Glenn Reynolds provides an enlightening look at the refreshingly bottomless topic of blog success and individual appeal. A few of his comments resonated with observations I've made over the past month or so. I sent him a letter supportive of the column. The subject-pertinent sections are good enough to reproduce for an entry, certainly.
[Glenn] brought up an interesting point about linking - how it truly has become a litmus test for trustworthy information employed in an argument, and how it is often valued directly by the number of cross-references or corroborations. I link as often as I can, particularly when hammering out some point on a comment-thread-cum-forum.
Of course, an expectation rises out of this in the blogosphere back-and-forth, insofar as "If I can't find it on the web, it must be suspect." Some subjects, unfortunately, are poorly represented on the web - nobody has yet (illegally?) dictated text onto a server or else referenced related sources considerably in their own work. I found this to be true with several topics that have become major discussions online as of late and, in the vacuum left by bloggers unable to find reading material within seconds from Google, this has lead to rampant speculation or worse.
To that end, it'll be interesting to see if the "Online Library" futura-commercials I remember from a decade ago, touting globally accessible information in the totality of a book, pan out. Until then, it's back to a heavy reliance on spine-bound paper to support ideas going straight to the weblog.
Granted, I easily found Francis Fukuyama's elusive "The End of History" speech online (on Google, within minutes); but after poring over an armload of, say, tomes on Japanese Occupation, I'm ready to take the blogosphere and online research with a well-deserved grain of salt. Hey, nothing deserves a pedestal - and by taking its limitations seriously, we're able to appreciate it more deeply.