But taking to the Internet — and taking advantage of the near-infinite time it allows to clarify remarks — sometimes does more harm than good.

That's TechPresident's Nick Judd, looking at Newark Mayor Cory Booker's "tortured-looking YouTube reversal" (to quote Politico) and drawing a parallel with Komen CEO Nancy Brinker's YouTube intervention from a few months ago.

But it's a mistake to assume the goal from speakers is always to clarify their remarks. Sometimes those remarks were perfectly clear; the purpose of the follow-up statement is to apply a rhetorical Gaussian Blur filter. Trouble is, it's pretty obvious that's what's happening.

When the damage was actually caused by your remarks' meaning being crystal clear, trying to change their meaning after the fact is a mistake. (And in related news, "I apologize to anyone who was offended because they were so stupid" is a losing strategy, too.) As a speaker, you have to own your words.

I see three strategies that let you get through this with some degree of integrity:

• One, if what you said is what you believe, you're on the record now - live with it. Recommit to its substance, if not to the way you phrased it.

Of course, if your original statement was ambiguous, or if it was reasonable but has had its meaning twisted by others, then by all means, clarify. But if by "clarifying" you mean making things less clear, it's time to rethink your approach.

Let’s understand something – My audience is the most important thing to me in my world, next to my wife and cat. I’ve spent YEARS and YEARS cultivating my audience. I’ve spent countless nights figuring out what my audience wants, how they want it, and what they’re going to want next. I’d take a bullet for my audience.

Peter Shankman got a PR pitch asking to "borrow" his audience, and he explained in vehement, articulate detail why the sender couldn't.

It's a fun read... but I hope people take more from it than just "respect other people's audiences."

First, the most important lesson I'd take from this is to respect my own.

That means thinking just a little about the value to my readers of everything I post. It means asking myself when I have a conflict of interest, real, potential or perceived. It means looking for the line between self-expression and self-indulgence.

And the other lesson I hope we can take to heart is this: forget ineffective for a moment. Ask yourself if what you're doing is right.

I'd argue that a PR pitch that ignores the subject matter of a blog is off-base, but not necessarily unethical. The same isn't true of a lot of the behaviour in the pitches I'm seeing these days — a strain of search-engine "optimization" that actually amounts to search-engine sabotage

Business models that rely on deceit are wrong, whether it's three-card monte, phone scams or black-hat SEO.

It's wrong to game search engines to produce results that aren't as relevant to a user's search. It's wrong to trick people into clicking on links to your content.

And I think maybe it's the fact that you sometimes have to be a little clever to outsmart Google's algorithms or a site's users that obscures the fact that even clever can be wrong.

Respect for your audience makes a lot possible: real connection and communication, genuine community, and yes, sales and profit. But it also rules a lot out.

[...] I fear that, in the interest of substantiating this horribly inefficient system we've concocted for disseminating information by attaching it to 1) noise and 2) reverb, we are confusing reproduction with creativity, and confusing source with origin.

So in addition to the two characters Popova has appropriated, may I suggest a third: one which enables someone not to just cite where information was discovered, but where the person citing it believes it originated. This way, someone linking to this article I've just written will accept it for what it is: a comment as opposed to a genuine flash of original inspiration or an original exercise in journalism. Not everything I produce is worthy of exaltation.

There is an opportunity here that we are missing to hard-wire this rabbit hole so that we are assured of an exit. It takes being more than present, alive, and awake to be a creator - if consciousness were the only ticket required, the Web would have been created a thousand years ago by ants.

Ȭ Origin: The Curator's Code

So you know how I suggested the Curator's Code doesn't directly address credit to the author of a piece of content? ReadWriteWeb's Scott M. Fulton III adds that missing piece with this suggestion.

Which, if I'm grasping this all correctly, would look like this:

Ȭ Down the Rabbit Hole with Hyperlinks in Hand: On the "Curator's Code"

I'd hope that any Curator's Code (in the sense of "code of conduct") would begin with crediting the person who actually created the thing, and then with crediting the person who first shared it.

By the way, I see this all as shorthand; if you're making explicit statements about creation, discovery and attribution, the symbols - at least for now - seem redundant.

Right now, this may all still look a little cumbersome... the same way that hashtags weren't the easiest things to use on Twitter at first. And then along came platform support, first from third parties and then from Twitter itself, where clients and services recognized the hashtag and automatically linked it to searches on the term, allowing topic-based conversations on Twitter. (In the long run, the Code, or something similar, could get us to some kind of a machine-readable attribute - along the lines of the "rel=" attribute for web links, only more widely adopted. And that could be tremendously popular.)

The Curator's Code may go in this direction as it becomes easier to use - built-in keyboard shortcuts, for example - and more widely adopted. But hashtags became popular because they were useful to the person using them, allowing them to join a conversation or tag their tweets. For curators, then, the benefits of attribution have to become tangible, as opposed to just Doing The Right Thing (as much as I'd like that to be enough).

And that may mean content creators have to do some hard thinking about the rewards we can offer to people who curate and share our content.

And here's a little background by one of the Code's creators, Maria Popova. (Let's see if I've got this right... ᔥ LinkWithLove.org)

This is what The Curator's Code is – a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work. It's an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring. This is not an effort to police the internet from a place of top-down authority, it's an effort to encourage respect and kindness among the community....

The unicode symbols ᔥ and ↬ are simply shorthand for the familiar "via" and "HT," respectively. While you may still choose to use "via" and "HT" the old-fashioned way – the goal here is to attribute ethically, regardless of how you do it – there are two reasons we are proposing the unicode characters: One, they are a cleaner, more standardized way to attribute. Two, since the characters are wrapped in a hotlink to the Curator's Code site, they serve as messengers for the ethos of the code itself, as people encounter them across the web and click to find out what they represent.

As someone who's done his share of griping about people failing to attribute content to its creators, I'm delighted to see this initiative. No, it doesn't directly address the issue of crediting authors... but it could make that much easier by strengthening the chain of attribution that may well lead to an original source.

And it's nice to see the celebration of discovery. So much of the "sharing" activity that goes on seems to be so much churn - the same link being retweeted, shared and reposted over and over again. I'd be glad to see some recognition of the value of initial discovery: that first act of sharing that makes the rest possible, and identifies the people who are going to the effort of exploring. And that, too, makes identifying the content's author that much easier.

Oh, and cool animation with the eyeball, people.

The Google Docs integration in Google+ Hangouts really is something else. (Try it while sharing a presentation. Kind of kicks the traditional webinar's butt.)

It's hard not to compare it to Facebook's Video Calling feature. And to wonder if - as much as Google+ is being billed as less of a social network, and more the connective social tissue for your Google activity - Google+ isn't going to emerge as the Facebook for people who are actually serious about Facebook.

The new political norm: flash-mob activism

OMAR EL AKKAD — TECHNOLOGY REPORTER

Published Friday, Mar. 09, 2012 8:57PM EST

Last updated Friday, Mar. 09, 2012 11:57PM EST

But as a marketing campaign, Kony2012 has surpassed all expectations. More importantly, the response to the campaign, especially from hordes of younger Web users who may never have previously heard of Mr. Kony, illustrates a new political norm, in which hot-button topics seem to take hold in the public consciousness with little or no prior warning – a flash mob of activism.

“For a lot of people, this is going to be their first [taste] of activism,” said Rob Cottingham of Social Signal, a Vancouver-based social-media strategy firm. “If you start reading the tweets and comments, they’re filled with the kind of enthusiasm you're seeing from people who are becoming engaged politically for the first time.”

...[T]he Kony2012 phenomenon likely marks the end of an age when politicians had plenty of lead time before an issue exploded into the mainstream.

“Those days are probably gone,” Mr. Cottingham said. “For a lot of decision makers and a lot of people working in the field, hoping to have control of the agenda ... is no longer a viable dream.”

I have deep reservations about the #StopKony campaign and Invisible Children's approach. But their ability to mobilize is undeniable. And the question for organizations that work with a more viable, integrated theory of change is what lessons they can draw from that viral success for their own efforts – and how they may need to change to put those lessons into practice.