One thing that I try to do on this site is accompany posts on all topics with links to related materials: both in terms of what I have written and what is out on the wider internet. One way I do this is by leaving comments that link to and quote from relevant news stories and websites. By convention, these comments are attributed to ‘.’ since it doesn’t take long to write and cannot easily be confused with a real person.
Readers who come across relevant stuff that they simply wish to link, rather than say anything about, are encouraged to use the convention as well. If you use ‘dot@sindark.com’ in the box for the email address, your comment will have the ‘Just some news’ gravatar placed beside it.
How Do You Find Relevant Blog Posts To Link Too? [sic]
By Dawud Miracle @ dmiracle.com
I can see why this would be useful for people doing research, but the way it breaks up conversations is a bit annoying.
It is worth noting that ‘.’ comments are unusually likely to be eaten by the spam filters, since they tend to be short, posted on older entries, and contain hyperlinks.
I try to recover the flagged ones manually, when possible.
It is also worth noting that linking a piece of news doesn’t mean that you agree with it – just that it pertains to the subject at hand, and offers some insight into some aspect of it, including the various sorts of media representation that are ongoing.