesday and Friday this week we published two short posts that were essentially parargraph summaries of other bloggers’ articles.  In each of those posts, we linked back to the original article on the other bloggers’ site. 

We figured that some folks might wonder why we’ve started including short posts like this… After all, what value do they add to this site?  Well, for the curious among us, the answers–and they are many–are below for your Saturday reading enjoyment.  We hope that after reading through, you’ll be encouraged to cite your fellow bloggers’ work too!  We, for one, would greatly appreciate it…

Why We Cite Other Bloggers’ Articles

First, we cite others’ work because we think its interesting and will probably be interesting to our readers.   While we all know there’s value in sharing our own experiences, we rarely have expertise and insight across a wide variety of topics.  By sharing other bloggers’ work with our readers, we can pass along something we’ve learned, give credit to the author, and enhance our readers’ experiences.

Second, we cite others’ work because we want to raise awareness of other independent writers.  For many of us in the blogging community, it’s hard to get our work syndicated by a big media outlet.  By sharing articles with our readership, we increase the probability of other bloggers being discovered.

Third, citing others’ work in the blogging community increases the search engine visibility of that article (e.g., the original post will rank better in search).  Why is this?  Well, most search engines use a complex algorithm that values an individual page based partly on that page’s popularity on the web.   If more people are referencing that article in their posts, the article must contain better-than-average content.  We want to improve the web and help others find the best content when they search.  Each outgoing link from our site does just that. 

(Important Note:  The most effective way to help boost an article in the search engine rankings is to use appropriate anchor text in the link.  You can see our post on DIY Deer Repellent for a good example of how to do this well).

Finally, we hope that by linking to others work, we will encourage other writers to link to ours… We want to create a sense of community in the home improvement blogosphere… Houseblogs goes a long way towards doing just that, and interlinking is just another way to share the love.

Are We Stealing Content?

This question sort of makes us laugh, but it always seems to come up with some of the over protective among us.  The answer is that it is definitely not stealing, and here’s why:

• We do not duplicate the article or even substantial parts of it.
• We give credit to the author in the most advantageous way possible for them (via direct link).
• We do it for the purpose of sharing the article with a wider community and promoting that blogger’s popularity, much like Oprah talking about a new book on her TV show.

Finally, from a legal perspective, we believe this type of use falls squarely within the Fair Use Provision  of the U.S. copyright law. 

What if I Don’t Want You to Include my Work?

If you would prefer we don’t cite your work, let us know and we’re more than happy to respect your preference and remove all articles that link back to your site.  But trust us, we think that’s crazy talk… if you don’t want others to find your work, you probably shouldn’t post it to the internet!

What do you think?  Will you cite your fellow bloggers’ work?  Think about creative ways to pass along the best articles to your readers!

Photo by dcJohn.

by: Fred | September 20, 2008 | filed in: Online Community
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