I was reading Dave Pollard's great post this morning and was compelled to comment . His post caused me to ask myself, why are blogs so powerful when they on the surface deal only with text which we know is such a poor tool when used for email? My aha was connected to what I now know about a formal science called Communication Theory which was developed by scientists in WWII for radar and range finding. The issue was how to make sure your signal did what it was mean to do. Today it is used in managing networks. Few have taken its principles and applied them to human communication. I have put my toe in the water and have been surprised at how helpful it is. If you are interested in how Communication Theory works in a human context follow the link and you will find a paper on it.
Communication theory tells us that bandwidth is very important for a signal to be received correctly. Full bandwidth for humans would be face to face where we get not only the body language, but other channels that we are hardly aware of such as touch, smell and pupil dilation. Sex may be the ultimate wide bandwidth where all aspects of the human can be brought to connection. Email would be the narrowest channel with practically all but the message stripped away.
Your great tables get at this gradient of bandwidth intuitively. The more complex the message the more bandwidth we need to ensure that the correct message is received. Defined as the same intention as the sender had. I think that email is good for when we have a request - can you make lunch etc but is rotten for dealing with say a performance problem.
Adding a great visual plus voice gets us close to wide bandwidth and should be great for even complex situations. Mr G's comment about getting a lock on the eye is a very important point. We unconsciously obtain huge messages about intention and truth from the eye movements. Hence your search for such a tool. But here is how I think blogging fits and I am surprised at how powerful it is.
Blogging shares with email a text and hence narrow bandwidth issue. So it is very hard to express any subtlety. Emoticons and :) can help. But until you know the other person really well we have to be careful. Now comes my point.
Why does blogging work as a communication device when email is so poor- while on the surface the technology presents itself the same way in text that has poor bandwidth?
The issue is related to 3 other parts of the theory Context,Surprise and Power of Signal or POS.
Context leverages understanding and enables code to be compressed and for the power of the signal to be increased. As I write this in English, you can read it - you have the context for the code. With a lot of context you can compress the code. "Gd day DP how R U?". Can be understood. But if I was writing to you in Hindi you would not get a word - wrong code. If I spoke to you in Hindi face to face you would be surprised at how much you would understand provided we were talking about day to day things and not philosophy.
So context is very important for effective communication- it allows for good connection with very small code and bandwidth. My aha this morning is that Blogging adds huge context. It adds most importantly emotional and personal bandwidth in a new way. This is what Dina and I are starting to get excited about. As I visit your blog daily Dave, I build a picture of who you are and my context for you also builds - I can therefore accept a limited amount of code and bandwidth in a message because I have a huge personal context established.
The other issue is surprise. Our meme immune system does 2 things. It screens out what does not fit into our established world view. It hates new ideas and it hates to be lectured too. It also screens out routine noise. I lived for years under the flight path of Heathrow and after 3 months did not hear the jets.
Breaking through this immune system, in CT this is called "noise", is a critically important design issue. Email is like a hammer. It is so direct it can create resistance. IF YOU SHOUT ON EMAIL IT PUTS PEOPLE OFF. Robin got 50 spams this morning - and she screened them out immediately. I have a filter and got only about 12. We all are screening out more and more email even the good stuff. We are being overwhelmed by the noise driven by the volume of email.
But blogging is subtle. Dave's ideas seep into the network of friends and lurkers and break through the noise by the subtlety of their mode of presentation which is take it or leave it.
Lastly we come to POS, power of signal. We get so much email because it is so cheap to send - not really because it is financially cheap but it is cheap in terms of emotional and intellectual effort.
Blogging is in this context expensive. I should be working on a project but here I am thinking and writing hard on your site instead. Why? Because you put so much effort into your post that it demands a considered effort in response.
I think the best bloggers put effort into what they select and to what they say. This is the emotional effort behind the signal. It is POS. Blogging has lots of amps, email lots of volts. You need amps to break through the noise.
Have a good one Dave - I have got to do some work work now
Cheers Rob
8:53:17 AM 
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