i was going through my rss reader last night, in search for something to submit to digg when i saw that engadget had published a post titled ‘charge your usb gadgets by breathing’. obviously thinking that this is something that would do well on digg, i clicked on it, but then realized that engadget wasn’t the primary source for the content. in fact, neither were the next two sites that i followed the links to.

engadget had gotten the story from gadgets-weblog, which had gotten it from treehugger, which got it from the original source and one of my favorite blogs, instructables. whenever i submit something to social media sities, i look to see if the article links to an originating source and i go back and make an earnest effort to submit for the originating source. this experience left me wondering, what is the proper way to attribute an originating source, and how far back should you go?

for example, should engadget, gadgets-weblog, and treehugger, all link back to instructables because they made the content, even though engadget and gadgets-weblog indirectly found it through treehugger? or should each site link only to the place where they found the information from? the way things are, engadget only linked to gadgets-weblog, which linked to both treehugger and instructables, and treehugger, of course, linked to intructables. from these three blogs, how many links does instructables deserve?

i haven’t linked the content above due to linking confusion. here’s how i found the article: from engadget, via gadgets-blog, via treehugger, via original source: instructables.

Technorati Tags: engadget, gadgets, treehugger, instructables, link, post, blog, usb, digg