Comment on Terminology Thread (or "name that pattern")

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 23:52:05 GMT

I'm not sure whether to start a new comment thread on this, but a related phenomenon:

Blog A has a post about some subject. Blog B has a post that is mostly just recapitulating the points of Blog A, and links to Blog A. Blog C has a post also on the subject, and rather than linking to Blog A, links to Blog B. Blog D then comes along and links to Blog C, and so on, and so rather than a bunch of blog posts all linking to the original post, you have a chain of blogs citing blogs citing blogs citing blogs. (This sort of phenomenon shows up a lot of times when Snopes tries to research something, although often it's print media citing each other). I'm reminded of the phrase "it's turtles all the way down", and think of this as "turtle citing", although perhaps a more descriptive phrase would be "recursive citation".

Another related phenomenon is people using anchor text for their links that really doesn't reflect the actual link content.

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