Purely for the sake of discourse (about bloggers explaining blogging)…

(For an intelligent take on the cause of this discussion see Sean Coon’s retort post Bloggers Are More Than Writers: We’re Social Connectors to the original A BLOGGER IS JUST A WRITER WITH A COOLER NAME Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold article by by Simon Dumenco )

Do you have to understand the technology that gives us antibiotics, or insulin to get value out of it if or when you need it? At the end of the day Language and Typography are also technologies, indeed arguably blogging is the same technology in a newer guise of evolution, if anything the difference lies in the receding barrier to participation and one could argue that it is actually a new tendril of the organic growth of the socio-cultural phenomena(/meta-meme?) of democracy. Human computer interaction teaches that the more efficient technology is, the more invisible it is, simply allowing the user to do whatever they choose to do as quickly and easily as possible.

With more and more blog entries appearing in online search results and other media channels familiarity will increase and eventually, many will become proficient in blog technologies without ever really noticing or having it explained to them, purely because as a specie we excel in creating mental models from experience through pattern recognition (and many of us suck at anything that feels like reading a help-file). Which is not necessarily a good thing. The downside is that this often means we accept and take to ridiculous extremes new technologies to discover the cost much too late. (But that’s another topic)

If anything, I would argue we need better terminology for things like ‘trackbacs’ and ‘pingbacks’ –and while we are at – it might be a good idea to resolve the semantic quagmire brewing in the mix between ‘tags’ meaning ‘keywords’ and ‘tags’ meaning mark-up code-elements.

just 20c worth.. :- )

besides ‘should’ seems a bit facist don’t you think?