Jay on "via" links: “It is my opinion that doing "via" links is not about giving someone Google juice or endorsing them in anyway. For me, it is simply a way of leaving bread crumbs. If I go somewhere, any where, I say how I got there. That's why I don't do stuff like say "Richard got a link from al3x to Site X" because I did not find Site X through al3x, Richard did.”

I feel no obligation to leave breadcrumbs, but do on occasion, usually when there is insight in the breadcrumbs themselves as well.

Jay then talks about some of the tools bloggers (and non-bloggers!) now have in their arsenal for finding and promoting discussion: “It is my opinion that the author in question should be providing links to the discussion elsewhere. In my mind, Technorati is a tool for weblog authors to find who's talking about them and for users to find out what people are talking about arbitrary URLs (that are not run by responsible bloggers.) And then Feedster is way of finding anyone talking about a particular thing--not a post.”

At one point, Don Park had a link next to each of his permalink that went to the Technorati 'cosmos' for each weblog entry. Because his hitcount is fairly high, I remember getting a not insignificant amount of hits from Technorati when I linked to an entry of his. At another weblog of mine, I copied that (that's what the "t" means). The hitcount there is fairly low, but anybody who happens upon that weblog has a quick link to those who link to a specific entry. Every now and then I'll include a Technorati link next to a link inside an entry (not often, but I did it to a link about pornography and a link about Bush and weapons of mass destruction claims). Having this done automatically for every link inside an entry shouldn't be too difficult in Movable Type using regex. It would be a more unedited pointer to discussion about something rather than first going to Technorati and finding the good discussion then linking to it manually.