Bobert,

The big problem I have with these citations people cut and paste OR link to is that many of them are shoddy, pastiches of opinion based on misrepresented or misunderstood data. People who enter perfectly good discussions and start flinging around this nonsense do it to derail a discussion that is going against their points of view. Another problem is that many of them don't seem to understand how to evaluate such sources and know which to use and which to skip over.

If I'm searching on a subject I want to send a link to, I never send links to blogs. Those are for the most part the non-regulated hyperventilated undifferentiated slop of the masses. Only if I can track down an individual through their various masks and links to a solid base to be sure that they are actually a thinking person, do I then bother with what I find in their blog.

As you said, any blogger can make any claim they want, offer bogus backup, or no backup, and some fool is going to come along and believe it because they saw it in print on the Internet. Like used to happen in the last couple of generations--if it was on TV it must be true. In a world where not only is it easier to reach a wider audience than television ever did, and where you can do it absolutely for no expense to yourself, readers have to develop a pretty powerful filter to wade through all of it.

Normally, the last three paragraphs I posted here would be in one paragraph, with the topic sentence now appearing as the first paragraph. I went back to break it up by way of demonstration. I wanted to illustrate another problem with writing on the Internet--this deplorable habit of breaking down an article so every sentence is its own paragraph. Grammatically it stinks and makes it harder to figure out when the writer has resolved the first topic and is moving on.

SRS