Ethical Aggregation

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Earlier this week, 538’s Nate Silver took to Twitter to complain about the lack of attribution on rival site Vox for charts that he said were lifted from his publication.

Vox’s co-founder Ezra Klein responded with “How Vox aggregates,” justifying the publication’s processes: “pretty much every publication you can think of … aggregate[s] for the same reason: because it’s of value to their readers.”

On one hand, I totally agree. It’s partly why I write the Hack Education Weekly News and the Hack Education Weekly Newsletter. I spend many, many hours collecting links to the week’s education news and most interesting education/technology essays and then writing them all up in a blog post and a newsletter. I do this because I think it’s “of value” to my readers as well as to my own research.

When I aggregate, I try to make sure proper attribution is all there in print (not just in a link). ("According to [publication]..." "[Author] argues..." And so on.) I try to link to original sources for stories, not to those who’ve simply rewritten the news. I'm not sure I always get the recognition right, but I do hope that there's value for readers and for the writers I cite.

Perhaps that’s why Silver’s criticisms of @VoxMaps resonate with me. Me the writer, not me the aggregator. The @VoxMaps account tweets a map image, often created by other publications, along with a link back to the Vox article that discusses it.

(This tweet links to a Vox story, but the accompanying image was created by PolicyLink, something you can't tell from the tweet itself. You've got to click for attribution.)

Tweets with images get significantly more engagement – more clicks, more favorites, more retweets. So is it ethical to use someone else’s images to do so? @VoxMaps and many others do it... but does that make it right?

As a writer, “link jacking” always (and probably inordinately) pisses me off. Link jacking is the practice of summarizing someone else’s work in a post; then the link to that post gets shared. The traffic is then siphoned off to the aggregator, not to the author. (For his part, Klein insists that @VoxMaps drives traffic back to the original content, something that Silver disputes.)

Now, I don’t get paid based on traffic. My sites don’t have ads, and I don’t have to report page-view metrics to investors. (I also don't make a dime from the so-called "attention economy." LOL.) So why do I care about this? Why does it bother me so much? Why care if my work gets link jacked?

In part, I think it matters because link jacking is disrespectful to writers and to readers and to the larger ecosystem – link jacking extracts value from the ecosystem. Link jacking underscores how much of the Web is obsessed with clicks not with quality or critical analysis.

To be clear, I don’t use the term “link jacking” to describe aggregation that adds value. (Arguably the Vox stories tweeted by @VoxMaps do that. Arguably. I think that Vox tries to be a "definitive" site, and as such, it doesn't really encourage people to look elsewhere for answers.)

The best example of doing aggregation right in education is probably Stephen Downes’ OLDaily. It’s the one source that I recommend everyone in education technology read. There are a couple of things that make the OLDaily aggregation stand out:

  • Downes always offers additional commentary. He gives a reason why he’s selected the article to share, for example, why the article is significant (or right or wrong).
  • OLDaily highlights the author and publication name. These are both linked so one can view all the times that either’s been mentioned by Downes.
  • GRSShopper, the tool Downes has built to power the OLDaily, is structured so that when you click the headline link, you are taken directly to the original article. (This also means that when you bookmark an OLDaily post, you’re bookmarking the original article, not his aggregation.)

In the case of OLDaily, the aggregation technology and the aggregator’s practice respect the original authors - ed-tech as people and ideas, not as products.

So how do we make sure that we aggregate respectfully - and not simply because traffic and "clicks" matter, but because we care about the ethics of the Web?

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Audrey Watters

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Audrey Watters

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