Thinking outloud.

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Though forums are a means of written communication, people usually identify them more as a sort of conversation, a give and take of ideas. And just as our spoken thoughts tend to evaporate into the air around us, so our written thoughts in a forum ultimately dissipate into that amorphous blob we call cyberspace. Yes, they're still accessible, but we tend to forget that they are. And anyway, who wants to reread the transcript of a conversation held months ago? Who wants to review what he or she wrote at what was generally the spur of the moment? Who wants their (more often than not) half-baked thoughts eternalized in accessible text?

Sometimes I do. Though I know many people whose writing style in forums is very off the cuff, I know many others, including myself, who sweat over each phrase, each word, in order to get across a (hopefully) well thought-out point. I don't have a word count on my participation in the various forums with which I've been associated, but I'm quite sure that at least three or four articles are floating around cyberspace, and had I copied and saved these to my word processor I'd need only limited editing to prepare them for publication.

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Go to: Now why would I want to do that?, or
Go to: on erasing an online forum.