Blogs Have Ruined Me!

First time in a few years, I’m writing a research report, and to be honest I now find it very difficult to write a quasi-academic/policy paper without the benefits of hyperlinks. I keep wanting to put them in the report I’m writing here at Cascade, thinking "oh, people might want to read a little more background info on this", but it's not really within the scope of the paper to include a paragraph about it. It's surprisingly frustrating, and I definitely feel that it reduces the overall richness of writing (and removes the fun of the hidden surprises behind all those links). It's amazing how limiting NOT being able to do that feels after a year of blogging. I've been saying for awhile that it's only a matter of time until we move to HTML-syle text for pretty much all non-fiction writing (and maybe fiction, too) due to the immense advantages it has over static text. My current experience simply makes this much more apparent. Footnotes, suddenly, seem incredibly lame and out of date.