In-House Counsel

Even more about back references on this blog and the evolving framework

By Rees Morrison

Since way back on Feb. 20, 2005, when this blog was delivered into the electronic world, there have been almost 3,700 posts. Of that mass, fully 35 percent of them have cited no earlier post, a practice I call back referencing (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: data on back references.). Several readers have taken me to task for not adding URLs to my back references, but I have remonstrated that finding and inserting the permalink for back references would slow my output to a crawl (See my post of June 16, 2007: no hyperlinks to back references; and Jan. 18, 2008 #2: references to previous posts.).

Now I have the facts for my refusal to hypertext references (other than metaposts). The data shows that as I have accumulated more I draw on earlier posts more. In 2005, I averaged 44.2 referenceless posts a month, in 2006 38.6, in 2007 24.8, and this year a paltry 11.9 posts a month without a pointer to a previous post. Increasingly, what I write has a plausible linkage to something written previously.

That is one of the motivators for me to blog: I want to relate ideas about law department management and create a conceptual and practical framework for those ideas (See my post of Dec. 5, 2007: the emergent, inductive path I meander along.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on November 17, 2008 (boomark / email).