a few days ago
mark pilgrim
created a bit of a hullabaloo by taking
kevin burton
for a variety of issues. i’m not really interested in the specifics of the argument or to who was “right” or “wrong”, but i do think a few of
mark’s comments
regarding
kellan’s
take on the issues highlight an important aspect of the “conversational” nature of blogging [ or lack thereof, depending on your perspective ]:
“Another problem is that I think we each end up constructing our own private dialect after a while. I was going to say “I need to write more about lighthouses”, until I realized that that probably wouldn’t make the slightest bit of sense to you or your readers. (It’s explained in that previous link.) After writing publicly for a while, you begin to develop these catchphrases or abbreviations for concepts you’ve already worked out, positions you’ve previously taken, things you’ve previously written. You write new stuff and refer to these catchphrases, forgetting that the audience of any given post is mostly new and doesn’t get the reference.
This bugs the hell out of me all the time whenever I read Winer. He’s been writing publicly, continuously, for like 8 years; he’s become his own little Darmok (which is itself an obscure Star Trek reference), full of references so familiar to him that he doesn’t bother to explain them anymore, relying on a shared context that doesn’t exist.”