People were saying — the thing you posted has been covered in the Washington Post! In USA Today! In the Seattle PI! You must be swamped!

Nope. Barely got 500 hits out of the whole thing, and most of those coming from Google, with, you guessed it, people searching on the name of the blog.

Arguments from authority (aka “arguments from the book”) are, I think, anethema to public discourse. And yet, and yet …

What concerns me about the blogosphere is that despite the dynamical stability provided by it’s “feed-back / feed-forward” nature it will go into a self-verifying stasis. Without credible (authoritative?) input it gets stale and becomes an elaborate mutual admiration society.

FWIW I think the survival of print journals is prime. With the possible exception of occasional government docs (which aren’t always discoverable; semantic web anybody? (grin*) and publically funded research papers (which aren’t always accessible; see SW above) they are the raw grist for the mill. (I’m seeing more transcripts from TV shows … that’s all very very good.)

Pre-digested is not good for us … over-processed is not good for us … we need ruffage daily. And primary documents provide that.

Not when the document is published, however ineptly, on the DOJ’s website, as required (I presume) by law.

Absolutely right. I scanned only for http://www.usdoj.gov and http://www.justice.gov, rather than for the specific URL, in order to give the benefit of doubt. A stricter scan would have yielded a worse outcome.

I wonder if there is a legal risk to linking if it leads someone to the wrong place?

Is there a concern that “deep linking” is still some kind of publishing bogeyman?

Would deep linking to a specific document that relates to “matters of national security” be considered risky? (assuming talking heads would gloss past such content being available on an unsecured or obfuscated website location)

The first attitude I’d characterize as “We Know Best.” This attitude is epitomized by the writer who has done all the thinking. In it, reading a newspaper is fundamentally a passive activity where the reader is exposed to whatever implicit or explicit bias the writers and editors have, and exposure to contrary bias/opinion should be limited to the throw-away quote. Exposure to primary material changes the passive activity to an activity, which is a Bad Thing.

A second attitude (which for me is scarier) is “We Didn’t Know You Could Do That.” Link to an original source? Really?? We can do that? And people will actually read the source material?? Wow. A note to this class of writer and editors: spend sixty seconds and use your favorite search engine to find some original materials and link to them.

A third attitude is, “Readers Will Figure Out How to Find The Source Material.” Yes, they will. Make it easier, please: link.

The fourth attitude I’ve heard is “Once You’ve Got ‘Em, Never Let ‘Em Go.” In this one, the idea is that people will go to a particular newspaper’s site and just stay there, clicking around the links on that site to other links on that site.