I generally keep a safe distance between my blog and my work — not because anybody told me to, but because I blog for my own personal amusement and my opinions, whether dealing with my industry or not, are my own. These days I do tend to write more and more about topics related to my industry. And I’m sure I’m getting a growing audience of readers who know exactly who I am and what I do.

So I’m breaking a bit of a personal rule here by drawing your attention to a couple of links, but I think they’re just so damn interesting, or should be to anybody who follows citizen journalism.

The first is a column for Poynter by John Moore about how a person in Thousand Oaks broke a story on the Ventura County Star’s photo blog . The second is the comments on a breaking news story from today … at this writing, more than 430 comments left by readers. One thing you might want to note about the story — there’s a link to a KCBS video. I know there are purest out there who think you shouldn’t send traffic to another site or link to a competitor, but I’ve come to the conclusion about the Web — you want people to come back, and they do that when you give them good stuff. If a link helps us tell a story better, we should use it. Web traffic is transient and fast moving. We want to be a daily habit for a core audience, but we can’t expect to be any user’s only source of news, so why ignore another news site when that site has something that will expand the value of a story? Of course, that takes a certain amount of confidence that over the long term, audiences won’t prefer that other site. That said, I’m not afraid to link to any other news site.