[Web4lib] info on Word Press

[Steven E. Patamia, Ph.D.]

You can start with the Yahoo help entry at;
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/wordpress/wordpress-01.html

<http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/wordpress/wordpress-01.html>which
is not bad if you have some background.


The Wikipedia entry for this product at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

is longer and more comprehensive, but perhaps not better in terms of
explaining WHAT the product does. (p.s. as a muscian you will not the tidbit
about how 'releases' of WordPress tend to be named after musicians.  Hmm...
small world coincidence?)

One of my pet peeves that has its origins more than 20 years back is the
seemingly incurable tendency to explain products in terms appropriate only
if you already know WHAT the product IS.  This is an absolute plague of
software products.  One can argue that it is no different that trying to
explain a mathematical or physics concept to someone without background in
those disciplines, but I argue that this is a poor analogy for two reasons:
 (1) in those scientific disciplines the same problem exists, but is more
nuanced since now we must talk about specialties and subspecialties to
recognize the same effect.  The awful truth is that physicists and
mathemeticians (and many many other highly educated experts) are guilty of
publishing only to others within their narrow specialties and the problem is
the same.  (2)  Software products intended for a *broad* audience that
includes relative neophytes NEEDS to be described with a contextual prologue
if there is any hope of reaching the intended audience with any reasonable
degree of penetration.  Moreover, we are now talking about *products* not
laws of the universe.  A law of the universe, subtle or simple, is enduring.
 A product and its jargon -- particularly in the software arena -- is
intrinsically ephemeral.  There is simply no way to truly excuse not paying
better attention to setting up a contextual framework when explaining what
the product IS!  (p.s. the advertising principles of explaining things in
terms of "benefits" does not salvage the putative explanation from this
criticism and only perpetuates the problem -- in my experience.).

Before I jump off of my soap box on this issue, let me personalize a bit.  I
have a Ph.D. in physics and in a relatively distant past (that reaches back
to include that magical time 20 years ago mentioned above) I was a
commercial application software developer and before that a systems
programmer.  What I grew to realize and what has been stated as a concept by
scientists more famous than I am, is that if you cannot explain something
you don't really understand it.  It has progressively dawned on me that I do
not understand a lot of things I *thought* I did and a lot of people I
counted on having a deep understanding of things did not deeply understand
them either!   Again, however, when it comes to software products, the
excuses are more tenuous and I am more certain that the problem is curable.
 If this helps you feel better than I feel justified in delivering this
diatribe.  If it does not, then please accept it as food for thought.(p.s I
did look at those explanations for WordPress and had enough background to
intuit what it was -- but still with lots of questions that I would have
expected to be answered in the same articles.  You are not alone!)

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Charles Irwin <cirwin at criminal-sound.com>wrote:

> My wife was asking me about Word Press last night and while I have seen it
> mentioned, I don't know anything about it. I went to their website, and
> still am not sure what it does, except that the word "blog" seemed to be in
> every third sentence. Could anybody on the list be willing to tell me
> something about it? (This is really a private matter, so an off-list reply
> would be best.)
>
> Thanks (and apologies in advance if I'm too far out of bounds with this.)
>
> Charlie Irwin
> unemployed librarian & working bass-player, Austin TX
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>


-- 
Steven E. Patamia, Ph.D., J.D.
Personal Cell: (352) 219-6592