Sources of Information

Personal Sites

Republican Ranting blog

The last example on the previous page was typical of much of what you find on the Web: personal pages that provide information on various topics. Such pages often appear in search results interspersed with sites from more established organizations. As we found earlier, this is part of what is so incredible about the Web: it is a profoundly democratic medium of publication.

And personal pages can be found all over the place these days: from social networking sites such as MySpace or Beebo to blogging services such as Wordpress.com, to hosting services such as Geocities--the possibilities are nearly endless. And it is important to note that personal pages can look quite professional.

You might find personal pages useful in the same way you might find talking to friends and strangers useful: they might give you ideas for angles to explore in your papers or simply be interesting reading. In fact, many people who have no particular credentials have an incredible level of knowledge and expertise in various fields and are sharing that knowledge via the Web. We'll cover this topic in more detail in the authority section. But for now, as a rule of thumb:

Don't cite personal websites in your papers.