Yesterday's posting was a lesson in the power and the dangers of blogging. Through RSS technology readers from far and wide, who would normally never hear of your name or blog pick up content through keyword identification.
True enough my posting was harsh towards Mac users and if it caused offence, sorry. But the beauty of blogging is that bloggers get to rant, and as an ex-Mac user I had my rant. The democratic ideology of blogging enabled the Mac community to respond, all views are aired. I hope that if I bumped into these fellows out on the street (unlikely just about all of them were American), they'd come for a pint and we can agree to disagree on computers and talk about other issues of interest.
What this experiment did teach me was - you just have no clue as to how far a blog posting will travel until you get this sort of response - and its a valuable lesson. The IWR blog is not focussed on Apple at all, but the keyword Apple obviously has a global scope that's almost beyond imagination.
This got me thinking, Apple is a company that attracts a following few brands can hope to emulate, it borders on fanatical. I admire this though, and I wonder how much could be achieved if the energy of these flamers could be harnessed towards the real issues facing the world like climate change.
But the question I have is, how do we create keywords with the ability to travel to so many bloggers like the word Apple does? If scientific, business or historical information hit every RSS reader and created the responses that Apple does, Lord only knows how valuable our collections and information services could be. Is being critical, over opinionated and occassionally rude a way of raising awareness?
Words have always illicited powerful responses, we are now entering a new era of powerful words backed by powerful technology.
Congratulations, Mark. I think that posting was very courageous, and I hope that anyone who took offence to your posting yesterday will see it as such. One of the things you don't say about blogs is that there's very little room for us to express irony - that things that are said in other environments where we can indicate a certain amount of irony or humour (or "gentle ribbing") in what we say, isn't necessarily available to us when blogging. Flame wars aren't nice, and they obscure the critical points that can be made. Listening to criticism, and responding to it, is an admirable thing.
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