This is what The Curator’s Code is – a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work. It’s an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring. This is not an effort to police the internet from a place of top-down authority, it’s an effort to encourage respect and kindness among the community….
The unicode symbols ? and ? are simply shorthand for the familiar “via” and “HT,” respectively. While you may still choose to use “via” and “HT” the old-fashioned way – the goal here is to attribute ethically, regardless of how you do it – there are two reasons we are proposing the unicode characters: One, they are a cleaner, more standardized way to attribute. Two, since the characters are wrapped in a hotlink to the Curator’s Code site, they serve as messengers for the ethos of the code itself, as people encounter them across the web and click to find out what they represent.
As someone who’s done his share of griping about people failing to attribute content to its creators, I’m delighted to see this initiative. No, it doesn’t directly address the issue of crediting authors… but it could make that much easier by strengthening the chain of attribution that may well lead to an original source.
And it’s nice to see the celebration of discovery. So much of the “sharing” activity that goes on seems to be so much churn – the same link being retweeted, shared and reposted over and over again. I’d be glad to see some recognition of the value of initial discovery: that first act of sharing that makes the rest possible, and identifies the people who are going to the effort of exploring. And that, too, makes identifying the content’s author that much easier.
Oh, and cool animation with the eyeball, people.
