I’m an avid consumer of all sorts of material out there in Surfers Paradise (not the beautiful destination in Queensland, Australia but rather the Web). I’m also a frequent publisher and contributor of material. I therefore offer a list of five ethics that will take Web surfers very little time however will help content providers immensely.
You see, there is so much great material out there on the web whether text, video, podcasts, images etc. that so many billions of us view each day and some sort of feedback to the content providers assists them to understand if anyone is finding the information useful or interesting. So here is the ‘Web Surfers Ethics List’; if you view pages on the Internet then please take a short while to take note of the five items below:
- Vote: See that Twitter, Digg, Reddit or Delicious icon? Please just click your favourite bookmark or sharing service and add the content you are viewing. It means a lot to content providers to see people responding in some way to the content.
- Comment: Most Blogs and many other sharing and media websites enable commenting on content. Commenting provides feedback to the content provider and stimulates knowledge sharing. Please even provide a short comment.
- Give credit: If you use content from the web then give credit to the source. This may be as simple as a link to the originating source of the idea or content. Please also respect copyright.
- Subscribe: RSS feeds and email newsletter are very common particularly from Blogs. Website owners really appreciate people subscribing to their RSS feeds or emails. Why not subscribe and show your appreciation – you can always unsubscribe later.
- Donate: Some content takes a significant amount of effort on the part of the content providers. For example, some Firefox Add-on or Wordpress Plugin developers ask for donations. If you can then why not donate even a few dollars. Without these Open Source developers the Internet would not be nearly as cool!
Thanks for reading and please help content providers by voting, commenting, subscribing or giving feedback in some other way. Content providers rely on feedback to know what Internet surfers do and don’t want. Be a Web hero!
