ralph levien talks about quoting netiquette.

It is considered good etiquette not to quote email without permission. However, these days, emails are often part of a broader discussion spanning blogs, web fora, and so on. It’s increasingly easy to run afoul of this etiquette rule. Thus, I propose the 2-character string “+ as a shorthand indicating that permission to quote, with attribution, is granted. Permission is also granted to integrate the email into any copylefted documentation (most copylefts do not require attribution).

“+ is a nice idea until we figure out how to attach rdf metadata to arbitrary text fragments. semantic web here we come. raph is right, quoting is increasingly a problem.

A less than clued-in person recently accused me of wanting to spam a mailing list when the intent was to use affero to provide users a possibility to give back by donating to select charities. that person was in possession of the whole trail of discussion, and only used that conclusion to discredit me. a generalized quoting system would allow anyone to trace these tidbits back to the source, and decide for themselves.