Another small problem with mute "here" links is that there's no calibration of the degree to which you agree or disagree with the linked piece. The link is binary, sort of an all-or-nothing thing, implying that you totally 100% agree with it (or totally, absolutely, hate the contrarian material). Is that always the case? I'd be surprised, so how about sharing your own opinion of the opinion?

My first response to this was "It's information. Why should anyone care what I think about information?"

I think this might be a modern mindset for a lot of the American public, honed by years of people in the media telling us what to think about things, and it has some uncomfortable results:

--Who says something becomes more important than the information.

--People have trouble analyzing things without having their hands held. Rush gleefully tells people that he'll tell them what to think about things, but he's joking. Sort of.

--People in the media who are relatively balanced in their views, and present information without comment, tend to fade into obscurity. I remember when hardly anybody knew whether the great newscasters were Democrats or Republicans. Not true nowadays.

Do people who watch newscasts hang fire on judgment until they know what side the newscaster is on? Why are people like Rush and Jon Stewart so popular? Is it because they tell you what to think about things?

I check things like "Drudge" and "Instapundit" quite a lot. Those sites are mostly links to other things, without much comment. I have only a passing interest in what Drudge or Reynolds think about things. What it does is save me a lot of time looking for news, since hot items tend to rise to the top on such sites.