Cameron's most recent rant touched on a point that I'm quite concerned about - crediting sources for stories. Wherever possible I try to credit the source for a piece of news, unless its well known and reported in a number of places. I think it's only fair to credit these sources, in the same way you would list sources and references if you quote from books and papers.

I don't claim to have contacts in all the right places or to be on first name terms with the movers and shakers so I rely on mailing lists, news sites, other weblogs and random browsing to create Internet Alchemy every day. I'm not in this for my personal gain or kudos, it's just a better way of sharing the interesting links I stumble across every day with the opportunity to add a bit of commentary along the way. Other methods of link sharing have ranged from the rehashed bookmarks list or the formal categorised directory site. Both have failed abyssmally, generally because they're hard to keep up to date and it's actually rather dull continually checking big lists of links.

With Internet Alchemy, my intention is to provide a transitory view of the web because that is the web's nature. OK, everything here is cross referenced and archived but that's really for convenience - I can't guarantee that those links will work in 6 months time but that's why I try to add a little more to each item, rather than just plonking a bare link on the page.