IRC
Mark Pilgrim thinks that IRC is a good medium for quickly getting rid of cynicism and bitterness.
f8dy irc is a good medium for that
f8dy blogging takes too long
f8dy blogging bitterness, i mean
f8dy you post, then people have to visit your site, or download your feed, then they have to find your comment form, or post something on their own blog (and that assumes they have trackback or that you have some sort of referrer auto-discovery)
f8dy i just don’t have that kind of time anymore
I know people who want me to enable comments (or even Trackback) on this site. Uh huh, maybe later. I want to make it hard for people to flame (or worse, correct) me. There's an email form on the sidebar. There's no "remember me" function—not yet anyway. For now, at least, comments aren't exactly unwelcome, but if you want to make them public, you can do it on your own site.
Blogging for me is perfectly suited to bitterness. IRC and, lately, IM have been too much, too fast, with too high an expectation of response.
Caterina and I will also IM, even when we are laying on the same bed with laptops open. Part of this is because it is OK to not answer an IM until you are ready—a pause of 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable where it wouldn’t be in voice (and the answerer doesn’t even have to hold the question in their mind while doing something else, but can refer back to it later).
Only recently did I have the chance to try chatting with someone online while physically in the same room, and it was with IRC. It was pretty silly though, and I'm not sure if I could do it often.
Don't get me wrong though. IM is kinda cool for conversations that require Internet research. More than a dozen times I've backed up what I say with a URL or two. But having grown up with it, I still prefer email. With email, there's no obligation to reply instantly, or even the same day.
