[keyist]

Lack of context happens when someone isn't targetting the various aggregators in their post.

I find it refreshing actually. It's nice to read a post once in a while that eschews the preamble/genericity that typically accompanies posts that are designed to be voted up somewhere or other.

[SwellJoe]

It is part of a larger conversation, and references the other parts of the conversation; blogs used to do that a lot, and the folks who've been doing it for a while tend to still do so on a regular basis. It definitely made sense to me. It can be hard to follow IRC chat logs, since there's so much said between the lines in such an environment (any insular community will tend to develop shorthand and a pidgin; IRC is probably an extreme example of that)...but I thought it was reasonably well explained, if you don't try too hard to understand all the trollish undertones and in-jokes.