Mark Twain, Father of the Internet

Mark Twain, Father of the Internet
The Tyee has published my article Mark Twain, Father of the Internet. Excerpt: Mark Twain died in 1910, a lifetime before the founding of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet and the web. So that you could read this on The Tyee, hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers worked for years to get the clanking, room-sized computers of the 1960s to communicate with one another. You've probably never heard of...

The Tyee has published my article Mark Twain, Father of the Internet. Excerpt:

Mark Twain died in 1910, a lifetime before the founding of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet and the web. So that you could read this on The Tyee, hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers worked for years to get the clanking, room-sized computers of the 1960s to communicate with one another. You've probably never heard of them: Vinton Cerf, J.C.R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, and Paul Baran, to name just a few. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, was a latecomer.

Yet I contend that Mark Twain (one of the great science-fiction writers of all time) first conceived the Internet. Like the wizards of the 1960s and '70s, his contribution has been forgotten. But like Arthur C. Clarke, who conceived the earth satellite and could have patented it, Twain understood the idea of the Internet before the scientists did. If anything, he leaped beyond the text-based Internet to the just-dawning world of video chat and vlogging (video blogging).

An Intellectual Property Issue
Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along: I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book. One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes...

Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along:

I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book.

One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes on a yahoo e-group website (and admitted to it), and sent links to those recipes in an e-mail to the 2,610 members of that group, thus depriving me of who knows how many sales. I only have until
Thanksgiving to sell my book, after all.

I sent an e-mail to the group and the woman saying she was violating copyright law. She wrote back apologizing and saying she removed the files from the website. But for the period of time that they were up, who knows how many people downloaded those recipes and e-mailed them to others.

I went to the FBI's website, which has a division on internet crime. It said that not all of the complaints registered with them will be investigated, as they're sent to various agencies, and that if a matter is urgent, a complainant should contact local authorities. I then called the local sheriff's office and explained the situation. They sent a deputy over. Neither the phone person nor the in-person deputy had ever heard of the term "e-book." The deputy said this was a civil matter.

Do you know of any intellectual property lawyers who would take this case on contingency?

I told Judy I don't know of such lawyers, but perhaps some of the readers here will know of an affordable and effective way to estimate and recover damages.

In Judy's shoes, I'd join the e-group, explain the predicament my customer had put me in, and ask those who'd downloaded the recipes to send me something by way of compensation. But I wouldn't build my retirement plans around the anticipated revenue.

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

Are citizen-journalists just amateurs?
Nicholas Lemann, in the current New Yorker, takes issue with many bloggers' conviction that they are doing the job the mainstream media are too complacent or arrogant to do. It's an entertaining piece, and in the online version you can of course visit the sites he mentions...and see what some blogger-journalists think of the article....

Nicholas Lemann, in the current New Yorker, takes issue with many bloggers' conviction that they are doing the job the mainstream media are too complacent or arrogant to do. It's an entertaining piece, and in the online version you can of course visit the sites he mentions...and see what some blogger-journalists think of the article.

BlogWrite for CEOs
Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well....

Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well.

All About GPRS
Dickens once said, \"never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.\" Perhaps we can now say, \"never close your ..

Nielsen on the "Usability Divide"
Here's an excerpt from Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox): Far worse than the economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn't use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don't achieve the modern world's full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand. Almost 40% of the...

Here's an excerpt from Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox):

Far worse than the economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn't use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don't achieve the modern world's full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand.

Almost 40% of the population has lower literacy skills, and yet few websites follow the guidelines for writing for low-literacy users. Even government sites that target poorer citizens are usually written at a level that requires a university degree to comprehend. The British government has done some good work on simplifying much of its direct.gov.uk site information, but even it requires at least a high school education to easily read.

Lower literacy is the Web's biggest accessibility problem, but nobody cares about this massive user group.

This really is a critical problem. It's one reason why I argue for keeping readability levels as low as possible. It's not dumbing-down the text—it's opening it up to people who can use it if only they can understand it.

Nielsen's post has a link to his guideline for writing for low-literacy users. I also recommend Readability.info, which can give you several good ways to assess your text readability. You can also find a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list, down in the left-hand column.