I Wonder...

Just thought of an odd correlation, at which I seem to be good.

We know of many of our ancient Greek philosophers, one's like Heraclitus or Anaxagoras, not through direct copies of the works they had written, but through fragments gathered from many different sources, many of them quotations. Those quotations being presented, usually, within the work of another philosopher -- or historian-cum-philosopher like Diogenes -- and we only have these little bits and pieces of what they wrote, what they thought. Unlike something like Plato's Republic, you can't exactly go out and buy yourself a copy of Heraclitus' I'm a Greek Dead Guy.

The same can be said of many works of literature, plays, performances, and so on and so forth, because there were pieces that came after that survived that contained a portion of a record of those works. ...and now, you have weblogs. Aside from those of us who just run around posting links in lieu of content, or those of us writing whatever inane babble pops into our head at the time, many bloggers are using the blog to reprint other peoples' thoughts, and usually comment on them. It's a similar circumstance, albeit, with the blog, the reprinted article usually isn't meant to be a record of someone else's opinion for posterity.