It allows entire webpages to become the topics of sentences and for us to use the webpages as words.

Speaking as an editor (See the hat? It says "Easily peeved."), I don't always see this as a good thing. In the context of a conversation, it's appropriate to use pronouns when appropriate. When writing a web page, the destination of a hyperlink doesn't provided the needed context to unravel the antecedent of the pronoun used as a link title.

For a bad example, see this.

For a good example, see the W3C style manual's guide to linking within documents.

One of the flaws of the Everything Engine -- a flaw which Wiki deliberately avoided -- is that it encourages poor link titles in some cases. That can work out in ironic writing as found on E2, but it can obscure technical, precise writing as PM deserves.

Yes, good point that this form of communication is prone to ambiguity in the ambiguity (poorly labeled links). And I'd agree with you that it's a bad thing for technical writing and for (many) uses in PM *posts*. But, that's why I specifically talk about the Chatterbox, rather than linking in general - it's a conversational pattern.

Your post also highlights two other issues. First is the post modern meta-comment thing: you fool us by making both your good and bad examples link to the same page since what you are emphasizing is the bad anchor caption, not the bad target. But this in itself is part of the conversational pattern - that the form of the link becomes an additional communication channel in itself and is available for use as irony or emphasis just as other sorts of communication markers are. When someone in the Chatterbox says "that's logical" and links the word logical to the Amazon.com listing for the novel _Catch_22_, they are using the contrast in the form and contents of the link as communication.

Speaking as an author (See the hat? It says "Goal in life: annoy editors", which can be a problem since I've also worn the editor hat numerous times), I happen to like having multiple communication channels available (depending on the purpose of the discourse, natch).

The other thing your post highlights is that different forms of communication are appropriate for different forms of discourse. We could imagine a time-scale of discourse with a college seminar at one end, blog/wiki/PM post in the middle, and the Chatterbox at the other end and a verbal conversation even farther at that end. In the seminar, the prof can say "Next let's discuss the novel Catch 22" and expect that with the week's time lag till the next seminar, the students will have read the novel and "inserted" its contents into the ongoing conversation of the seminar. In a blog or wiki or PM post, a reference to the novel might serve as context-setter for those who know it and as a curiousity-tweaker for those who don't. For references shorter than a novel - say an online magazine article- the blog author might even expect that some readers will follow the link and read it (unless it's Slashdot :-)), then with a time lag, return to the blog and contribute to the discussion. In an ordinary verbal conversation, if someone mentions a short magazine article, the conversation doesn't pause while everyone goes and reads it - too much time lag. But in the Chatterbox, that sort of time lag *is* possible - people do go off and read the links and return to the conversation to discuss them.

Certainly the chatterbox is more casual, but it's rarer to have too much context for links than not enough. Consider the case where someone inadvertently links to something potentially offensive (or at least not safe for the environments of certain other people) without warning.

I think it's better to err, if it is at all erring, on the side of more context, even in casual situations.

What this tells me about the chatterbox is that people really do treat it as chatter, as a written version of a spoken conversation. And as you say, there is a fascinating deviation from the spoken paradigm when people inject detailed perl code or site references. Such detailed information probably could not be remebered easily in spoken conversation, but it works well here.

what other kinds of conversational innovations have you noticed in the Chatterbox?

A license to kill talk about yourself in the third person:

/me is going to lunch

Of course, if Hardburn were to talk about himself in the third person normally, many of Hardburn's freinds would no doubt shove one of Hardburn's dirty old socks down Hardburn's esophagus. This goes doubly when Hardburn fails to use personal pronouns.

George is getting very *angry* here!

/me offers perlfan lovely pairs of <em> or <strong> tags to choose between.

When you aren't used to it and are missing emotional indicators like facial expressions or hand gestures innocuous German conversations can be easily mistaken by an English ear for a very high tempered argument. When I first got here I thought Germans were always arguing with each other. The my ear acclimatised and now I know they argue in public no more than we do. :-)



---
demerphq


First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi

That reminds me of the Simpsons Episode Lost our Lisa, where Lisa Simpson gets lost in the Russian district of Springfield:

% Lisa walks around the Russian district of Springfield. She walks over to
% two chess players.

 Lisa: Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to the museum?
  Man: (Shouting in Russian. Dialogue is translated at bottom of screen)
       My pleasure. It's six blocks that way. (Lisa runs away.)
  Man: (Shouting) Hey, she went the wrong way.
Man 2: Checkmate. (the other man throws the chess board to the ground.)
  Man: (Shouting) Good game. How about another?

People using it when they should be using IRC.

ROFLMAO!

All three statement would work equally well if you walked into a cubicle with a memo that both you and your coworker had just received. In that case, waving the memo provides the same function as the link. Both are indicators of focus. They're present IRL as well as the Chatterbox.