Friday, March 16, 2012

Linking is not endorsing

In the twitter tangle between M.I.A. and Anderson Cooper, text from yahoo.news about Cooper's side:

The silver-haired talk show host then let loose some mad journalism skills on her. He responded, “you’ve gone from saying ‘I wrote’, ‘I called you,’ to saying my cnn show blog had a link to an article. Big difference…we link to many articles with different viewpoints, and we gave you an opportunity to respond. I can understand your frustration if someone wrote untrue things about you, and I’m glad you were able to respond.”

Linking to an article, or referencing an article, is certainly not the same as endorsing an article. IPBiz has referenced the Lemley/Moore article in BULR, as well as several articles written by a certain former Kodak employee (Cecil Quillen), but that was in the context of criticizing them.

Sadly, systems which merely count citations don't make the distinction between a favorable citation and a critical one. Anderson Cooper is right, and, for that reason, citation counting is wrong.

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