Slashdot to Yahoo to Joystiq to GamePolitics to Ripten
In the online gaming news world, re-reporting on news from another source is the bread and butter for every blogger out there. Myself, I make sure to link to the source (or whoever found and reported on it first), and who I found it from.
This makes sure the people who put the effort in are credited, as are the people who helped me find the article in the first place. As it turns out, I appear to be in the minority with my thinking.
A few days ago, Ripten reported on a guy who has 36 WoW accounts. The story was widely distributed, hitting all the big social news sites. This makes other blogs notice, and so they report on the story, hopefully linking to Ripten.
As I was checking out my feeds this morning I came across an article on Slashdot titled “Gamer Plays Over 30 Warcraft Characters”. I know from my time writing that getting on Slashdot can give a large traffic boost, so hit the link to see if the Ripten servers were up. But the link didn’t go to Ripten. Nor did it go to the original forum thread where the story originated. Instead it went to an article on Yahoo Gaming.
Well, at last they will link to Ripten right? Well, no. Yahoo Games linked to Joystiq. And who did they link to? Ripten? Nope, Joystiq linked to GamePolitics. The first site in the chain to actually give credit to Ripten.
GP say they got their article via Gizmondo, who link to Ripten, but also to where they found the article, CrunchGear. Only then does the chain end, as they link to Ripten. An impressive chain of sites, possibly the longest I have seen.
As a blogger/writer myself, I’m all for reporting news from other sites to share with my readers. But to not give credit to the site which actually found the news is just bad form. Not even linking to the very source (which Ripten used) is bad enough, but to simply link to a site you found the story on is just lazy.
Did the writers of these articles even click through to see the source, or simply read the article they found and regurgitate it for their readers?
To recap:
Slashdot -> Yahoo Gaming -> Joystiq -> GamePolitics -> Gizmondo -> CrunchGear -> Ripten -> the forum it was first published
Amazing.
The blogo-sphere has been malformed into a blogo-chain.
I’d rather have it link to a site that’s actually up, and re-reporting it, than to have a piece of news link to some rinky dink site that crumples just thinking about of the amount of hits it would get from Slashdot.
I know how busted the site chain is. It’s frustrating, but people don’t have time to follow link upon link.
You ever play telephone, where one kid has a message to whisper in the next’s ear, and it travels down the line? There’s always one prick who changes the message to “I have smelly fartypants.” Funny, sure, but not when the original message was “Cindy, will you go to the dance with me?”
That’s blogging in a nutshell.