Language and the New Social Web blog.simonwoods.online
@simonwoods “When I post to my Facebook using Facebook, it shows up on Facebook” is also a contrived sentence that could be uttered, as is “When I tweet on my Twitter from Twitter, the tweet shows up on Twitter” (which, admittedly, is a bit better because Twitter’s users have created their own identical-noun-and-verb for “post” specific to that platform), and no-one seems to have trouble understanding those re-usages of the same words. That said, Micro.blog’s system is slightly more complex, and our cultural insistence on dropping the word “app” or “program” or ”website” (or whatever other specifier) where including it would lend clarity is a problem that we should all work on.
I think I’d say “When I post to my Micro.blog-hosted blog using Micro.blog for Mac, it gets cross-posted to the Micro.blog timeline” (or, as you say, “microblog” in the second instance, and I’d also make an argument you could just say “Timeline” for the last one and “Mac/iOS app” for the penultimate without losing clarity).
rather, it’s time for people on the web to become better citizens.
Yes!
Speaking of confusing language, your “tagline” at the bottom of you page is ambiguous. Are you chanting “Down with those no-good monsters!” or saying “I’m down with those good peeps, dude”? (I know the answer is the former, obviously, but just wanted to point out that more-dangerous ambiguity in case you hadn’t seen it.)
@Ron It all depends on your point-of-view at the moment (what part of the elephant you are looking at) ;-)
@smokey (that recent events reminded me about this reply of yours and my intent to reply back... well, yeah, what a wonderful world we're all building 😒)
The phrase was made popular thanks to the Queen Mother. I picked it up from a podcast of course.
Funnily enough I'm not bothered by the ambiguity. If anybody ever contacts me about it (ha!) then their approach would say a lot to me about whether the conversation is worth my time or not.