Your Linkage Reflects Your Thinkage

Urban Onramps has a link to an interesting Forbes article on blogs as news media. To quote the article,

“…Steven den Beste made the distinction between “thinkers,” who post primarily their own thoughts, and “linkers,” who mostly direct readers to other sources. If thinkers are sources, linkers are what journalists call “editors.”to the bioethical debate. ”

It is an interesting distinction, but in many cases a false one. The things you link reflect the way you think and many of the most influential blogs in a range of areas follow a link and comment pattern. Self-contained and self-referential blogs can be compelling for a short time, but they don’t seem to hold their appeal for long. It is the kinage and thinkage nature of blogs that makes the web-like and seems to me to part of why for many people they provide the “missing link” in their experience of the web.