Weblog 101
Judging by the e-mail I'm getting, some people are easily confused by the format of a weblog and don't seem to understand how to read one. This is a new way of doing things, so let me explain a few things.

When you pass your cursor over a block of text and it lights up, that is a hyperlink, or just "link" for short. The link takes you to another file somewhere on the internet. Almost all my posts have hyperlinks. Many of them are links to on-line newspapers, like the internet version of the Los Angeles Times. The words "the Los Angeles Times" are a hyperlink. Click it if you don't understand what I just wrote. These links are the equivalent of citations in a printed publication because they are references, in this case electronic ones, to the full text of some other publication.

Often I make the header of the article the hyperlink. This is easy to do because Blogger (where this site is hosted) has a shortcut for that. Typically I put an excerpt from the article in italics, usually with quotation marks around it. The point is to get people to click the link and read the whole article.

Sometimes I put my own comments before and/or after the article in non-italic text. I use bold text throughout, in block quotations or my own comments, to highlight things that I think are especially important. If I have material in quotation marks in my comments on an article I have linked, the quoted material comes from the article I linked. I thought this was incredibly obvious, but in a post below (that I have now edited to fix this problem) I included a four-word quotation from an article I linked. I thought it was obvious that I was passing along a short quotation from the article. Some people didn't understand that, I guess. I cited the article by linking to the entire piece. I will have to be more explicit about this in the future. Live and learn.

But this points up a problem with the internet. Information gets cut and pasted and passed around so fast that people can circulate a rumor, a misunderstanding, or any other kind of misinformation with light speed. In the time it once took to write and mail a single letter, a group of overwrought and hypersensitive people e-mail misinformation back and forth, reacting to it over and over, and ultimately they all reach escape velocity over nothing at all. Remember the Y2K panic? People spent a gazillion dollars freaking out over that and it was a big fat nothing.

Maybe now there is such a thing as too much communication--at least, more than some people can handle given their propensity to overreact.

So, that's the way it works. Perhaps anybody who still doesn't understand should trot down to the local community college and take a course on how to use the internet. Or maybe get off the web entirely and spend all that spare time watching QVC.