Friday, October 03, 2003

Building bridges back to the rest of the world. Jargon Builds Walls Not Bridges. David Giacalone: Jargon Builds Walls Not Bridges.  [Scripting News] David has a lovely rant here about the self-inflicted damage we've created with ugly labels like 'blog' for the powerful tools and ideas we've invested in ahead of the curve. Not that I would have been happy with some marketing type trying to package things up while we're still figuring out what it is we have here. David sums it up nicely Very few adults are looking for a clique, new religion, or (r)evolutionary movement to join.  They don't have the time or desire to learn a special new language or undergo some tribal initiation.  Instead, if they are going to turn to sites that use the weblog format, it will be because gathering or disseminating information that is important to them is especially easy and rewarding on such sites. [Jargon Builds Walls Not Bridges] My approach has been to keep conversations focused on the problems that people have before talking about tools of any kind. Even that can be difficult because the natural tendency is to shortcircuit the conversation to the answer before we've really agreed on the question. Jargon, for all its usefulness as shorthand, just gets in the way. For all the progress that has been made over the last several years, it's easy to forget how small and self-contained our little universe actually is. Time to start building some bridges. [McGee's Musings] 10:27:46 AM