Good post. Both HT and via have been part of blogging since the beginning. Creating a new icon and standards page won't stop the re-bloggers from re-blogging and not attributing.

I have started working on a technical solution to news attribution. The original Atom spec had a definition for a 'source', which isn't being used. It didn't get adapted into hNews. I am working on extending Microdata so that links to the main source of the story can be attributed and read by search engines and aggregators.

The idea is that with the support of search engines blogs and websites that don't properly attribute with microdata markup can be penalized as duplicate content. A lot of the re-blogging content networks rely on search referrals for traffic and revenue, and referrals from aggregators for readers. This would also solve the problem where stories from wire sources such as Reuters and AP are republished hundreds of times on hundreds of different news sites and pollute search results.

The standards already exist, they just need to be documented and adapted (and added to the BlogPost schema[1]). It just as important for applications to be able to read attribution links as it is for readers.

for eg. at the moment when Business Insider reposts one of Marco's posts there is no way for a crawler to know which is the original. Microdata can help that and help keep mirrored or ripped content out of search engines and aggregators (like Google News, etc.)

The other problem I have with this group is that the entire committee is made up of representatives from large media companies, and they are all writers. Not a single independent blog, or indy blogger represented, or part-time blogger, or designer, or programmer, or software implementor, etc.

[1] http://schema.org/BlogPosting