Lowering the power of context

Comment on post 3734 on 10/18/03 by Dare Obasanjo. *chuckle* It’s amusing to see my words critiqued out of context. It’s almost like being a celebrity or a famous politician being crucified over misconstrued sound bites. Almost. [chaosplayer News]

Dare chides me on taking his remarks out of context in yesterday’s post. On reflection he’s probably right in the sense that we are both making more or less the same point and are not in any disagreement.

His comment, however, triggers several other thoughts. One, that the tools here make it simple for anyone here to go look at what he said and draw their own conclusions. Two, that the particular quote I pulled by way of Scoble did trigger a reaction and let me start a train of thought that served my purposes. For that I am grateful, even if I may have been less than accurate in representing Dare’s point.

This suggests to me one of the advantages of blogging as a form over newsgroups and threaded discussion. In a threaded discussion I am more bound by context than I am here. Lowering the power of context without removing it entirely, makes blogs more conducive to working out your own ideas. I wonder what Denham would have to say about this? He’s generally been an advocate of the collaborative powers of tools such as threaded discusisons and wikis. Blogging adds another flavor to the mix. The challenge now becomes working out for yourself and your organization how to manage the mix.