Global Voices

Global Voices
A few weeks ago I discovered: Global Voices Online, and since the site has just had a makeover, this is a good time to introduce it here. The value of the site lies in pulling together blogs and bloggers from all over the world. Ordinarily we're not going to seek out a blog in Nepal or West Africa, but GVO provides a kind of planned serendipity: it makes it easy...

A few weeks ago I discovered: Global Voices Online, and since the site has just had a makeover, this is a good time to introduce it here.

The value of the site lies in pulling together blogs and bloggers from all over the world. Ordinarily we're not going to seek out a blog in Nepal or West Africa, but GVO provides a kind of planned serendipity: it makes it easy to discover sites we might never find otherwise.

Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers
You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.

Which search engines to target?
Some search engine ti

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.

Where to Put the Links?
Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question: Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant...

Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question:

Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant links at the foot of the page or in the right-hand margin.

Another school of thought says no. You need to make it easy for readers to find the link as they read the main copy. If you place it anywhere else, many will miss it.

And here's my answer:

The blessing and curse of hypertext is that it can take you so many places.

In regular print-based text, we follow the writer's line of thought. That "line of thought" is a metaphor for a great deal of pre-writing: consulting sources, reflecting on them and on one's own preferences and principles, reacting to the actual ideas as they appear in the words the writer has drafted. The final version is like a good meal, with each course carefully prepared and served in the proper sequence.

In hypertext, we have scarcely sat down and opened our napkins before we're invited to jump up and visit the kitchen to confirm that oregano was indeed used in making the soup. Before we can enjoy the first bite of beefsteak, we're back in the slaughterhouse and from there to the feedlot.

This can be both informative and entertaining. We may learn a lot about what went into our meal, but we risk missing dessert, coffee, and liqueur...not to mention some good dinner-table conversation.

How Scholars Use Hypertext
It's helpful to see what scholars do with such links. You could say they invented the first hypertext in their annotations to earlier documents and the footnotes by which they cite their sources. These break the narrative also, but scholars manage to ignore the disruptions. They absorb the information and then check the footnotes.

In the online medium, the "footnotes" are links—not to the original sources, but to citations at the bottom of the document, which in turn lead to the sources. A typical example is a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Go visit it and come back for my comments.

Welcome back. You've probably noticed that the NEJM article is not designed to be read online. The text sprawls across the whole screen. We have to scroll forever to follow the narrative. (We do have the option of clicking through to see the report's tables.) A sensible strategy would be to print it out, read it in our favourite armchair, and then return to the computer to check the links to the sources. We can click on a footnote number and "rappel" down the screen to the footnote, and then go on to the online source.

Serving Readers and Users
This is a pretty good format for "readers"—those who use the Web as a convenient archive for print documents. For "users"—those looking for information to apply to their own documents, or just for entertainment—it can be a bit awkward. It's especially awkward for bloggers, as I've learned in running my own blogs.

Most bloggers are writing for users, "hit and run" visitors who arrive, grab a fact or comment, and surf on to somewhere else. Blog posts (and many other website texts) should therefore be fairly brief. If they do run long, like this one, it helps to put most of the post "below the fold" on its own page. The user can see two or three posts on one screen, and then decide which to follow onto the next page.

So on my own blogs, like H5N1, I'm quite happy to include the links to my sources within the text of the post, usually with an excerpt. Only the most dedicated visitors need to visit the original source, so the link to that source won't instantly distract them. They can read the gist of the post at a glance (or with a little scrolling). And then they can visit the source for the full story.

Other Options?
Links on the side are another option. A good service of any website is to supply links to related sites, and blogs usually provide them. This is a convenience, but it may be necessary to supply blurbs with those links as well—many surfers are hesitant to click through to a different site unless encouraged to do so. But these links tend to be "stand-alone," unrelated to the main posts: They stay put in a side column, while the main posts gradually move down the page and disappear.

No doubt you might design a page so that links stayed to one side of the main text, but it doesn't seem worth it. Readers will still print out the text and then return to the computer to check the sources. Users will still want to grasp the main points of the post and then (perhaps) click through to the links, whether they're in the text itself or off to one side.

So designing the links of a post depends on knowing the kinds of readers you're writing for, and then providing what those readers are most comfortable with.

This post itself is a compromise. I expect people to read it online, not as a printout, so I've included a number of subheads to break up the text and help navigation. And of course I've included my links in the text, not at the bottom.

Of course I'd love to hear other opinions, whether you agree or disagree. This is an interactive medium, after all.

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).

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

The Corporate Blogging Book
Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.

Bienvenu, Sébastien Bailly!
I've created a link in Web Writers and Editors to Sébastien Bailly, who blogs in French. His site also has a link to the Medieval Tech Support video that was pulled from YouTube....

I've created a link in Web Writers and Editors to Sébastien Bailly, who blogs in French. His site also has a link to the Medieval Tech Support video that was pulled from YouTube.

Starting a Blog
After a reader of my flu blog asked for advice, I decided to answer in some detail: Should you start a flu blog? has some general suggestions that any webwriter might find helpful. Tell me what you think....

After a reader of my flu blog asked for advice, I decided to answer in some detail: Should you start a flu blog? has some general suggestions that any webwriter might find helpful. Tell me what you think.

Split Run Testing
If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..

Ideagoras
The Globe and Mail is running a series based on a forthcoming book, Wikinomics. Today they've published the second in the series, Ideagoras. Here's an excerpt: In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In...

The Globe and Mail is running a series based on a forthcoming book, Wikinomics. Today they've published the second in the series, Ideagoras. Here's an excerpt:

In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits.

In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine. In fact, five years after the company's stock collapsed in 2000, P&G has doubled its share price and now boasts a portfolio of 22 billion-dollar brands.

Today P&G is a leader among thousands of companies that participate in what we call "ideagoras" where millions of ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds change hands in something akin to an eBay for innovation.

Companies that move now can leverage a global pool of talent, ideas, and innovations that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.

P&G figures that for every top-notch scientist inside its labs, there's another 200 outside who are just as good. That's a total of 1.8 million people whose talents it could potentially tap into.

The article is interesting not just for its content (which may be good stuff or routine corporate hyperventilation) but for the Globe's own awkward use of the online medium.

The paragraphing of the online article was identical to that of the print version I read over breakfast. I broke up one over-long paragraph to make it more readable.

The resources mentioned like InnoCentive and NineSigma are given without links to their sites. (Don't get me going about companies still using StudlyCaps.)

The story does offer a link to the Wikinomics home page, and to an earlier article in the series. But like so much material that the print media dump online, this is really just shovelware. Its value online would be far greater if only it had been turned into real hypertext.

That said, I'm posting a link to Wikinomics in Webwriting Resources, and I'd welcome your comments about that site.

The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

Poynter Online's EyeTrack07 Attacks the Myth of Short Attention Spans
I haven't had time to read it yet. But here's the story from Poynter Online - EyeTrack07: The Myth of Short Attention Spans. Excerpt: You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly. And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is...

I haven't had time to read it yet. But here's the story from Poynter Online - EyeTrack07: The Myth of Short Attention Spans. Excerpt:

You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C.

Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.

And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is even stronger online than in print.

At a time when readers are assumed to have short attention spans, especially those who read online, this qualifies as news.

That was the predominant behavior of roughly 600 test subjects -- 70 percent of whom said they read the news in print or online four times a week. Their eye movements were tracked in 15-minute reading sessions of broadsheet, tabloid and online publications. Evidence from these sessions revealed how long readers spend with the stories they pick, as well as a host of other details about reading patterns.

This should be a very interesting report.

The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book
E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.

Print Editors and the Web
Jade Walker recently posted some interesting thoughts in the Online Writing List, and she's kindly allowed me to quote them here: I recently attended a conference for copy editors in Miami and whenever conversation turned to the Web, the editors in attendance often fell into two categories: 1) They hate the Web because they believe its mere existence is going to result in profit/job losses. 2) They fear the Web...

Jade Walker recently posted some interesting thoughts in the Online Writing List, and she's kindly allowed me to quote them here:

I recently attended a conference for copy editors in Miami and whenever conversation turned to the Web, the editors in attendance often fell into two categories:

1) They hate the Web because they believe its mere existence is going to result in profit/job losses.
2) They fear the Web because they don't understand where copy editors fit in.

I have no doubt there are other editorial folks at newspapers and magazines across the country that feel the same way. This is so easy to fix! All it takes is a little time and training. Those of us who've been working in new media for many years need to show the print folks what the Web has to offer, particularly the advantages of publishing news in different formats, reading/writing blogs, using RSS feeds, etc.

I also believe newspapers and magazines should make a concerted effort to update their online portals. So many sites are clunky, hard to navigate or simply replicate the print product via online templates. What can these companies do to fix this problem?

• Look at the competition and see what works and what doesn't.
• Experiment with design but avoid repeating others' mistakes.
• Hire copy editors, or assign current editors, to give blog entries and articles a once-over before posting on the Web.
• Allow comments, albeit moderated ones, on stories.
• Create a forum just to find sources for stories.
• Include e-mail addresses for reporters on each entry/article, or a link to a profile page.
• Provide "e-mail this entry" links as well as permanent links for readers/bloggers who wish to discuss stories and share them with friends/family.
• Offer one-click options to the recommendation sites (digg, technorati, netscape, etc.), or follow USA Today's lead and allow readers to rate the stories themselves based on usefulness or entertainment value.

Jade ended her post with "Any thoughts?" And I echo her question.

I'll add one thought from my own online-writing experience: The editor of The Tyee finds comments a chronic headache. Too many are illiterate, incoherent, abusive, and plain libellous. He requires registration before people can post comments, and this has helped a lot. I find the comments on my own Tyee articles generally pretty civil. But some topics can bring out the barking loonies.

Previewing EyeTrack 07
At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt: A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first...

At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt:

A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first with the distinct focus of comparing print and online news reading.

We've almost finished analyzing the data. Key findings will be released at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington, D.C., on March 28. The full debut of the findings will take place April 10 to 12 at a Poynter conference in St. Petersburg, Fla.

To give you a little background, this was a test of 600 regular readers of news. That's a large number in the research world, and it was necessary in order to get what we needed. We wanted to look through readers' eyes as they read live publications to see what attracted and held their attention. A second part of the study involved six versions of a prototype and an exit interview, which gave us insight into comprehension, and retention of information.

Using eye-tracking equipment we noted the number of times readers viewed more than 350 specific elements, such as headlines, photos, cutlines, stories, graphics, blogs, listings and ads.

The data totals more than 102,000 "eye-stopping events." That's research speak, but it means we've watched every eye movement of 600 readers over the course of about 9,000 minutes of reading 30 days' worth of news publication.

We conducted the study in four U.S. markets, working with the St. Petersburg Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune in Minnesota, the Philadelphia Daily News in Pennsylvania and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo. Each subject read the actual publication for 15 minutes, then read a prototype for another five minutes.

You may reserve a copy of the EyeTrack07 report and find more details about the upcoming conference at eyetrack.poynter.org. Go there to get a glimpse of the project in a video as well, while we continue to crunch the data.

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Can We Still Talk Online?
Dave Beers, my editor at The Tyee, has a thoughtful article today about the famous interactivity of websites: Can We Still Talk Online?. It won't be a surprise to webwriters that responses to their work are often ignorant, abusive, and even threatening. Dave uses The Tyee's experience, and that of other online magazines, to invite still more interaction on the subject. Maybe this is a good time to dig out...

Dave Beers, my editor at The Tyee, has a thoughtful article today about the famous interactivity of websites: Can We Still Talk Online?.

It won't be a surprise to webwriters that responses to their work are often ignorant, abusive, and even threatening. Dave uses The Tyee's experience, and that of other online magazines, to invite still more interaction on the subject.

Maybe this is a good time to dig out a piece I did on the subject about ten years ago: "Time for Flame Wars to Flame Out" was first published in the Vancouver weekly Georgia Straight in the summer of 1997.

An email correspondent once described my views on education as a “Socialist brainwashed, Communist-cliche’d, agit-prop spew of black lies, red herrings, straw men, Marxist-Stalinist Totalitarian, 1984, Brave New World, One World Dictatorship, mooching, felonious, treasonous, cowardly, dangerous, insensitive, [and] anti-human.”

After that he got positively hostile.

Some online veterans would shrug this off as just more proof that any idiot can get on the Net, and most already have. But as many can confirm, this kind of verbal abuse is all too common in cyberspace. The Usenet discussion groups in particular are full of sarcasm, insults, degrading language, and outright obscenity. In the mailing lists, where you have to subscribe to get access to discussions on specialized topics, even college teachers and dog lovers can blow their cool.

Why should this be? Are we just awful people? I don’t think so. But I do think the technology of the Internet has encouraged users with a particular mind-set, and they in turn have largely created an online culture that promotes abuse.

Addicted to Jolts
To do anything on a computer, you have to obey some arbitrary rules and go through certain ritual actions: click the mouse, hit return, type a precise string of keystrokes. This favors a certain kind of obsessive, ritualistic personality. The reward, for such a personality, is to go through the keyboard rituals to get a “jolt” —a psychological reward— just as a laboratory rat will push a button to get a food pellet.

The jolt may be the opening of a window on the computer monitor, or seeing your own name in someone else’s message, or reading an angry, hostile message that rejects every value you hold dear. In any case, it’s an emotional payoff for going through the ritual, and it clearly appeals to a lot of people. Like any other such reward, computer jolts can become dangerously addictive.

Most, however, prefer to limit their jolts to eavesdropping on others’ quarrels. These are the lurkers, the passive Internet users who like to watch other people get into punch-ups. When lurkers do begin posting messages, they often start with a plea for mercy; they know what they’re getting into.

More aggressive types don’t care. Once addicted, they soon need ever-stronger jolts. So they just wade in with all guns blazing, and they thrive on flame wars of mutual recrimination and insult. Flamers may look like mortal enemies, but they’re really like junkies who also deal drugs—they provide jolts for each other.

Smile When You Write That, Stranger
Still another problem is “register.” This means adapting your comments to the person and the circumstances. If a kindergarten teacher talks to you the same way she talks to your child, you’ll be resentful. If you talk too familiarly to your boss, you may soon be looking for another job. Using the wrong register is the basis of most sitcoms, but it’s not often funny online. That’s why many of us use emoticons to try to convey the register we’re trying for.

When you’re sitting at your computer, you’re totally private. But the messages you read and receive are totally public. This really complicates the register you should adopt. You feel private, as if you were sharing pillow talk with your spouse, but the whole world is watching. Your intimate message brays out over the world’s greatest public-address system, and soon you’re getting equally intimate messages that thousands of others can also read.

When I first began to study the flame problem in the early 1990s, I consoled myself that selfish, insensitive, addictively aggressive slobs would not last long. Like barbarous pioneers, they would give way to the schoolmarms and genteel pillars of society. The people who would really flourish in this new medium, I told myself, would be those who could see beyond the computer monitor to the real live person at the other end, and write their messages accordingly.

I was wrong. The slobs have poisoned most of the waterholes, creating no-go zones all over cyberspace. Worse yet, when some folks do try to set up a civilized online community, the slobs barge in and track mud on the floor. Uninterested in grown-up discussion and debate, they try to bring everyone down to their level. Giving insults, taking insults—it’s all jolts to them.

For those of us who really do want to bring civilization to the online wilderness, the options are few. Arguing with the slobs only gives them more jolts. Ignoring them sometimes goads them into even worse flames.
Better to set out clear house rules for acceptable behaviour, and then to turf out anyone who behaves badly—just as we would if someone crashed a party and started insulting our guests.

Good Manners? On the Web?
Via the New York Times: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. Excerpt: Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse. Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a...

Via the New York Times: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. Excerpt:

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com).

Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself. “If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

Yes, it's extremely nasty out there. I've been lucky, in my own blogging, to escape the kind of behaviour described in the Times article. But I don't know how effective a "code of conduct" would be. What's your opinion—especially if you live outside North America?

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 ..