Ready, Aye, Ready

One thing I hadn't considered much when I started helping Ritchie on the blog was cites. Other than the few articles that are written purely from scratch, most entries reference some other work. In fact most reference some other work that references the original article. It all gets a bit convoluted.

What makes it a bit worse is that often the site I cite is pulled from an RSS feed; until I've read the the article I'm not sure if it's worth passing on. Unfortunately once I've done that, I tend to have lost the original referrer; Daring Fireball is notoriously bad for this as its RSS feed goes directly to the referred article, not his site. Kotke generally goes to his own site first but frequently the reference is so brief I click through and then forget what the original source was. Wired News produces so many references that are interesting but not terribly quotable that if I lose the original link, even the good posts will be linked without Wired themselves being included. BoingBoing has the best search engine so at least I can find the article again; better still when I remember something that was interesting from a month or two ago but is now pertinent, I can locate it, so long as I remember that it was BoingBoing and not Wired, Gizmodo, Engadget or any of the other technology sites. If the earlier and unbookmarked reference has come from one of the political blogs I frequent, there's a very good chance I'll never find it again.

I'm not sure that referencing the original cite is required but I figure that since I got "there" from "here", I ought to at least say where the "here" actually is.

(For extra credit, feel free to make fun on the number of times variations of "reference", "cite" and "website" were used in this post -- and then give me a few usable alternatives!)