Over the weekend, the Rabbi at the synagogue I attend gave a speech Friday night about integrity and intelligence. In the orthodox-Jewish world there is a principle that if someone who has very little or zero integrity says something intelligent, and you want to repeat it - you should not use the person's name. So if Mr. X said something smart, but also commits violations to the Jewish law, you typically should say, I heard this in the name of a person from city, state but not mention his name. It gets a bit more detailed then this, but this is a good enough introduction to where I am going with the rest of the post.

As a blogger, it is often very customary to link back to an other blogger when you are writing about the topic. But what if that blogger is someone who is someone with zero integrity? What if that blogger said something that was very wise?

Why would I not want to mention that blogger by name or link to him? Well, I can understand that if I linked to him or mentioned his name that people can also learn more from this individual, stuff that I may not think is appropriate. For example, let's say Blogger X said something smart but he also has a ton of things on his blog that I would find harmful to my readers. Would I want to introduce this blogger to my readers? Would I want my readers in harm?

Now, outside of that. Would I want my link to the blogger show a sign of my approval to that blogger without integrity? Would people feel that if I link to this blogger that I condone ALL of his actions or advice?

It then got me thinking. If I, as a blogger, did not have integrity (I hope I do), would people read this site or my search blog? I honestly, don't think so. As I wrote in my Search Engine Roundtable Code of Ethics; "Basically what it comes down to is a deep consideration of respect towards the industry and the people within the industry."

Do I not link to people I cannot respect in the industry? I do link to people who I may not respect. But would I link to someone that has zero integrity, and I knew the individual didn't have integrity? I honestly don't know. I would definitely think twice before doing so.

Obviously, the degree to how much integrity someone needs is important. Does the degree of intelligence impact the integrity of an individual, when it comes to offering credit? If so, what is that scale?

Now as a search engine, a site with negative integrity (possibly classified as a spam site) might be delisted and never cited for any of its work or it may just rank poorly. Can we use those algorithms to help with this problem? Maybe... OK, now I am seriously rambling... To be continued...