A Blog About Making Culture
Badvocacy
April 10, 2006
One of my recurrent sources of frustration with my fellow geeks is that most are just plain lousy at convincing others to try technologies. It's only because the stuff geeks make is so flat-out valuable that anybody else ever even gives it a try. Seriously: Stop naming things with clever acronyms and waiting for people to get the joke.
So I've tried to do the right thing and start sharing what I've learned. Thus, "How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people" I'm no great coder, I'm a lousy designer, but one thing I am good at is trying to help regular people see the value of different kinds of technologies.
On the other hand, I'm tempted to do a lot more evil as well. I keep thinking about the fact that, basically, some bloggers will believe anything, at least for long enough to post it on the web. Then, of course, things devolve into the usual finger-pointing and ass-fact-checking and all that kind of stupidity. There's still that little window of time, though, when you can get the credulous to write about or link to just about anything.
What I think we should do is start a kind of anti-Snopes. A place to store confirmation of any piece of bad information, with some really reassuring tones that the random alarmist, xenophobic, improbable assertion that's found its way into your inbox is absolutely true. Kind of the dark opposite of Pardon me for being forward.
And judging by all the ads on Snopes, there's probably a lot of money in it. It's like Fox News, only we acknowledge our intellectual dishonesty.
Previously: Even More on Copy and Paste
Next: Guesting at Kottke
Bob Aman
That was a very confusing post until I noticed the mismatched double/single quotes in the HTML… :-)
Dave Vogt 
That second link is broken. That’s about it.
cheers dave
Celeste W
Your point about tech enthusiasts who unwittingly scare people off from blogging is spot on. It’s the reason I started a new Typepad blog, studio 501c, (for nontechies in the nonprofit sector) and wrote this post in particular: a blog can be like a business lunch. I try to dispel some of the misconceptions about organizational blogging and offer a non-threatening starter model that would be useful for nonprofits as well as businesses.
Ian Adams
You know what really annoys me, though? The *nix geeks that name their products with recursive abbreviations. (e.g. PHP, GNU, etc.) Yes, it’s clever. But really, I think it makes them sound too clever, turning off the average user.
Manuel
My newest hobby is Blog reads that is more intresanter than newspapers or television. in the between time I spend already 4-5 hours at the computer. Writes firmly thereby I also still enough-end to read has.
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