I received an email over the weekend that reminded me of my original goals for the Common Craft Weblog – and how I’ve recently diverged from those goals in some ways. An excerpt:
When you come upon a "mature" web log, which, because, and especially because, web logs rank high on search engine results, and therefore people's introduction/entry to specific web logs is often "in the middle" of an ongoing discussion/thread, the ability to find out the meaning of unfamiliar terms quickly would be most felicitous.
Basically, this person came to my site, thought it was interesting, but became confused by the acronyms and technical language and contacted me to let me know.
This was a gift to me. In reading his message, I realized that my some of my recent posts exemplified the kind of language I had previously worked to avoid. I wanted to provide explanations for non-geeks and not delve into geek-speak that irritated me on other sites.
So, thanks to this piece of feedback, I see the recent error of my ways. The question remains- what am I going to do about it?
I plan to communicate in much the same way as I have previously. However, instead of just mentioning RSS, I’ll provide a link to an explanation as part of the post, for example. This was the original reasoning behind the “Technology in Plain English�? category- to create internal resources for linking in posts.
Also, I’m looking into the various types of html links I can use to quickly relate information by moving the cursor over the link, a la Mark Pilgrim. See example here: DiveIntoMark
After reading this, you might wonder… well... What IS RSS? Well, I happen to have a link for you. What is RSS?.
I hope that you too will provide feedback in the future.