Pedants-R-Us

Forgive the rant for a moment, if you will, but this posting at Master New Media is a symptom of something that seems to have become rather worryingly prevalent at the moment - namely that we’re all getting just a little bit up ourselves about blogging and RSS and the ‘death of mainstream media’ and so on’:

This is a clear sign of how incompetent the major news media outlets are gradually becoming when it comes to good reporting. A pro blogger offers much greater value without swamping my field of vision with ads everywhere.

‘Why?’ you might be asking yourself. Are we talking about missing the next Watergate, or definitive proof that there was someone else on the grassy knoll? Actually, no. The clear sign of incompetence was, and I quote:

In all cases Anne Chen should have written “Really Simple Syndication” and not “Real Simple Syndication”. And someone else after her, approving this for online publishing should have known better too.

It’s exactly this kind of precious, holier-than-thou, I-know-my-acronyms-better-that-you attitude to a new technology that slows down its adoption by mainstream technology users. Presenting what is - after all, in the grand scheme of things - a fairly marginally useful technology as some kind of precisely-worded religion is not going to make your average PHB sit up and take notice. They’re going to stick with what they know, thank you, because it’s safe and familiar and they don’t have to worry about being made to look a fool in front of their peer group because the R in RSS stands for Really and not Real.

Of course, this post might be a tongue-in-cheek spoof, in which case count me in as suckered - but if not, get over it! Given the holy wars and flying vitriol raging over syndication, a technical journalist venturing into the fray should be congratulated rather than criticised, let along picked up on a point of pedantry.