The “Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation” is to promulgate your new guidelines for blogging. David Carr in The New York Times:
“This is not an anti-aggregation group, we are pro-aggregation,” Mr. Dumenco told me. “We want some simple, common-sense rules. There should be some kind of variation of the Golden Rule here, which is that you should aggregate others as you would wish to be aggregated yourself.”
The motives are honorable, the objectives reasonable, and the timing … timely. But no-one is going to care about these folks or whatever theses they nail to pastebin’s door, except for their entertainment value. The problem isn’t that we lack a necessary formal system of crediting and linking to sources. The problem is that people break and exploit social norms and standards, which can’t be regulated by committees.