April 17, 2003
A McGee Musing

When I was sitting in the Jim McGee conversation the other day, one of the pointers I wanted throw to him was to the BlueOxen PatternRepository's reference to the ThinkOutLoud pattern.

Working on weblogs at personal-life and at work-life has proven helpful to this process as a faceting of how I regularly behave. I don't know, of course, if it is inherent in what I am (I am a walking thinker often, and thinking aloud comes naturally after a period of introverted brooding) for certain, but I think it is. Part of the ThinkOutLoud pattern is to throw an idea 'out there' to see what happens to it in the give and take of other ideas out there. And the other part, particularly for weblogs shared in a small group, is that it captures a set of knowledge cleanly in gestated form - later one can do the product specification when the details are ironed out...

The old saw of "run it up the flagpole and see who salutes," which is often similar to this, is not in fact terribly accurate. It's my belief that the ThinkOutLoud pattern is largely non-heirarchical, whereas the flagpole pattern implies that some entity controls the raising of the idea, not each individual accreting their part to said idea.

Reviewing the text in the BlueOxen wiki, I see that the weblog connection has not been missed by others, as are the Lotus Notes 'challenges' as discussed in the Seabury lecture a week ago.

Posted by esinclai at April 17, 2003 07:10 PM |