The "Three Men in a Boat" approach to Technology Writing

Ethan Zuckerman of the blog My heart's in Accra has written an impressive piece of technology writing, "Bad Software Is Good For You." In it, he discusses various technology tools in relation to Global Voices, a project he co-started with Rebecca MacKinnon in conjunction with the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

He writes from a position of expert technical knowledge, yet the piece takes care to address "non-geeky" readers (if you'll excuse the phrase). It discusses blog aggregators, wikipedias, spammers, and the nature of software programmers. But what makes the whole piece work is that the writing matches the quality of the content. I would recommend reading it, even if you're only vaguely interested in these technology subjects, because Zuckerman doesn't hesitate to entertain as he makes his points. He draws analogies from agriculture, home-buying, and college studios in the process of persuading you to align with his point of view.

What grabbed me was the opening:

In which I make a number of unsupportable assertions about the design of community software and attempt to bolster my position with seemingly unrelated advice from four wise friends.

This light, humorous opening intentionally imitates famous 19th century writers like Jerome K. Jerome (see "Three Men in a Boat"), or even The Diary of a Nobody's style.

Here's another humorous bit:

"The details of this specific debate [WordPress versus Drupal] are so boring that they’d drive six of my seven readers to Slashdot to follow flamewars instead of listening to it. (The seventh reader, who knows more about the subject than I ever will, would write a polite email convincing me that I’m an idiot while making me feel good about having her as a reader.) But this debate is emblematic of a larger debate that I think is (possibly) interesting to nongeeks."

He likens spammers to potato beetles and takes responsibility for ridding his wikis of them:

"Potato beetles are a good indicator that you’re not rotating your fields often enough (and therefore allowing the beetle population to breed year after year) and that you’ve got insufficient diversity of flowering plants, which means you don’t have enough predatory insects, especially 10-spotted lady beetles, which eat Colorado potato beetle larvae. Spam on my wiki is a good indicator that I’m not spending enough time gardening the wiki and that I haven’t recruited a sufficiently large and dedicated team to help cull the spam and expand the wiki."

The second to the last paragraph also surprised me as he introduces a new point: the laziness of programmers, and the virtue of patience.

Zuckerman also does not use the default "male" when alluding to a fictional reader or computer programmer, which indicates an awareness of sexist language and the need to eradicate it. I certainly appreciated it, reading his piece.

By the end of the essay, I was convinced that spam can be "good" (if I can crudely put it that way), and "lazy" can be an advantage.

What will Ethan Zuckerman persuade me of next? To participate in Blog Day?

Further reading: "Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb" by Google Blogoscoped.