Monday September 27, 2021; 9:10 AM EDT
- Bookmarking or linking to particular places in an outline is obviously a finer-grain function that linking to the outline. I recall in my first days of paying attention to blogging, where people wrote endlessly about better ways to blog, that there was maybe a consensus that linking to a site without linking to the particular thing in the site that you were writing about was a rookie move.#
- Linking to the site was a way of providing a wider context--who is this writer, what is this writer's project, what is this writer's claim to authority?#
- Linking to the particular posting was a way of saying that we all agree that the real chance for thinking together involves paying attention to the specific things the other person is saying. If we're not doing that, helping each other do that, we're not really all that interested in communication.#
- Most honorable of all practices was providing those two links AND quoting and discussing a key passage.#
- In about 2003, that seemed to be what bloggers had arrived at as a shared body of best practice, to be tried for most of the time.#
- Bookmarking or linking to particular places in an outline operates in the same spirit, I think, helping readers and writers speed along the pathways we recognize as essential to thinking alone and together. #