Tooner
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3 months ago
in Ars Technica snapped up by Conde Nast on Mathew's comments
Congrats to the Ars guys. I think they deserve it, and here's hoping that Conde Naste doesn't come in and screw it up. I think it's fair to say that Reddit hasn't been screwed up by Conde Nast, yet. Harder to imagine how it might effect a content company however!
1 reply
3 months ago
in On Attribution, The Ars Technica Story on How To Split An Atom
"For them, linking out would be admitting that they weren’t the ones who broke the story. That alone could drive hungry social bookmarkers to push through to find the “real source” of the article."
I just checked all of their front page stories and every one links to multiple sites. Many of them explicitly say who was first to report a story. This is better than I see most sites doing....
Like jeber, I read Ars as a filter site on news, so what would be the point if Ars didn't link outside itself? MG's accusations that the site holds stories for days and days and steals from bloggers just does not pass the sniff test. I read Ars 6 day a week. That's not going on there. They are very timely, they break a lot of news, and they link out all the time. I woudn't be surprised if they screw up on occaision-- who doesn't? Frankly, I just wish they would get better editors, they have too many grammar errors on their site.
I just checked all of their front page stories and every one links to multiple sites. Many of them explicitly say who was first to report a story. This is better than I see most sites doing....
Like jeber, I read Ars as a filter site on news, so what would be the point if Ars didn't link outside itself? MG's accusations that the site holds stories for days and days and steals from bloggers just does not pass the sniff test. I read Ars 6 day a week. That's not going on there. They are very timely, they break a lot of news, and they link out all the time. I woudn't be surprised if they screw up on occaision-- who doesn't? Frankly, I just wish they would get better editors, they have too many grammar errors on their site.
2 replies
Maggy Young
"For them, linking out would be etc"... . Assuming a number of reasonably good articles, each having one or probably far more links, then readers are not pushed to any one alternative 'real source'. Also the various sources for many reasons would mostly not constitute an alternative to that blog. Blogs/news reports tend to act as filters / aggregators & most importantly commentators on news which readers have often already picked up. The value should be in the quality of the article, not that they were the first to report on something.
sbspalding
I agree. In my experience they have been very good at linking out. I was just pointing out one plausible argument that would justify avoiding certain links.
I am still not sold on the entire attribution scandal. I do think it does bring up a more general point - how important proper attribution is.
I am still not sold on the entire attribution scandal. I do think it does bring up a more general point - how important proper attribution is.
3 months ago
in Blogs and the attribution dilemma on Mathew's comments
Siegler is fronting a double-standard. He's holding Ars to a standard he doesn't hold himself, with the lame excuse that Ars just MUST HAVE known what that great MG Siegler wrote. And it's funny Siegler appears to have gotten his inspiration from another blog in the process. Now that readers are calling him out for bitching over nothing. he's turning to convenient anonymous sources who tell him that he is of course right and could never be wrong.
1 reply
MG Siegler
Tooner - I have no problem discussing this, but let's not misconstrue things. Does anyone really think I would write that whole post if I had knowingly done the same thing myself? Please.
The fact of the matter is, as I've repeated, if this were one incident, no biggie, you can chalk it up to a lot of things including coincidence. Two incidents, still perhaps okay in my book. But a history of this behavior and you bet I'm going to call BS on it.
And yes, I really do hate to be vague on who is emailing me on this, but they asked that I do so. I don't have a history of making up sources, but you're free to not believe me if you'd like. And does it really even matter that it's prominent people seeing the same thing? Perhaps I shouldn't have said that to Mathew, I was just a bit surprised myself by some of the support.
Regardless of who else it is that is seeing the same thing, big fish or small fish, the fact is that many other people ARE noticing the same thing. There's simply no denying that.
The fact of the matter is, as I've repeated, if this were one incident, no biggie, you can chalk it up to a lot of things including coincidence. Two incidents, still perhaps okay in my book. But a history of this behavior and you bet I'm going to call BS on it.
And yes, I really do hate to be vague on who is emailing me on this, but they asked that I do so. I don't have a history of making up sources, but you're free to not believe me if you'd like. And does it really even matter that it's prominent people seeing the same thing? Perhaps I shouldn't have said that to Mathew, I was just a bit surprised myself by some of the support.
Regardless of who else it is that is seeing the same thing, big fish or small fish, the fact is that many other people ARE noticing the same thing. There's simply no denying that.
Wired should be able to work pretty well together. In a lot of ways,
Ars is kind of like a magazine anyway -- it just doesn't have a
printed version.