I sit in awe this morning of the interwoven discussion going on regarding truth in blogging. I started with this post on Jill’s site, and then worked my way back and forth through various links. Not only is this a fascinating conversation, but it is a perfect demonstration of the power of linking and trackback.

I’m all too aware that my own blog entries have not been as carefully thought through or as dense with content as they could be. I’m torn, like everyone probably, between my desire to write in my blog and my need to take care things going on in my personal and professional life. Lately I’ve been leaning towards material life concerns and away from those of my online, electronic life.

Update: 7:45 p.m. – Here’s what Samuel Johnson, writing in 1759, says about these issues:

The writer of his own life has at least the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of the truth; and though it may be plausibly objected that his temptations to disguise it are equal to his opportunites of knowing it, yet I cannot but think that impartiality may be expected with equal confidence from him that relates the passages of his own life, as from him that delivers the transactions of another.

Certainty of knowledge not only excludes mistake but fortifies veracity. What we collect by conjecture, and by conjecture only can one man judge of another’s motives or sentiments, is easily modified by fancy or by desire; as objects imperfectly discerned take forms from the hope or fear of the beholder. But that which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of understanding, and alarm of conscience; of understanding, the lover of truth; of conscience, the sentinel of virtue.  299

The Idler, Saturday, November 24, 1759. from Samuel Johnson: 1709-1784. ed. by Donald Greene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.