Making your point
I posted on Ted Neward's failed analogy (in a post about O/R mapping) a week or so ago. Yesterday, at the party we had, a few of us were talking about this and that, and James McGovern's blog came up. One of my friends made an excellent point:
How can you take him seriously, when he posts the kind of silly, unrelated pictures he does?
Exactly. That's a large problem for his blog, and it's the same one Neward had in his post about O/R mapping. When an otherwise ancillary point overwhelms your message, you've failed in the basic task of communication. On McGovern's blog, most of the images he posts are political, and they are bound to irritate roughly half of his potential audience. A lot of the others are just pure nonsense images. In general, none of them have anything to do with the content of his posts.
Those images are like annoying popups - they detract from his message, and make it far less likely that his thoughts will be taken seriously.
Comments
[Dilip] July 4, 2006 18:49:13.000
"When an otherwise ancillary point overwhelms your message, you've failed in the basic task of communication"
Well put! This is exactly what I was trying to convey to Ted on his blog in the comments section.
How bad images can discredit your point
[Roman Rytov] July 6, 2006 12:47:06.000
Let's separate the flies from the soupe. James is a competent architect that has always been speaking on very hot and relevant topics so "How can you take him seriously" is not a serious question. I tend to agree though that the images he chooses to illustrate his point and their places in the blogs are not always obviously coherent with the content.
Just published a blog inspired by your friendly discussion:-)
http://roman-rytov.typepad.com/miles/2006/07/importance_of_v.html
Re: Making your point
[ James Robertson] July 6, 2006 14:00:34.320
Comment by James Robertson
Roman: "How can you take him seriously" is a perfectly valid question. Imagine listening to a speech where the speaker makes brilliant points, but belches loudly every 30 seconds or so. Ask yourself: How many people in the audience will remember anything other than the belches?
That's what McGovern's pictures are: verbal belches. You can call it unfair, you can say he makes good points - it doesn't matter. Everything he says has value subtracted by the verbal belching.