The real worry about astroturfing stem from the sites that sit outside the fortress of the blogosphere’s most powerful, the sites that talk about local politics and community issues, and the local news media outlets, which typically wield far greater influence on U.S. elections than the comparetively miniscule national news media. These sites and sources of news rarely have the resources the big dogs do to fact check everything that emerges from the blogosphere, but they need to engage it if they want to look fresh, hip, and media savvy.

While its almost certain that the “guildmasters” of the blogosphere will be able to counter assaults on authenticity, as Henry suggests, the risks they pose for the edges of the blogosphere, the part that makes it truly meaningful for decentralized federal states like the U.S., is almost undeniable.

The idea of “acknowledge your source” is a very big one in academia, and has been for a number of years. It’s also pushed a lot in schools. Not acknowledging your source means that people evaluate you more harshly, and wonder what you have to hide.

Plus in my work experience it’s important to keep track of sources since people come back and ask additional questions that require going back to the source. Linking to the source on the same post makes the checking process far faster. This creates an incentive, all other pressures being equal, to maintain links.

Consequently I don’t think the norm of providing links is suddenly going to disappear. Links provide credibility and linking to people who provide the source is a cheap way to meet norms of niceness.

As for for-profit blogs, a for-profit blog is going to want a lot of people to come to their site in the first place and then keeping coming back. It’s not at all clear to me that the way to do that is to stop having outwards links on the blogs. It’s noticable that one of the biggest bloggers around, Glenn Reynolds, provides material that mostly consists of links. He churns out far more interesting material that way than he could by writing it all himself (and any for-profit blog that just cut and pasted everyone else’s materials without linking it would find themselves in legal trouble for breaching copyright). Another example is Arts & Letters Daily, which gets plenty of eyeballs just by packaging links. An older example is Yahoo.