A mind, like silly putty, is a terrible thing to waste!

Well, it’s now official:

Blog owners usually don’t allow their readers to add their own comments, preferring their monologues to others’ dialogues.

So claims Greg Hill, a librarian at the Fairbanks (Alaska) North Star Borough Public Library, who thinks ignorance has been made faster because of the blogosphere. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)
Perhaps Mr. Hill doesn’t want us to lose sight of his own usefulness:

The infoglut is certainly a bummer, but it does answer that persistent question, “Why are librarians needed now we have the Internet?” There’s an immense amount of information that’s not on the Internet, which itself is like a library with all the books scrambled up on the floor and no librarians to put it in order. For librarians, the infoglut means job security, and for information seekers, the best search engine you can ever access is a librarian.

If that’s true, why the touchiness about bloggers? Why misspell at least two names in an article decrying blog accuracy? Why accuse bloggers as a group of not allowing comments?
This calls for a comment and a true confession, folks! Thanks to Glenn Reynolds’ link to Mr. Hill, I have been having a wonderful time browsing through the latter’s collection of essays. Why, not only is he a natural blogger (he even links to a super etymology web site run by this excellent blogger), but he’s been stretching and shaping my proto-thoughts with incredibly cool trivia about things like silly putty:

Before planning a drop from the Ice Palace at 40 below, know that 100 pounds is the minimum order, and experiments have shown that while large balls of Silly Putty do bounce incredibly well once, they shatter on the second bounce. As Goethe put it, “Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.”

Agreed. Anyone who’s been blogging for any length of time understands this principle. That’s why the better bloggers believe in correcting themselves at least as much as they do in correcting those who don’t believe in self-correction.
So where are Mr. Hill’s updates, anyway?
(Surely he has a corrections page . . .)
UPDATE: You know, I hate to be picky, and I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so I don’t usually correct others’ obvious typos. BUT . . . what’s with the title Greg Hill has given to his collection of essays?

Historical Column’s

Historical Column’s what? Considering the erudition of the man, it must be some sort of inside joke. Mebbe a word left out somewhere.
“This Historical Column’s Actually A Post” perhaps?
(Yeah, that’s gotta be it!) Sometimes a column is a post. Other times, it’s dumber.
MORE PICKY PICKINS: In the post column cited above, Greg Hill twice misspells (UC) “Berkeley” as “Berkley.” (Twice in the same column is not a typo, I’m afraid.) Asks Hill,

What sort of data’s being imbibed?

I don’t know about the corybantic data he’s imbibing, but that’s my alma mater he’s misspelled!
But byte overload is not his fault. There’s just too much misinformation out there!
(I’d blame bloggers too.)