Anil has a great post up today about leveraging the power and experience of weblogs to understand problems and encourage change, and in so many ways, it rings true to me. Specifically, it reminds me of the annoyance I feel when I read a weblog post that is clearly based on the superficial understanding of a situation someone gleaned by merely skimming a single perspective on something (or, worse still, skimming the text of a single link to a perspective on something, a phenomenon I’ve started to call MetaFiltration). Too often, I find that weblog authors don’t delve any deeper than the link someone sent them in their email (punctuated by fifteen exclamation points) as a call to action; they don’t even try to figure out the context in which the supposed travesty exists. Anil does a good job of pointing out the alternative, an alternative that we’ve even seen wield an enormous amount of power at opportune times. I’m all for exploiting that alternative when the need arises, since I’m generally for using anything and everything to right wrongs and iron out ineffeciencies in systems.