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This is a dorky but true admission.
On the very day that I began this blog, I googled the words “blog etiquette“. I read every article I could get my hands on, because I was in terror of making some unknown-to-me slip-up that would offend the very bloggers I’d been reading and had come to respect.
Of course all the articles had slightly different takes on what constituted good blog etiquette; however, one thing was mentioned in damn near everything I read. It was this:
you link back to that blogger.
Sure, this has a few exceptions, I suppose. If you are appalled at something a particular hate-group has done, you’d not want to link to their site. And in a case like this, NOT linking sends a strong message to your readers about your thoughts on that group’s actions.
So it was with great surprise when I followed Tony Comstock’s link to this piece, written by PBS blogger Mark Glaser. He writes about an apparent snafu in Google’s new search algorithms which for a time dropped some sexually-themed websites.
The glitch has been fixed now, so it seems, but what surprises me greatly is that Mark Glaser chose to write about Chelsea Girl’s prettydumbthings, Tony Comstock’s Comstock Films, and Violet Blue’s tiny nibbles, and:
He even used Chelsea Girl’s recent post on the Google mix-up as the lead quote in his article and yet…no link back to her site.
There are many ways you could describe this sort of reporting; I’d like to address it only from the point of view of blog etiquette. It is dreadful blog etiquette. If you cannot link to someone whose words you are quoting, there is something very wrong.
Do you feel this is a bit…odd? Unusual? Blatantly wrong? Here is a feedback form you can use to speak your mind to the PBS Ombudsman. Here is a feedback form for blogger Mark Glaser. Or you could leave a comment on Glaser’s original post.
Come on, PBS, get your act together.
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Chelsea Girl has written about the PBS article here.
Tony Comstock’s response appears here.
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UPDATE: Mark Glasser has added on to the original post, requesting feedback on how PBS should handle links such as these. Go over and look.
Thanks, Mark, for the response!
