Drawing your attention to feedback.
I found Caterina's site recently, and discovered a really interesting article. It talks about "bringing things to people's attention", which resonated deeply with something I do a lot of: providing feedback.
I try to provide feedback on everything I see that can accept it; burnt out traffic signal lightbulbs, typos on corporate websites, articles I read. I guess it could be taken as a way of bringing my opinion to people's attention :)
Once I called Budweiser because my friend's box of beer had half the labels put on upside down. After the QA engineers stopped laughing, they sent me a $25 cotton tee shirt -- not a cheapo Hanes, but a REALLY EXPENSIVE well-printed cotton t-shirt. You can use this thing as a towel, it's that cool.
A few days ago the traffic signal at a local, heavy-traffic intersection was out. I called 911 and reported it, since it was about bar-closing time -- and the locals have a bit of a drunk driving problem. Didn't want to see anyone get hurt, and 911 knew what to do with my report.
I take a small percentage of the articles I read through in my news feed list (currently at 113 feeds, yay) and forward them off to various people. Two of my friends are specifically interested in linked-topic/semantic-indexing/slicing type technology, for their new mail application; another is interested in anything semantic-web/idea-map/brane-grok type stuff, and he gets a different collection; I share wireless-related links with Schuyler, the author of a popular wireless gateway program called NoCat.
I use my blog to bring my opinions and ideas to people's attention, which seems to be a worthy use for a blog; ideas like this one, for instance (meta-recursion!) are brought to my attention by the newsreader, and I have a chance to survey them, allocate them into mental buckets, and perhaps bring them to other people's attention.
Perhaps that's the killer app of blogging; it lets you bring something to the attention of people far sooner, far quicker, without economical or distribution barriers. Anyone can bring something to the attention of all who will listen, if only they care to speak. Email had this feature as well, but it's hard to link to a specific email on the web. With blogs, you can use permalinks and TrackBack and their ilk.
Feedback welcome, of course :) Hee.
Excerpt updated, I wasn't happy with the first one.
How does track back work exactly?
Posted by: meika | February 25, 2003 at 10:44 PM