With thanks to Sameer Patel, on whose tweet I based this title. And with thanks to Creative Commons of course for using their newest Attribution icon
Attribution seems to be turning into a lost art form, at least in my social web
First, I totally agree. I answered
RT @SameerPatel: Attribution seems to be turning into a lost art form, at least in my social web < +1. Especially "thought leaders" do it...
which is a typical tweet saying "Yes I totally agree with you, I've seen it before too, and especially socalled thought leaders do it, in my opinion
Second, I could have asked Sameer why he said it but I'm second-guessing it has to do with the financing of Atlassian by Accel - 60 million good old-fashioned dollars
The original post on that is by Techcrunch. Somehow magically someone named albert5888 gets the first tweet on it, and a few seconds later the auto-tweets fire away.
All 104 auto-tweets of them, that all have the chance to attribute or not to attribute. 18 of them attribute in some way by including the word TechCrunch in their tweet. All the others don't. That's 86% non-attribution by machines. I'm being leniant as well, as only 7 of those 18 mention @Techcrunch, the other half just mentions the word TechCrunch so I wouldn't want to count that for full attribution: after all, those tweets doesn't reach Techcrunch unless they search for them
Amidst all those tweets, there's Jevon, who manages to (read and?) tweet about Techcrunch's article all within 85 seconds. Without attribution. His tweet gets picked up by others who ReTweet Jevon's tweet - without attribution
So, if non-attibution starts with the auto-tweets, are the chances getting smaller or larger that attribution will occur? That's an interesting question but not in this case: it's a post by Techcrunch and they have all the buttons in the world to ReTweet it in some way
Two minutes later, the human tweets start. Those people must have been lurking all day for this post, read it in 90 seconds and found time to adjust the original tweet to their needs. Simply astonishing.
There are 158 human tweets within the next hour. Of those, 54 somewhat attribute by mentioning the name Techcrunch, and only 41 really attribute by using @Techcrunch
Of course, it's hard to measure attribution that way because people might not be following Techcrunch (count me in) so when they see the tweet and don't bother to read, the best they can do is ReTweet it as it is.
So, only counting @-replies: in 72 tweets there's an RT or a VIA attributing it to someone. That's a lousy score of 46% of people who attribute
Total score? 262 tweets, 79 @-replies or mentions (30%). 72 include the word TechCrunch (27%), only 48 (18%) correctly attribute to @TechCrunch
A sad, sad score. Here is the entire list of all 262 ReTweets so you can judge for yourself
And Jevon? Jevon got 16 @-replies and / or ReTweets out of it. That must have upped his image of 'thoughtleader' a bit, I guess: 1/3 of what @TechCrunch got
Hope it was worth it
