[...] I fear that, in the interest of substantiating this horribly inefficient system we’ve concocted for disseminating information by attaching it to 1) noise and 2) reverb, we are confusing reproduction with creativity, and confusing source with origin.

So in addition to the two characters Popova has appropriated, may I suggest a third: one which enables someone not to just cite where information was discovered, but where the person citing it believes it originated. This way, someone linking to this article I’ve just written will accept it for what it is: a comment as opposed to a genuine flash of original inspiration or an original exercise in journalism. Not everything I produce is worthy of exaltation.

There is an opportunity here that we are missing to hard-wire this rabbit hole so that we are assured of an exit. It takes being more than present, alive, and awake to be a creator – if consciousness were the only ticket required, the Web would have been created a thousand years ago by ants.

? Origin: The Curator’s Code

So you know how I suggested the Curator’s Code doesn’t directly address credit to the author of a piece of content? ReadWriteWeb’s Scott M. Fulton III adds that missing piece with this suggestion.

Which, if I’m grasping this all correctly, would look like this:

? Down the Rabbit Hole with Hyperlinks in Hand: On the “Curator’s Code”

I’d hope that any Curator’s Code (in the sense of “code of conduct”) would begin with crediting the person who actually created the thing, and then with crediting the person who first shared it.

By the way, I see this all as shorthand; if you’re making explicit statements about creation, discovery and attribution, the symbols – at least for now – seem redundant.

Right now, this may all still look a little cumbersome… the same way that hashtags weren’t the easiest things to use on Twitter at first. And then along came platform support, first from third parties and then from Twitter itself, where clients and services recognized the hashtag and automatically linked it to searches on the term, allowing topic-based conversations on Twitter. (In the long run, the Code, or something similar, could get us to some kind of a machine-readable attribute – along the lines of the “rel=” attribute for web links, only more widely adopted. And that could be tremendously popular.)

The Curator’s Code may go in this direction as it becomes easier to use – built-in keyboard shortcuts, for example – and more widely adopted. But hashtags became popular because they were useful to the person using them, allowing them to join a conversation or tag their tweets. For curators, then, the benefits of attribution have to become tangible, as opposed to just Doing The Right Thing (as much as I’d like that to be enough).

And that may mean content creators have to do some hard thinking about the rewards we can offer to people who curate and share our content.

And here’s a little background by one of the Code’s creators, Maria Popova. (Let’s see if I’ve got this right… ᔥ LinkWithLove.org)

This is what The Curator’s Code is – a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work. It’s an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring. This is not an effort to police the internet from a place of top-down authority, it’s an effort to encourage respect and kindness among the community….

The unicode symbols ? and ? are simply shorthand for the familiar “via” and “HT,” respectively. While you may still choose to use “via” and “HT” the old-fashioned way – the goal here is to attribute ethically, regardless of how you do it – there are two reasons we are proposing the unicode characters: One, they are a cleaner, more standardized way to attribute. Two, since the characters are wrapped in a hotlink to the Curator’s Code site, they serve as messengers for the ethos of the code itself, as people encounter them across the web and click to find out what they represent.

As someone who’s done his share of griping about people failing to attribute content to its creators, I’m delighted to see this initiative. No, it doesn’t directly address the issue of crediting authors… but it could make that much easier by strengthening the chain of attribution that may well lead to an original source.

And it’s nice to see the celebration of discovery. So much of the “sharing” activity that goes on seems to be so much churn – the same link being retweeted, shared and reposted over and over again. I’d be glad to see some recognition of the value of initial discovery: that first act of sharing that makes the rest possible, and identifies the people who are going to the effort of exploring. And that, too, makes identifying the content’s author that much easier.

Oh, and cool animation with the eyeball, people.

The Google Docs integration in Google+ Hangouts really is something else. (Try it while sharing a presentation. Kind of kicks the traditional webinar’s butt.)

It’s hard not to compare it to Facebook’s Video Calling feature. And to wonder if – as much as Google+ is being billed as less of a social network, and more the connective social tissue for your Google activity – Google+ isn’t going to emerge as the Facebook for people who are actually serious about Facebook.