Word Verification, Welcome New Blogrollees, Blogging Good for You

Speaking of word verification, after a recent batch of comment spam I have taken advantage of Blogger's word verification option for comments. From now on, if you want to leave a comment, it will ask you to type in confirmation of a slightly distorted set of letters as proof of your status as a human being.

Today is multisyllabic-noun-modified-by-multisyllabic-adjectivized-noun day here at NOTM, so please welcome to the blogroll Foxy Librarian, Suburban Guerilla, and Alabama's own Unlocked Wordhoard (thanks for the link). Susie at SG has a good post (i.e. one that provides self-justification) on why blogging is good for you. Original source here. Excerpt:

Blogs promote analogical thinking. Recent international surveys have shown that students in the United States have fallen far behind most of their first world peers in problem solving and critical thinking. This fall has coincided with a shameful decline in school-based instruction in critical analysis, rhetoric, and persuasive writing. However because professionals like attorneys, philosophers, and academicians run many excellent blogs, we all can benefit from their intellectual rigor, and their use of analogical thinking when communicating to the common world of the blogosphere. Back-and-forth blog-based exchanges between experts also provide a unique opportunity for young thinkers to witness and evaluate arguments from analogy on an ongoing basis, and to develop their own abilities to think analogically.