An Alternative Proposal for Excerpting

The common case for excerpts is that they send traffic to the original source. The case against is that users don’t click through to the source because so much content was excerpted that readers don’t need to.

This debate has emerged in various places over the past six months including a New York Times article, a terrific discussion among professional and independent bloggers, and more recently a rather extreme proposal to ban all excerpting of (and linking to!) content without the permission of copyright holders.

A significant portion of the discussion has revolved around determining some “fair” amount of content that excerpts should not exceed. The best answer is that “good” excerpting is a question of intent and the O’Reilly Radar post behind that last link is an excellent one. But, how can intentions be measured or molded into practical guidelines?

My proposal is this (I’m assuming clear attribution and links to sources are a given at this point): instead of trying to curb the amount of content that can be excerpted, expect excerpts to be matched with the same amount of original content summarizing, interpreting, explaining, analyzing, opining or otherwise adding value to the meme.

I think the ratio of excerpted content to original content in an article could prove to be a more effective measure of intent than looking at the percentage of the original article that was excerpted or setting arbitrary word count limits.

If the intent is to filter the Web and point users to interesting, valuable or otherwise newsworthy stories just post a link, a short description and an excerpt of a few lines. If the intent is a longer explanation or critique I think the added commentary would at least match the length of the excerpt.

If the intent is to boost traffic and ad revenue using the content of others it would require additional work at the very least. Those extra words could either be made to count or articles would meander and provide less value the longer excerpts become.

Posted on July 16, 2009