teh interwebz

It feels like I’m discovering a new must-have thing every 10 minutes these days.

You know the things. Those things you don’t even realize you need until after you have them and then it’s all like “How did I LIIIIVEVE without this BEFORE??!!”

Things like city-grade bicycle locks, greek yogurt and Pleated Jeans Gif dumps. Online banking. Deodorant. Secret after-hours clubs where cool kids hang out. That instagram filter that makes your skin look radiant, even after a long night of hanging out in secret after-hours clubs where cool kids hang out…

It is my belief that a standardized system of attribution on the web is about to become one of those things — albeit a slightly less exciting one than, say, sriracha sauce on everything.

Whether that standard system takes the form of some widely recognized unicode characters (as suggested below) or an entire citation index modeled after the world of scientific research (discussed at length during this panel) has yet to be seen, but if the journalism-related panels I hit (/ hashtag creeped) during SXSW this year taught me anything, it’s that the discussion is hot and something’s about to pop.

Unveiled at a SXSW panel called “Is Aggregation Theft?” (one of more than 40 falling under the “journalism and online content” session theme this year), The Curator’s Code was created by Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova and Kelli Anderson, with help from Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss (and my beloved Tattly!) among others.

It is their hope that this attribution system will catch on among journalists and bloggers, becoming a new standard for web accredidation — and they’re making it easy with bookmarklets, badges and free copypasta codes.

“One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it’s a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery — we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed,” writes Popova on her blog, later stating that the Curator’s Code is “an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics — first, understanding why attribution matters, and then, implementing it across the web in a codified common standard, doing for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution.”

She makes a great point, and with an influx of offline content producers making their way onto the wild wild web it’s an important discussion to have.

On the other hand, a huge number of web aggregators and bloggers (“curators”, if you will – and some of you won’t) have already been doing this for ages.

We credit sources by writing thinks like “via” or “found via” when appropriate. Sometimes, we simply hotlink — like this:

We give hat tips where hat tips are due, not because it’s a “rule”, but because it’s just kind of sh*tty not to. It’s what distinguishes a hack blogger from a professional… of sorts.

Personally, I find it easier to hyperlink an image to the referral source or type the word “via” next to a link than embed a unicode symbol (even with that cute bookmarklet handy).

That said, I love the idea of a standardized code of conduct that can be implemented across the blogoverse.

Will everybody use it? Heck no. The negative reactions for the curator’s code alone have been rising up like mad since last week’s presentation for some reason. Some are downright hilar.

Either way, the fact that anybody cares enough about this issue enough to make a beautiful website dedicated to it is great. It’s a lot easier to sit back and critique, round-up, aggregate, “curate” than it is to actually do something . Thus, I respect anybody who does.

Now, please enjoy the first installment of a 77 dance film set to Girl Talk’s “All Day” album. It’s one of the greatest things you’ll see this week, guaranteed. So good I can’t even handle it, it’s so flucking good. So good. So so good.

See the rest of Girl Walk and learn more about how it came to be (what up Kickstarter?) here ( ? BoingBoing)

OONTS! OONTS! OONTS! OONTS! (via 10 minute ago when I was Googling around for something else and accidentally found this.)