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Metaphor

Quilting Bee

April 25, 2007

Posted by leah.jones

In a team training last week, I found myself grasping for a metaphor. I pride myself on being a great de-geeker. A teacher who can find a way to turn Internet jargon into something that anyone can understand.

Yes, I'm the person that has compared different search engines to different strainers you might find at a fantastic kitchen store. I'm also the person that needed a new way to talk about blogs and forums. The team didn't want technical jargon. They didn't need to know about PHP and CSS. They needed something tangible, something concrete.

"Well," I finally said, "a forum is like a quilting bee and a blog is like a sermon."

I wasn't sure that it was exactly the right way to compare them, but I suddently had a room of staff nodding their heads. Now that I've had a week, I've decided that this is indeed an apt comparison.

In a forum, for the most part, members are at the same level. While there are moderators, everyone can chime in and everyone is responsible for the conversation. At a quilting bee, there is the host who has opened her house, but everyone is responsible for quilting her (or his) portion of the quilt.

On the other hand, a sermon begins as one way communication. Clergy stands in front of the congregation and talks to them. After the sermon, during the meet and greet, the clergy might receive comments and feedback from the congregation. On a blog it works the same way. I write my post and after I've published it you, the reader, can give me comments.

Like the clergy will take a congregations feedback into consideration for the next sermon, a blogger might take those comments into consideration for my next post. In a forum, as in a quilting bee, the conversation is much more immediate.

What do you think? Does blog:forum::sermon:quilting bee work for you? If not, how would you teach these differences in a concrete way?

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posted by leah.jones

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TalkShop is a blog about word-of-mouth and the Me2 Revolution, published by Edelman and hosted by Phil Gomes, the company's Senior Counsel, Online Communications. This blog pulls in thoughts and opinions from members of the worldwide Edelman network.