Looks like a nice technical improvement. But the basic argument is all wrong. First, the content attribution problem ―which is not exclusive to Tumblr― is not fixed at all. Second, the bookmarklet may automatically set a source but in no way will it be able to confirm that the page reblogged is the content’s origin.

If you’re surfing ffffound and happen to stumble upon a nice picture, the bookmarklet will display this : “fffound.com photographed or created this image”. Which is wrong, as wrong as before.

The fact is that no simple software implementation is capable, for the moment, to replace human judgement. The problem remains : if one wants to know the “source” of any content, one will have to make the effort to think and to do some research. Unfortunately, this condition for attributing the right source to a content seems to contradict one of Tumblr’s main tagline: “Tumblr makes it effortless to share anything you find or create” (Why Tumblr).

Reblogging is fast and effortless. If the author of a Tumblr blog (or any other blog for that matter) doesn’t take the time to track down the original source of the quote or picture he’s interested in, it will get lost in the reblogging process (for example, try to find the original artist of a picture published on ffffound!). There’s a reason why Skandalon release only two posts a day : providing adequate references can be a time consuming process. But without them, this archive won’t be a proper archive. And I’m not saying that everyone should do this. It’s a personal choice. But then again, for it to be a choice, one would have to take the time to think about it : do I want to know who’s behind this nice illustration? Do I want to spend time to look into it? Do I need the reference? What could I gain from it? And so on.