Well, the conversation continues, with an interesting twist. This time, one blogger has explicitly responded to a request for his input from another blogger. The semantics here are interesting, since the original blogger (Dave Hyatt) didn’t directly ask for comment. Instead, what he wrote was
I’ll be eagerly awaiting the responses of both Tim and Eric to this entry.
This reminds me a bit of the mediated debates that the Supreme Court has with itself sometimes as justices ask questions of the lawyers not so much because they are looking for the answer as because they are implicitly articulating arguments for each other. While the lawyer, of course, does play some part in the conversation, it’s often not the part s/he thinks (or hopes) that it is.
Since the main converation here is between a small number of standards gurus who know and respect each other’s work (and presumably know each other personally, though I’m just guessing here), this could be viewed as a similar sort of conversation, with their respective blogging audiences acting as the mediating litigators. I wonder whether this style of communication would be less inclined to develop outside of a well-established community of experts. To what degree is familiarity and mutual respect required to overcome the awkwardness of this indirect form of conversation?