ffffound and attribution
The subject of attribution on the "image bookmarking" site ffffound has been getting a bit more attention recently. For example, it's a key point in Alexander Bohm's reconsideration of the site. With the site's slow but relentless increase in popularity, I've come to notice duplicate images on the front page more and more often. (One that particularly bugs me is this early sketch of the Underground roundel, which I posted from the IHT, but which was later posted without the annoying black border via fontblog.de.)
Personally, right back to the early days of blogging (a whole five years ago now), I've tried to remember to chase back attribution as far as I can, and I do this with images on ffffound, too. Today I saw this house on the front page (linked, annoyingly, to the blog's home page, rather than the post's permalink- the sort of thing that makes it impossible to trace attribution once the page's cycled, which can be as quickly as a few days, but never mind that now), and so I read down the page looking for other posts* of interest.
Rapidly I found this Moleskinerie hack, which, unusually for such things, I quite liked. I followed the attribution change back through designboom (again, having to find the permanent link myself - are all designers incapable of doing this?) to the original artist's site (once more a link to the top level, which is more excusable this time, since the post was about his entire body of work). At each step I posted the same item to ffffound, generating three links, each addded by different people. It turns out that the least popular (two links, at the time of writing) was the artist's site; the two blogs had three links each.
ffffound doesn't really try to tie these images together, or to do anything to limit the duplication. Admittedly, sites like del.icio.us don't either, and variant URLs on the same site can lead to as much duplication as the quoting (and reuploading) of images can. Nevertheless, it's a source of annoyance to me, and, I assume, even more vexing to those whose work is never recognised, because it's referred to but never seen in the context they'd prefer, or attached meaningfully to its creator.
*
I've got a rant brewing about the use of "blog" to mean "blog post" as
opposed to "site", but never mind that now either. Anyway, I fear that
the battle's already lost, despite me only noticing the trend a month
or three ago.
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I suppose asking sites to wrap images in pages such that they're clickable is somewhat unfair, but it is a problem (and I've sinned too; the versions of the graphics on this Ace Jet 170 post about the Practical Idealists book were too small to post to ffffound unless I used the popups, which lose the attribution).
At least with bare images, the ffffound bookmarklet could use document.referrer instead of location.href when it posts the image.
Sadly http://ffffound.com/bookmarklet.js is implemented as an anonymous object with a fresh token each time, so there's no way I know of for us to do this ourselves. (If they'd namespaced it we could rewrite it).