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Perhaps this is just me, but I was half way through reading this before I realized that it's an interview. When I began reading, I thought it was a book review.
The phrase "Author Clay Shirky explains ..." clearly suggested that it was Farhad Manjoo talking at the beginning. That text is bold, of course, as are the questions later. But there's also that picture immediately below it. I thought that the text below was no longer bold because we were now past the first paragraph.
When the first of Manjoo's questions came up, I thought "oh, weird, Farhad is have a Socratic dialogue[1] with himself. Hmm. Okay, fair enough, he's not the first."
It wasn't until I got to "There are a couple things I want to challenge you on" that I realized there were actually two real voices in the article. Then I had to go back and read the whole thing over to get it straight in my head.
Compare with normal Salon interviews, like that one with Cass Sunstein a while back.[2] There was a brief introductory passage in normal text, not bold; the picture used floats off on the right so that it doesn't break the flow of the text. And immediately before shifting into the interview proper, there is a one-line paragraph standing by itself which says "Salon spoke with Sunstein recently by telephone" to indicate that from here on in it's a question-and-answer format.
Given the lack of visual and textual cues that this is an interview, I'm not surprised that I got confused. Particularly since the article has the same formatting as Manjoo's ordinary blog posts. If it looks like Manjoo's blog, it must be Manjoo unless there is some clear, unambiguous signal that there's a quote or that the content is different from an ordinary blog post.
Perhaps it is perfectly obvious to everyone else; perhaps I'm crazy. Who can say? I just think people identify the type of thing they're reading based mostly on contextual cues. Mess with those cues at risk of confusing people.
Sel
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_dialogue
[2] http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/07/sunstein/
P.S. When is Salon going to let us put links in our posts? They are THE fundamental feature of the web. No links, no web. Disabling them is seriously irritating.
