Discussion pages should include a more explicit link back to the original discussion.

[semorrison]

At present, on pages with discussions from Google+, the only indication of the original of the discussion presented there is the "Reply" button.

I think there should be an explicit link, and ideally text, along the lines of

This discussion is quoted from Google+ https://plus.google.com/103703080789076472131/posts/6MG3BbTj5p1

alongside where the author of the original post is displayed.

It's important that we cite sources!

[cjlee112]

We need suggestions about what people think would be the best general way to do this. We want it to be visible but not to break up the presentation of the user's post. Google+ supplies stock icons for these kinds of linking functions. So we could make it read something like

[1] Timothy Gowers on Google+ (icon) (16 hours ago)

where both "Google+" and the icon would be linked back to the original post. I'm not enthusiastic about pasting long URLs like https://plus.google.com/103703080789076472131/posts/6MG3BbTj5p1 in the display of the user's post. It looks bad and adds nothing; all browsers give you a menu option to copy the URL of any link, or for that matter just clicking the link will display the URL.

[cjlee112]

@semorrison One important point of philosophy about "source": even if a user is logged in to selectedpapers.net, and clicks our button to recommend or discuss a paper, selectedpapers.net submits their post via Google+. So in that case which site is the source, selectedpapers.net or Google+? Our philosophy is that that question is not very relevant; the source that matters is the author (the user), they are the true owner of their own content. Even if they typed their entire post on Google+ exclusively, by adding the #spnetwork tag they are explicitly saying they want selectedpapers.net to index and display their post.

By posting our users' content to other websites (like Google+) rather than just keeping their content in our website, selectedpapers.net is making a strong statement that we are not trying to own their content. By operating in this explicitly "federated" way from the get-go, we are trying to provide a clearly different approach than the default "walled garden" model.

To summarize:

• establishing a clean, standard way of citing and linking to sources is great;
• we want to make sure that doesn't overshadow the author as the real source / owner of the content, or the display of the content itself.
• there is clearly a difference between displaying content where the user has explicitly tagged the content #spnetwork, vs. displaying other content (e.g. the MathOverflow arxiv trackbacks). In the latter case, unless the content provider gives us permission to display full content, we have to follow "search engine" rules in terms of how much content we can display.

What do you think?