I need to be brief: I'm working on the new version of my paintball news website (www.68caliber.com) and under deadline for this and that, but I did want to get something up here.

You'll note, as time goes by, that my 'brief' is not your average 'brief'.

Anyway. A couple of quick highlights, then back to the salt mines.

1. I really appreciate this site - and not just for the time-suck. Cudos to everyone involved in putting it together

2. I guest blog on the Cordwainer Smith site and would appreciate it if you folks would visit not just the blog but the site itself. FREE FICTION by the master over there. If you have not yet read Smith (real life Paul Linebarger, who practically invented psyops and who is the god child of Sun Yat Sen) you are in for a major treat. The blog is hier.. (Not a misspelling - CS fans will get the joke.)

3. I have been very fortunate that several places have picked up on my tweaking of IO9 (I take them to task for failing to properly credit and link - which I hope you will agree is about as big a blogging sin as they come). You can read about it on SFSignal, on Enter the Octopus and on RayGun Revival, among other places I am sure.

I know a lot of people disparage IO9 for their sensationalistic coverage and almost unceasing support of drek, but the reality is this: they get an enormous amount of traffic and are in a position to influence a lot of people - at least so far as the presentation of genre and genre-related works are concerned.

I'm not interested in driving IO9 out - I don't think that's possible in the least. But what I am interested in is encouraging them to "play fair".

By that I mean spreading the link love (and properly crediting people they cover). We all know that it costs a blogger nothing to link to someone - in fact, it usually results in better traffic for both the referer and the referee.

If they are going to "mine" other blogs for content, the least they can do is link and/or credit. But it seems that they are bent on creating a site where everything is one-way and the only reason you do something like that is to grab market share. At the deliberate expense of all others.

Look, I know everyone here does what they do for the love-of, and would write whether they have one reader, no readers or ten-thousand uniques a day. And I'm not recruting for some kind of internet war. But what I would appreciate is if you notice that they've mined one of our friends and didn't credit - let folks know. Let THEM know. And let each other know.

The only way this 'sharing' social experiment that is the web is going to work is if people share, and those of us who do have a duty to point it out when others aren't.

I can't for the life of me understand why:

A) you would not want to link back to the source. I mean it is a no brainer, you link to them, they link back, readership goes up for everybody.

and

B) Why take the copyright risk. One day they are going to mine the wrong site and BAM, lawsuit. Or is the Creative Commons Attribution license a joke?

Well, this inspired me to post a semi-response on my blog (partly due to Mulluane poking at me, partly because SF Signal did, and finally because this post did). I've written about it here: http://wisb.blogspot.com/2009/02/io9-worth-reading-or-consumerist-fluff.html

Interesting discussion, I think.