Tim Bray at Northern Voice
One of the fathers of XML (who now works at Sun) is on stage here in Vancouver at Northern Voice.
He’s talking about blogging - and going over the basics. One thing he said which is right on - is that you should start a post off with something specific and migrate it to something general.
I like that principle and I use it often. You start off a post with a stream motivated by some announcement, product feature, new standard or totally ludicrous idea. From there you migrate the post to one (or more than one) of your underlying principles - which is what you REALLY wanna communicate.
This idea of generalization is a nice strategy - which can be mapped to almost any idea or set of principles.