I agree, yet this tactic pops up all the time. I suspect it keeps those with short attention spans (who can't be bothered to get through an entire page of writing) glued in better to the article. Anyone know what this "literary device" is called?

"yet this tactic pops up all the time."

It's called a Pull Quote. It's used in newspapers and magazines to draw you into an article as you leaf through the pages, I guess it serves basically the same purpose in blogs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote

It works best in magazines or newspaper layouts where the pull-quote exists outside of the normal eye-path when reading the article. Then you avoid the "Hey, I just read that" moment, but still pull people in who are leafing through.

But, web pages are not typically laid out in such a way to allow for that.

It would probably work better as a side bar in this case, since the blog layout has all that wasted space on the left.

It works far better in print media, in my opinion... you don't leaf through the pages of a blog.

But some people do scroll down fast, somewhat like skimming...