Before I even was quite awake this morning I ran into something that confused me greatly, but I sat on it for awhile in order to figure out exactly why it nagged.
I think the link is as important as the text itself on a blog, but now, we also have quotes, and hence can reduce the need for the link. But with minimum viable readability with links achieved, blogs can offer a rich and immersive experience.
Two things here struck me. First, nothing reduces the need for the link. The entire thing that made blogs what they are is that you could write about something you’d read and no matter what you had to say about it you could provide the reader with easy access to it so they could judge for themselves.
Quoting doesn’t obviate links.
The second thing, though: that took the morning to sink in. What can it possibly mean to say that “now, we also have quotes”?
We have always had quotes. I used one above. I use them all the time. I only can assume that this is a reference to Quotebacks, which is just a bunch of custom styling for blockquotes with the citation built-in, I guess so that Twitter doesn’t have all the fun with fancy embeds. I’ve been confused about the Quotebacks thing since they launched, and the above remark kind of illustrates a bit of why.
Quoting isn’t new.
Whatever value people might find in Quotebacks, for the love of god can we not discuss them like they are some sort of revelatory experience heretofore unknown to blogging. Yes, you can (block)quote me on that.
(I should say that I guess I hope it was a reference to Quotebacks, otherwise the comment really doesn’t make any sense.)
Bonus observation: I’m glad to see that Colin Walker is reading Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook, which I’ve been mildly pushing people to pick up. It both relayed and informed much of how we thought about blogging in the early days.