Dennis Kennedy

David Giacalone has had a couple of very interesting posts recently. The first was called Can We Talk About "Virtual" English? and addressed the important issue of how "early adopters" need to take care with using acronyms and terms that are unnecessarily confusing to the general public.

David used a recent article of mine on "virtual law firms" as an example. Fortunately, I cleverly defined the term in my article, in no small part to avoid the issues David raises. I use the term "virtual law firm" almost exclusively when my main audience will be the lawyers and technologists who have a familiarity with both the concept and the use of the term as short-hand. I don't think that it makes any sense to use the term when the audience is the public at large. Even in other contexts, I tend to define the term because I use the term in the sense of non-formalized collaborations, almost in the sense of food co-ops in rural areas, but also in the sense of project teams as Tom Peters might describe them.

The use of technology jargon, especially when combined with legal jargon, is both an occupational hazard and a practice to be avoided.

I was also interested in another post by David called Disappeared from eBlawg Cyberspace, which discussed the disappearance of comments and other items from blogs. I must admit that my first reaction was "Hey, it wasn't me," but I've followed these types of issues with interest for a while.

I have always taken a Reaganesque "I paid for this microphone" approach to allowing comments on this blog. I prefer that people simply email me or comment on their own blogs about my posts. It's hard enough for me to keep up with email - adding the burden of reading and commenting on comments sounds like no fun whatsoever. And, I'm an email person at heart - I always email bloggers about their posts even when comments are enabled.

With another type of blog, I might well allow comments, but they don't really fit with what I want to do and, frankly, I would have shut them down after getting the first spam comment in any event. The Megnut 3 question approach is an excellent guide to thinking about comments from my point of view, but question #2 will knock me out of the box every time.