A few months ago I moved to a new house. For the first time in a couple of decades I have a proper back yard. I've taken to doing the standard things, mowing, planting a few pretties, but my favorite thing so far is I've started feeding wild birds.

I've noticed a lot of similarities between the birds at my feeder and the visitors to our RetouchPRO forums here.

There are the wrens and sparrows that feed lightly but often, chirp and tweet the best they can, then quickly...

This is not a semantic discussion, so negative brownie points to the first commenter who quotes a dictionary. This is philosophy, so get out your pointy hat.

Can you sense the difference in nuance between "make" and "create"?

I seem to regularly get into discussions about this, and they seem to be accelerating, so I thought I'd poke a pin in it and post this here for open discourse.

IMO, if you are responding to someone else's idea,...

I hate blog posts that sound like they might be educational, but end up being nothing more than attempts to get conversation going. That strategy is welcome in a forum, I do it myself all the time. But blogs should be an offering of knowledge, opinion, or just interesting thoughts, not a plea for readers to supply same.

Here's an example: Do You Really Need Photoshop?

It has a great title, and got linked from another blog (the point, I expect). But the title question...

I know, some times it feels like no one is listening. This early in the blogging game, you might even be right. The search engines only found these blogs a few days ago, and it will take awhile to be indexed, ranked, etc.

In addition, unlike the forums, there is currently no way of measuring how many views your blog is getting. This is promised to change in future versions, but in the meantime realize that even if no one comments on your posts, you're still getting read many, many...

We have a very good post rate here on the RetouchPRO forums. Above average, actually.

But our thread rate is far below average. Add this to our propensity for threads to wander in and out of topics (see my "not a chatroom" blog entry) and there's really only one conclusion:

Our users are afraid to start new threads. They have threadophobia.

This causes me no end of puzzlement. Even though I score off the charts for introversion, I have absolutely...