Monday, October 22, 2007

I Said That! No, I Mean *I* SAID That!

One of the truly surreal moments in a writer's life is when he is first quoted back to himself. I first experienced this many, many years ago and had a running argument with the person as to the fact that I had, in fact, first stated the very thing s/he said back to me (I forget who it was now). By the time I managed to prove it to the mad-quoter, s/he was so surly and - I don't know, just a bad sport and all-'round rude person - that it dismissed my proof with a wave of the hand and roll of the eyes and I never heard from or spoke to said person again (which is why I do not recall precisely who it was - I did not know them that well, anyway).

In the blogosphere, there is a nifty little device in pretty much all blogs that allows you to quote someone else. Problem is, it does not credit said quote to the original blogger - that's specifically why I do not use it; you will notice that, whenever I quote someone (or a source), I do so the "old-fashioned" way, with proper quotes and a dialogue tag (so-and-such "said," "quipped," "drooled," etc.).

However, by some magic of the Web 2.0 (or whatever - it's magic, I know that much), it does credit the original source in the search engines as a link, like a Trackback without an actual Trackback. That's how I found out I had been quoted some time back in another (more popular, I'll mention... bitterly) blog.

I'm posting this, not to "bust the blogger out" or anything petty like that, but because I wondered how I should handle it? I mean, I felt like I should leave a comment, but if I had, I kind of wanted to point-out that I was the one so quoted and kind of go from there. So I sat here, pondering whether or not that was the way to go about it, or if that would be seen as "busting him out."

So the question is: what is the proper netiquette for handling such a thing?

I mean, I can see quoting a news source or article in such a manner, but quoting a personally-run blog this way (even if it is a news source, depending on how you view blogs and so on) seems a rather snarky way of co-opting someone else's work without crediting them for it. I don't necessarily think that was the blogger's intention - he seems to do quite a bit of work himself - but that is how I personally felt about it when I realized it was me that he had quoted. Especially after I spent a few minutes browsing through the damned thing to see exactly where my name and/or the link to the blog appeared and found neither!

What is the appropriate tack to take here, if any?

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