Via Altogether

Here‘s a little mini-debate I just picked up on regarding use of “via links” — the stuff you regularly find at the ends of my posts (just look).

My two cents:

I like to give credit where I find things. Call it a heritage of high school debate or a liberal arts education. Or maybe it just strikes me as common courtesy.

If Joe-Bob points me to an article, I like to give him credit for it. Further, Joe-Bob usually has something interesting to say about it, so I want to point people to that, as well.

And, finally, I find the whole idea of a web of information — links and cross-links and cross-cross-links — to be fascinating. It’s a neural network, in some ways. a collective. We’re not all just pointing at primary sources, but point to each others’ commentary on them. And that’s kind of neat.

And I know that sometimes I go to places that are cited with via links, and find them interesting, and start to read there regularly. And that’s kind of neat, too.

(Via Trance Gemini)