One of my recurrent sources of frustration with my fellow geeks is that most are just plain lousy at convincing others to try technologies. It’s only because the stuff geeks make is so flat-out valuable that anybody else ever even gives it a try. Seriously: Stop naming things with clever acronyms and waiting for people to get the joke.

So I’ve tried to do the right thing and start sharing what I’ve learned. Thus, “How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people” I’m no great coder, I’m a lousy designer, but one thing I am good at is trying to help regular people see the value of different kinds of technologies.

On the other hand, I’m tempted to do a lot more evil as well. I keep thinking about the fact that, basically, some bloggers will believe anything, at least for long enough to post it on the web. Then, of course, things devolve into the usual finger-pointing and ass-fact-checking and all that kind of stupidity. There’s still that little window of time, though, when you can get the credulous to write about or link to just about anything.

What I think we should do is start a kind of anti-Snopes. A place to store confirmation of any piece of bad information, with some really reassuring tones that the random alarmist, xenophobic, improbable assertion that’s found its way into your inbox is absolutely true. Kind of the dark opposite of Pardon me for being forward.

And judging by all the ads on Snopes, there’s probably a lot of money in it. It’s like Fox News, only we acknowledge our intellectual dishonesty.