Comments

• bohu

  2010-11-23 19:28:08

  May I offer a criticism (constructive I hope)? I've always enjoyed the names you make up for the enemies of freedom (things like silverlie, etc). I get a lot of laughs from it. And as they say, a lot truth is spoken in jest. But I just realized the reason that is funny is because I've been keeping up and know the real names for these things.
  
  I've been gone a few days and came back to find Novel is sold. You called the buyer AttachMSFT and since the whole thing was news to me I had no idea the name of the real company until I found it later in the article.
  
  It was very disorienting at first. I like the pointed humor with things like silverLIE and calling senor de icaza a microsoft MVP, but for people not in the loop this has got to be confusing. Not sure how to fix this. Maybe with breaking news involving new players, you should use real names for the first week or so?

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-11-23 21:28:02

  I think about it too, whenever I write in fact. I try to add/type "[sic]" at the very least in the first occurrence, sometimes excepting the headlines. The changes of product and company names are never rude (hypePad, Vista 7, AttachMSFT). The FSF has a similar system of renaming things, but the idea came up independently about 2 years ago in our IRC channel. People thought it would only help advertise the products if their names were not changed somewhat to add a derogatory association/connotation, e.g. KINect, AZune. The Inquirer adopts this type of style too -- a style that I only dare to embrace in this medium in order to make reading fun. In our audiocast I use proper names strictly. It's the same in my personal blog.