So the New York Post printed a story without crediting the blogger who originally broke it – and the journalist whose byline is on the Post piece claimed it was an editorial policy not to credit blogs for scoops.

There’s been some controversy over this, with Zachary M. Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab saying “It’s hard, of course, to defend this rule on journalistic grounds”.

There’s a clear and obvious line between nicking someone’s words and rewriting their story – and individuals and organisations who fall on the wrong side of that line tend to get publicly and appropriately told off.

But news organisations routinely borrow or steal story ideas from each other. Newspaper ideas go back and forth, nationals write up local stories, local BBC newsrooms interview people in the evenings who were in that morning’s paper. It might not be nice, but it’s the way the traditional media world seems to work. It’s even happened to me.

Should it be the case online? Print journalists sometimes get very upset when online news outlets summarise their stories even with links – for example, see Ian Shapira‘s response to Gawker’s write-up of his Washington Post article.

Most papers, though, nick stuff and don’t bother to attribute it. Like the New York Post, they take an idea from somewhere and run with it, usually without crediting where that idea came from.

Sometimes it’s to get individual credit, sometimes to avoid looking slow, sometimes editorial policy, and sometimes – believe it or not – it’s because the journalist in question doesn’t know how to put links on their online stories.

At the moment, where I work, we can’t add inline links within stories. We can only add boxed links, which makes it very difficult to link specific content – I couldn’t link to more than two or three sources without confusing the issue. There’s no way of separating links by category or by subject, so internal and external links are lumped together.

This week at work I trained two people to add links to web stories using our current content management system. Before that, if they had found a story on the web they couldn’t have credited it in the way bloggers expect – they lacked the skills to do so. It takes up to three minutes to add a link – time that some people don’t have.

It’s hard to believe in a time when linking is considered potentially vital to paper’s survival, but for some papers and journalists technology and training – and the financial issues involved in acquiring them – are preventing them from following good web etiquette.

Journalists and bloggers can agree (not that they always do) that online sources ought to be clear and obvious, that raw data should be available wherever possible and that linksharing is both important and necessary.

But when the technology isn’t available, sometimes we fall down before we’ve even started.

Forgive me, Internet. It has been one week since my last confession.

In my defence I’ve been on holiday, seeing small children, visiting zoos, discussing at length the appropriate naming of Lego Star Wars characters with jetpacks and purple lightsabers (Mace Fett or Bobba Windu, we decided), and going to Greenbelt.

Greenbelt. Britain’s least-known and friendliest festival, where I have spent a wonderful weekend being very, very relaxed, and engaging with social media as a consumer.

Rather than blogging my personal festival highlights, let’s talk about the innovations that allowed me to pick up on Monday a 16-page newspaper that went to press on Sunday night, two days after the festival opened, aimed at getting me to engage with Greenbelt’s online content.

Sponsored by Hewlitt Packard, the paper itself is a lovely object. It’s called “While We Were Here” and it’s entirely composed of blog posts, images and links that already exist on the web. In theory, the 4,000 free copies are designed to direct traffic to the web, not the other way round.

I don’t know if it’s working universally. I do know that when I got home on Tuesday I logged on and looked at a fair few blogs – I visited many of the ones printed in the paper and bookmarked or followed the profiles and groups signposted from its pages.

And I can say it worked for me. I don’t know if this business model is sustainable anywhere outside a four-day charity festival using volunteers willing to spend every waking hour (and several that should be sleeping ones) making it work. But I do believe it has legs and it could be immensely succesful to clone online content for web as a way of driving the link economy of an event.

Plus I had a really good time. HTML can wait.

I’m off work at the moment, staying with family and preparing with trepidation for a long weekend without mobile phone, internet or even laptop access. I’ve not started any big web-related projects this week,  but I have done and discovered a few interesting things.

1. Following Adam Westbrook‘s advice on branding, I  now own my own name, and it’s consistent – as is my avatar – across most of the networks I’m in. (LinkedIn was difficult, because there are too many Mary Hamiltons in the world.)
2. I’m now on Wired Journalists, and just starting to get acquainted with the place since its purchase by Publish2 – which I’ve also joined. You can see the first results of that in the sidebar here.
3. I have confirmed to my own satisfaction that my current phone is not an acceptable substitute for a digital camera, because it is crap.
4. Ditto video camera.
5. I have, however, confirmed that I can get an iPhone in January.
6. I’ve downloaded GIMP in anticipation.
7. I’ve stumbled across the #followwomenjournas movement, and I am now following women journalists. In fact, I’ve stumbled across all sorts of folk, and I’m following a total of 60 more people now than I was this time last week. My blog reading and interacting has increased exponentially as a result.
8. I am, slightly, drowning in information. At some point I’ll need a strategy for coping with this.

This week I plan to:

1. Rewrite my blogroll. WordPress ate it.
2. Sort out my profiles, and post. Just joining networks is not good enough – need to get active.
3. Investigate the technology I’d need to be capable of doing my own video. (At work we’re using Windows Movie Maker. Let’s just say I’d like to have other options.)
4. Locate a halfway decent HTML tutorial and commence staring.
5. Download Tweetdeck and stare more.

What I ought to be doing on this blog is getting the blogroll together, but the thought of so much copying and pasting makes me feel slightly unwell.

Instead, I’ve been playing with Publish2, in the hopes of making a “what I’m reading” widget for this site and finding out whether we can potentially use social network curation on the paper.

Results will, I hope, be in the sidebar.

(Incidentally, why isn’t there a feature allowing you to integrate Google Reader and WordPress link lists?)

I’m a fairly recent Twitter convert, and there are two main reasons I’m sticking with it. First, it’s short, and second, it’s art.

I’ve failed to enjoy Facebook or work well with it for several years, preferring to do my moaning on my blog and my events management by email. Yes, I know, I should do better. That’s why I joined Twitter.

The interface is easy, keeping up with people you find intriguing or blogs you want to keep tabs on is suddenly very simple, and you can engage as much or as little as you fancy.

All of which is lovely, but it’s not why I like it so much – it’s not why it works. The best and most innovative thing Twitter has done is forced us to condense communication into short bursts – to crystallise. To be brief.

Twitter’s 140-character limit forces poetry from mundanity. It’s possible to build a tweet around a single thought, a concept, without over-egging it or forcing it. It rewards neatness. Even “pointless babble” becomes a crystal of meaning, complete in itself.

And people are using the microblogging format for all sorts of textual art, from condensing words down to fit within the strict limits to haiku to artistic political satire, such as William Shatner’s Tonight Show recital of Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed. The medium even spawned the world’s first interactive poetry competition.

Mashable laid out the reasons for loving the character limit very neatly and persuasively, but didn’t mention the possibility of poetry.

Twitter is forcing us to distill our words, and words distilled can make art. This is an artistic revolution.

Well, I now own my own name. maryhamilton.co.uk redirects here, mary_hamilton is tweeting away, and this blog is in my name too.

Eventually, I’m told, if I keep posting without devolving into mindless streams of punctuation or porn spam, my Google ranking will increase. Currently my Twitter feed is on page 3 somewhere, and this blog is down in the distant mists of irrelevance.

I have to believe that most people embarking on the task of branding themselves don’t have to contend with namesakes from Celtic ballads, university faculties and an ex-MP, BBC director and Suffragette all on the front page.

Sometimes I realise that – in certain very specialised circumstances – I might have been better off if my parents had named me Philately. Or Carmelina. Or even Chlamydia.

Even then, I probably wouldn’t be more interesting than a lesbian transvestite bigamist who duped another woman into marriage in the 1800s.

Page 3? With that kind of competition, I’m lucky I’m there at all.

Today the BBC reported that video adverts are going to appear in a print magazine.

Yes, seriously. This is the Daily Prophet made real, though with more Pepsi and less Azkaban. We are now officially living in the future. Though someone seems to have stolen my jetpack.

According to the BBC, they use similar technology to singing cards, can store 40 minutes of video and can be recharged.

As long as they don’t use them to wish me a happy new year in tinny voices every time I open a magazine, I’m behind this idea all the way.

Let’s make print more attractive, let’s innovate in meatspace as well as online, and let’s develop easily-accessible video news as a permanent medium and see what happens.

I was trying to rewrite my CV the other day to make it skills-based when I realised how lopsided it is.

Reporting skills? Working on it, with some exams to prove it. Writing skills? Ditto but with more degree. Design and copy editing? Three years’ print experience and a distressing knowledge of Quark shortcuts to prove it.

Web, though? Let’s see. I did a VB6 course when I was 12 and 8 years ago I learned SQL and Oracle. A bit. Well, some. Enough to run complex database queries, anyway. Oh, and I taught myself enough Applescripting, Excel and macros to create all 166,844 of the perspex plates that go on the front of postboxes from a single spreadsheet.

Multimedia? I definitely did a week of video training, which is just enough to make sure that you can point the camera in the right direction and set up a tripod without braining the person stood next to you. Everything else has been trial and error.

Not exactly bundles of experience for something I love doing, then. So let’s fix it.

In the interests of being self-starting, entrepreneurial, proactive and so on, Web Wednesdays are going to be about what I’ve done, each week, to teach myself a range of useful web and multimedia skills.

I want to learn: CSS, Flash, HTML, image manipulation in GIMP or Photoshop, audio manipulation, writing for video, shooting and editing video, halfway decent photography, Indesign, Illustrator (I have a head-start on the last two, I admit).

That’s a nice ambitious list to start with. But is there anything that shouldn’t be on it, or any glaring holes? Where do you think I should start?

If you’re interested in personal development as a journalist, I’d really recommend taking a bit of time to read the first post in Adam Westbrook’s 6×6 series – and, I imagine, all the others too once they’re up. It’s on branding yourself online and in real life, with common sense tips.

There’s some excellent advice and some useful sources, and it’s given me a project idea – I’m going to be building my own website, learning/relearning/honing my CSS, HTML and Flash skills as I go along. Watch out for Website Wednesdays.