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nit picking, blip edition
23 Mar 09
What’s wrong with this excerpt from blip.fm’s FAQ page?
A blip is a combination of 1) a song and 2) a short message that accompanies it. The way you create a blip is to first search for a song that you want to hear (or a song that you want your listeners to hear), then add a short message (under 150 characters), finally you submit it. Submitting a blip is also referred to as “blipping”, so from here on out, when you read “he blipped my favorite track” it means “he submitted a blip that had my favorite song attached”.
In the first sentence, a blip is defined as a song plus a comment. Hence the example in the last sentence should read something like “he submitted a blip that included my favorite song”. The song is not attached to the blip, it’s one of two constituent parts. The example as written says “he submitted a [song plus a comment] that had my favorite song attached”.
One could, of course, leave the comment field blank, but there would still be a song plus a comment of zero length making up the blip.
Posted by pzed on March 23, 2009 at 1.59pm
Categories: music, twitter
Comments on "nit picking, blip edition"
I love you.
Posted by kelly on March 23, 2009 at 4.31pm :: link
aw, shucks
Posted by pzed on March 23, 2009 at 9.07pm :: link
The trick is that, thinking like a programmer, a blip isn’t REALLY a song plus a comment, it’s an abstract data object that has both a song and a comment attached to it. That’s how a programmer thinks, but it’s awfully confusing and pointless to try to explain that to a user.
So I’m seeing a programmer writing that, and describing a blip as “a combination of a song and a comment” because that seems clearer to a Normal Person, but then forgetting this mental model when they got to end of the paragraph and reverting to their default programmer mental model, where things are attached.
I’m up way too late writing random comments on blogs about such things.
Posted by Jonathan Rochkind on March 23, 2009 at 10.32pm :: link
