Often when I post an article, I will include the author's name. I like to give credit where credit is due, and also it reminds me that an individual wrote the words that I am reading.
For some time, I have been contemplating if it would be worthwhile to include an author field on posts, and whether or not authors could be followed, just as users, tags, and domains. It might appear like this, where 'Venkatesh Rao' is the author:
I have considered that the author field might only be available when the the url field was not blank, but I am not sure if that is necessary. Of course, the author field would be optional.
We've talked about it a bit, but if you have any thoughts or ideas about it, I'd like to hear them.
If it's follow-able, how would you handle cases such as "S. Sliverstein" versus "Silverstein" versus "Shel Silverstein"? Intuitively, they might all be the same person, but they might be different authors as a computer sees it. It might reduce in the same way that tags have to some extent ( #economy and #economics, for example), but with rarely-posted authors, fragmentation might still be a problem. I love the idea, but just something to consider.
You ever have something or someone that is mentioned, out of the blue and then you notice it everywhere. This week it's been Shel Silverstein for me. After reading this comment, I posted this.
Isn't it bizarre how things like that happen? It's even funnier when you consider that I have no special reason for picking Shel, I just kind of thought "I need an author for an example," I blinked, and he popped into my head. Maybe you've been sending me telepathic signals.
Glad you picked up on Shel instead of all the other strange crap that runs through my head :) In reading his poems I'm reminded of how strange they are, especially when put with the fantastic art work.
I like zebra's suggestion. If doing it realtime is too intensive, maybe once you hit "submit", hubski searches for authors similar to the one you've entered (probably just by last word, i.e. last name), and if there's a close match with (relatively) many uses, a popup appears, suggesting that tag instead. This way, if I put "S. Silverstein" as the author, I would know that most people refer to him as "Shel Silverstein" instead, but I wouldn't have to see that some guy posted something from Shel Horowitz six months ago. If people find the popup annoying, have a checkbox in settings to turn it off.
Trying to think of ways this would affect my use of hubski, either negatively or positively. Can't really. So I guess I'm indifferent to the change, leaning positive. It can't hurt. To whomever tagged this 'bad idea' -- unsubtle. Dickish. Not really what we do here.
Would you automate the author field by querying HTML Meta tags and/or REL=AUTHOR markup?
Could run a quick scrape on the top 100 URLs posted on Hubski to see if they have META AUTHOR or REL=AUTHOR tags. Lower down in relevance is span class="author". HTML5 has ADDRESS. Google are suggesting a 'by <name>' somewhere in text on the page but that would be more tricky.
oppose. people who write independently will have a blog with a followable domain. people who don't write independently should be considered in the context of their institution. and, as others have mentioned, the lack of standardized nomenclature will make this a big hassle
Hm. Is this true? Jullian Assange has written for a number of publications. I don't think they can all be found on one site. Even if they could, I might want to follow any Hubski posts about his writing, which is a separate thing.people who write independently will have a blog with a followable domain. people who don't write independently should be considered in the context of their institution.
kleinbl00 I would be interested in your take on this? As someone that doesn't follow many people on Hubski, focuses more on tags and perhaps URLs, would you follow authors?
No. If someone thinks it's worthy of note, use a tag. Also heavily biases content towards externally authored, "pedigreed" posts - between a self post, a blog post, a scholarly article, a video, a picture or a newspaper column, only three of those six have "authors" and only one of those six benefits from the "author" tag.
Interesting point. Still, I can see videos and images having 'authors', some text posts too. I occasionally consider using the tag for the writer, but only in cases of fiction.Also heavily biases content towards externally authored, "pedigreed" posts - between a self post, a blog post, a scholarly article, a video, a picture or a newspaper column, only three of those six have "authors" and only one of those six benefits from the "author" tag.
I think most people, myself included will often attribute the quality of work to a publication rather than an author. It's not really fair, is it? While publications definitely deserve to be recognized for quality content, clearly the authors do foremost.
I like it a lot. I would suggest allowing it for all posts. We have a number of writers on Hubski that may like to post their own content and put their own name in the post.