I’m not going next to near Tom and Damien‘s attempts to out me as one of those filthy blogger types, but I do feel the need to point out that when something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it may in fact be some kind of ferret, or a saucepan, or a teeny-tiny grouping of thingamajigs widely debated by physicists.

Yes, he’s very clever for spotting that the site runs WordPress, but would he have spotted this one (shortly to be reclad in this theme); or this one (in the final throes of development); or how about this one (under development for what feels like three decades now, but isn’t that always the way with your own site)? You’d have to go looking, right?

I think that even with all the Web 2.0 and social networking and remixing crap that you guys go on and on about – seriously, please stop – people still underestimate what these pieces of software can do for us. No so much because they don’t understand the software – although that is part of it – but often because they don’t understand modern culture.

So they use wikis on their intranets because it improves productivity, but they don’t use them on their websites because they’re afraid of what people will say; rather than, you know, dealing with it.

They don’t have forums on their websites because they’d have to employ a raft of moderators, despite the fact that most communities – if you do it right, it will become a community – become self-moderating.

And, to come back to the subject in hand, most WordPress users don’t ever get beyong “blogging” because they’re afraid to play around a little; click a few buttons to see what happens; hell, break it and start again if needs be. Same goes for most software they use.

So if anyone’s listening today, do me a favour: look for a button marked Options or Settings in just one piece of software you use today, and click it. Now press a few buttons or click a few links, see what happens.

Maybe you’ll turn your duck into something completely different, maybe you won’t, but it’s fun either way, right?

Well, if you back up first, obviously. You did back up, right?