Finding Wisdom in the Mass

One of the problems with writing a blog is that when you get an idea for a post, an idea which may be the result of weeks of mental incubation (a la Hermann von Helmholtz's theory of the steps of discovery or James Webb Young's A Technique for Producing Ideas), you also find yourself tasked with the tedious chore of chasing down all the links, references, quotations, blog posts, magazine articles, or books that contributed to your idea and including them in your post as well.

The problem is similar to that of information overload: with so many possible sources of information and text, how do we know what to read? And how do you know what to include in your post?

Do you really have to include references to everything and anything that might have contributed to the idea in the text?

I can't surf the web for any length of time without discovering new websites that are well worth my while reading.

So what how do I allocate my time so as to achieve maximum utility?