On blogs, as you might have noticed, it’s customary to provide active links as built-in references. Hypertext allows citations to provide instantaneous gratification, which is more efficient and arguably more distracting. The excitement of the link beats the drabness of just plain text. In addition to providing ready access to information, links function like paragraphs – they break up the long chunks of words.

Thus, I was wondering today about the value of primary sources on the web. We are taught as students that primary sources are authoritative, precious documents. Commentary was always contextualized by whatever frame of reference was being considered, but the primary sources were always the true evidence of some point or another. I feel like I subscribe to this perspective, and I definitely gravitate towards the State of the Union transcript before I read the articles about it.

The issue comes up though, when you send links or post blogs about an event, or a speech, or even an article in the paper, because sometimes I feel like it’s more useful to send, say, a link to a blog post that discusses an article. That way, you know that the receiver will be able to easily access the article (via hypertext link in the commentary), but you ensure that the commentary is also read.

I think I wish that information was received the other way around; if you read an article, you can then decide, from a sort of reference list, what to read in response to it. That way, the primary source would be read first, but the information is still readily available in that special, internetty way.

These are the concerns of someone who’s official title for this publication is Blog Editor. You should not be surprised, then.