the ryan king

Paul Graham says Hiring is Obsolete:

If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you’ll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.

Hmm, so what if I go to grad school AND start a startup? Broker and smarter? Where do I sign up?

Just caught this nearly month-only link back to my Evolutionary Revolution piece (wonder why Technorati didn’t pick it up earlier?). Anyway, on why an evolutionary approach to advancing the Web is better, he writes:

Old content does not die, it gets tagged!

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I got two new converts this week:

• David Wolber is one of my professors, who’s advising me and my partner on our Small Web project.
• Eran Globen is my partner on that project.

Both using WordPress and both worth reading.

Since I first wrote about hVia on Friday, there’s been some good discussion going on. We’re calling the idea ‘citeVia’ now, but that’s really just a working name and could easily be changed.

Our initial proposal was basically to do this for via links:

Via <cite class="via"><a href="http://www.example.com">Mr. Example</a></cite>

After comments from Tantek, we realized that the whole issue of citation in HTML is an undefinted area. There doesn’t seem to be any specified connection between <cite>, <blockquote> and <q>.

Tantek brings up the cite-a vs. a-cite issue. Mainly, he askes what else a cite tag wrapped around an a tag could mean beside a via-link. While it would be nice to have come up with a new HTML compound, I think things are trickier than that.

I think Eran does a nice job of summarizing the issues in this comment.

I think Eran and I finally understand Tantek’s oringinal point. However, it still seems necessary to use class=”via” to disambiguate the via-links. For us, a via-link is different that a regular citation. Often you’ll want to quote from a particular blog, but point out that you found out about that content somewhere else. The via-link is to the intermediary, not the source.

I’m not sure where to go from here. Tantek, I’m not sure if we’re not understanding each other or Eran and I just aren’t getting it. Either way, we need more input from anyone’s who’s interested.

In conclusion, a couple notes:

• Bud Gibson has used citeVia here
• We’ve pretty much dropped the idea of citations that don’t have a link. Those probably aren’t very interesting.

Update: After thinking about this a bit more, ‘citeVia’ may be a better potential name.

For my Internet Systems Research class last night, we had Tantek Çelik come speak on microformats. I believe it was more or less the same presentation he gave at SxSW this year.

Everyone in the class seemed very interested and excited by these new developments and Eran and I were so excited that in our regular after-class-beer-drinking, we worked out an idea for a new microformat.

The problem we want to deal with are ‘Via links’ (also called Hat Tips). These are the links at the end of a blog entry that give credit to someone for providing the information to the blogger.

It seems obvious that this is a type of citation, so the <cite> tag would seem the appropriate choice. However, this is a special kind of citation which is well recognized among bloggers and and distinct from content citations.

Before describing a solution, let me pause to explain why we think this is a problem– first of all, there have been studies done to track the spread of ideas through the blogosphere. Unfortunately, Adar, et al, had to do a lot of work related to inferring connections where there were no supporting data (ie, when people didn’t put via links, they had to infer where they got the information). So, having parseable via-links would be a great benefit to those who study the blogosphere.

Secondly, via-links can be useful to bloggers and blog readers. We all care (or should) about people’s sources and via-links are a way for bloggers to be transparent and give credit where credit is due. The practice of using via-links will enable blog-readers to track ideas back to their source.

Thirdly, bloggers who attribute their sources will benefit by incentivizing their readers to send them pointers to interesting material.

So, given those reasons, we conclude that using via-links is a best practice for bloggers and that there is reason enough to have a machine-parseable semantic format for these citations.

Here’s our idea– we’ll use the <cite> tag with a special class. For example, original markup from BoingBoing:

<em>(Thanks, Dave Gill!)</em>

and in our format:

Thanks, <cite class="via">Dave Gill</cite>!

Of course, BoingBoing could use a CSS rule to style this element with italics, to have the same presentation style they have now. Also, not that in this case, there’s no URL for the person being cited. This leads us to the second part of our proposal– when citing someone as the source, you should use the most specific URL possible.

So, if the pointer comes from someone else’s blog entry, you should reference that entry. If the the info came in some other manner, but the person still has a personal website, you should link to that site. Of course, if the person doesn’t have a personal website, their name is the best we can do and is considered sufficient.

Now for some more robust examples of what we’re proposing:

First, from [photomatt](http://photomatt.net), an example of a non-specific web citation. Here’s his markup:

<cite>Hat tip: <a href="http://deadheart.net/">neiljmorrow</a> via email.</cite>

As you can see, he’s already using <cite>, so he’s ahead of most, but we think things can be improved. For the sake of clarity it seems more useful to put only the person’s name (and link) within the <cite> tag. So, with our proposal, Matt’s markup would become:

Hat tip: <cite class="via"><a href="http://deadheart.net/">neiljmorrow</a></cite> via email.

Matt may not think this situation is optimal, and he would have to do some more work to get things styled the same way he has them now, but we think keeping the <cite> element to just the name/link of the person is worth the tradeoff.

This example also brings up an issue we discussed last night– the issue of source types. As Matt does here, bloggers often indicate how the information reached them, whether via a blog, email, im or face-to-face. At this point we’ve decided to not try and encode that into the microformat, but the idea is open for future work.

Ok, so what I’ve presented here is a rough outline of what we think would be the best practice regarding a via-link microformat.

Please give any feedback you have, public or private, especially if you have a better idea for a name (the working name is ‘hVia,’ but is open to change). My email is ‘ryan’ at this domain.