I was just admiring Alison Fish's Glossary of Weblogging Jargon, and I sent her an e-mail defining some of the terms she planned to define some day, but had not yet posted there, and here comes someone else thinking about how to communicate these concepts.
- [Dixiblog] illustrates a problem with how some people fail to properly credit their sources.
- We see this a lot in humor forwarded by e-mail ... who was the original writer?
- [Ray Ozzie] wrote a great piece on how blogs are better than discussion forums.
- [High Context] commented on it.
- [Gurteen Knowledge-Log] commented on it thanks to [High Context] link.
- [Dixiblog] quoted this, but did not make clear which content was from
- Part of the problem is a lack of weblog standards for how best to show that.
- Many people, such as myself, are experimenting with some, but we not really happy yet.
- Can we learn from the Journalists profession?
- Another problem is that most people are linking not to the actual quoted area, but to the home page of the person who posted something, so we have to scroll down a bunch of pages to see what they are referring to.
- In other words we have people who are struggling to figure out how to use this technology, and in the process are making it a struggle for other users, like people on the public highways who are highway illiterate - they do not know what the double yellow line in middle of highway on a curve means, they do not know what the speed limit signage means, they just do their own thing, and the result is anarch.
[Dixiblog] QUOTE
blogs vs. discussion forums
UNQUOTE [Dixiblog] actually the following statement was from [Gurteen Knowledge-Log] QUOTE
On the difference between blogs and discussion forums. (Al insert clarification: this is hyperlink to [Ray Ozzie] article)
Some people do not seem to be able to get their heads around the difference between blogs and discussion forums. To my mind, although at a surface level they have some similarities - at a deeper level they are fundamentally different.
There are two dimensions to their differences - the first the psychological dimension and the second the technology dimension. One of the major psychological differences is that you own your weblog - it is YOURS - and it represents a history of YOUR thinking - so you take pride in its ownership - something that does not make a lot of sense in a discussion forum.
UNQUOTE [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
[Dixiblog] says this is from [Architecture Matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion by] by [Ray Ozzie] [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
[Dixiblog] QUOTE
some interesting conversation on the blogging vs. discussing. but it doesn't seem to directly address the question of comments in blogs, although if you trace the source far back enough, maybe.
UNQUOTE [Dixiblog]
Well [Dixiblog] certainly illustrates how to cloud the topic of copyright by quoting someone and not crediting the fact of who is being quoted.
As a person who has participated in Internet Forums, Discussion Groups, e-mail discussion, telephone tag, business meetings, team projects, and other attempts at a meeting of the minds, I see a progression of technology to help improve our ability to communicate effectively and in context.
- Weblogging is to Discussion Groups what the Personal Auto is to The Horse and Buggy.
- Both the Personal Auto and The Horse and Buggy serve people as transportation.
- The horse has some sanitation problems, and it only goes so fast, but is inexpensive, and for those people who hate technology, totally natural.
- Both Weblogging and Discussion Groups serve people as communications.
- With discussion groups there are problems with context and agendas.
- We post something, and someone misconstrues what we said.
- We try to correct the misconception.
- Turns out that some people deliberately misunderstand everything you say because they want an arguement.
- You have to put up with those people as a cost of using the site.
- In both realities, if we make an honest mistake, someone can tell us and we can fix it.
- There is a concept of noise to signal ratio.
- Noise is these people who want arguements.
- Noise is when people ask a question that has been answered, so we answer it again.
- Noise is when person-A posts a bunch of stuff, then person-B is commenting on one element of person-A post, but instead of quoting just the context that they are commenting on, they quote the whole thing.
- Noise is today when I sent a post about the Scandal Map to a discussion group.
- It went to the discussion server which added a bunch of header info to the message.
- It went to one of the other people on the list, whose company has anti-virus software, which transcribed the message, adding a bunch of lines and replacing every one of my end of lines with its own characters.
- Then it went into the company's e-mail server, which added some stuff.
- Then it went into the e-mail client of this guy, which further messed it up.
- He forwarded the result to me which was absolutely garbage.
- For every line of text I had keyed, he got 5 lines of stuff.
- Noise is flames.
- Noise is when someone misquotes you by accident and then other people are on your case because they think you really said that bad stuff.
- Noise is when you have a discussion group for one purpose, and someone does not get it and we have a lot of off-topic posts.
- Signal is the good information that is new and interesting that you wanted to see.
- Most discussion groups have a high noise to signal ratio.
- Weblogging can also have a lot of noise getting in the way of signals, but it is much easier to tune out the noise with weblogging than with discussion groups.
11:28:49 PM 
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