Is the Kindle the Next Big Thing?

Is the Kindle the Next Big Thing?
According to Farhad Manjoo at Salon, no: Amazon's Kindle won't spark your e-book fire. But it's a very interesting description of a gadget that's almost got it right.

According to Farhad Manjoo at Salon, no: Amazon's Kindle won't spark your e-book fire. But it's a very interesting description of a gadget that's almost got it right.

Free Publicity: How to Create a Media Plan
How do you get free publicity for your business? How can you create a well thought-out media plan to catch the attention of frazzled news directors, busy reporters and grumpy editors? If you don't have a penny to spend on...

Unique Templates & Logos
For the past few years I have been asking every professional designer I know to offer a service that would provide small business owners a place to purchase unique basic templates at an affordable price. Not only did I finally find a team of highly qualified designers willing to do this for us, but they even [...]

Sex Appeal: Do your blog posts have it?
When you write, do you try to seduce people? Psychologists will tell you there are four basic temperaments, each with it's own particular emotional triggers. Most TV sitcoms have characters who are prime examples of these. Take Sex in the...

42 Top Content Marketing Blogs: We made the list at #25!
This blog has been included in a list of 42 Top Content Marketing Blogs, that Joe Pulizzi has compiled. I tell you this because I'm glad and proud, of course. But there's another reason: there are some very good blogs...

Michael Kane Interview
Michael Kane, owner of InLip Designs, is one of my all time favorite designers. But he tends to be a bit private showing his work to the general public. So, one of the most common questions I have heard lately, is “who the heck is Michael Kane?” Now you know. The truth is, I literally drool over [...]

Are We Yahoos and Thieves?
Via the Globe and Mail: ‘Amateur' charge infuriates blogosphere. Excerpt: Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter. Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe, argues that basic notions of expertise are under assault amid a cultural shift in favour of the amateurism of blogs, MySpace and...

Via the Globe and Mail: ‘Amateur' charge infuriates blogosphere. Excerpt:

Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter.

Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe, argues that basic notions of expertise are under assault amid a cultural shift in favour of the amateurism of blogs, MySpace and other popularity-driven sites.

"Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys ... are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity," Keen writes in a book published Tuesday.

His views have infuriated bloggers and others, especially in Silicon Valley, who argue he is an elitist intellectual, a conservative pining for a return to old ways, and a writer who cannot keep his facts straight.

The villains in Keen's narrative are a "pajama army" of mostly anonymous writers who spread gossip and scandal, "intellectual kleptomaniacs," who search Google to copy others' work and the "digital thieves" of media content in the post-Napster era.

For a technology industry used to basking in the glow of self-promotion, Keen's work is shocking for its unforgiving view of Silicon Valley's utopian aspirations.

The book "is designed as a grenade," Keen, a native of north London who now lives in California, said at a recent debate with bloggers and journalists in Berkeley. "It is not designed to be particularly fair or balanced."

The title of his polemic, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture," attacks what he calls the "cut and paste" ethic of Web users, who he says are robbing professionals of their livelihoods.

The Web allows anyone to post their most intimate thoughts, views or even outright lies, without any editing, under the assumption that the crowd will correct any mistakes. Keen calls for efforts to balance out the Web's powers of instant publishing against society's need for accountability.

Here is Keen's own blog. I'll post a link to it in the Web Writers and Editors list.

Downloadable Material from Writing for the Web 3.0
If you use a PC, the CD that comes with Writing for the Web 3.0 contains the items below. But Mac users can't use the CD; so the links below will give you access to the CD materials in the form of a long Word file and a PowerPoint slide show. Whether or not you own the book, I hope you find them useful. Download W4WCDItems.doc Download webwriting_intro.ppt

If you use a PC, the CD that comes with Writing for the Web 3.0 contains the items below. But Mac users can't use the CD; so the links below will give you access to the CD materials in the form of a long Word file and a PowerPoint slide show. Whether or not you own the book, I hope you find them useful.

Download W4WCDItems.doc

Download webwriting_intro.ppt

What Makes Good Webwriting?
A reader wrote the other day to ask my opinion: What did I consider good examples of writing on the web? Well, I confess I couldn't leap up with a dozen examples on the tip of my tongue. Examples of bad writing, however, are easy to come by. On my blog H5N1, I often excerpt text from news stories, government websites, and technical sources. All too often, I have to...

A reader wrote the other day to ask my opinion: What did I consider good examples of writing on the web?

Well, I confess I couldn't leap up with a dozen examples on the tip of my tongue. Examples of bad writing, however, are easy to come by. On my blog H5N1, I often excerpt text from news stories, government websites, and technical sources. All too often, I have to tinker with the text to make it readable.

For example, some scientific abstracts are solid blocks of text, 200 or 300 words long. I can't edit them, but I can re-paragraph them to make them easier to read.

News reports are often more reader-friendly, full of one-sentence paragraphs. The sentences, however, may run to 40 or more words—and it's often the first paragraph that tries to create an "abstract" of the whole story. (When I excerpt the text anyway, I usually apologize for the style.)

In other cases, the text may be concise and well-paragraphed, but appallingly displayed. Some poor souls are still stuck in 1996, proudly publishing white text sprawled across a black background clear across the screen.

Others have crisp black text on a white background. But the lines run to 15 or 20 words. Here's an example from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, which is OK but could be much better with shorter lines. He hasn't changed his format in years, and he should have.

Subheads Help
Subheads can break up the text still more and provide landmarks. Too many webwriters neglect this simple aid to readers.

Of course, sometimes a text is on a website only to be printed off and read on paper. In that case, it just has to be readable when printed.

You're welcome to visit H5N1 and my other blogs to see how I try to live by my own rules.

Judge the Top Blogs on Their Writing!
But here's another suggestion. Visit Technorati: Popular Blogs and see what you think of the writing on some of the top sites.

Does Engadget's shimmering prose enshrine it as #1 blog? Is Michelle Malkin (#11)a better webwriter than Guy Kawasaki(#15)?

Or are other factors at work in these high-traffic, high-impact sites? I'd love to hear your comments.

On Foggy Writing
Dave Wood wrote to me the other day: I was somewhat aghast at finding one of my web pages coming in at a fog reading of 15+ - I'm just in the middle of revamping it now and am determined to have an index below 9. I did find a glitch in a site you'd recommended: Readability.info. It wasn't accepting my files and seemed to convert them to a read-only...

Dave Wood wrote to me the other day:

I was somewhat aghast at finding one of my web pages coming in at a fog reading of 15+ - I'm just in the middle of revamping it now and am determined to have an index below 9.

I did find a glitch in a site you'd recommended: Readability.info. It wasn't accepting my files and seemed to convert them to a read-only in my own files. I had to re-start the computer to get rid of that setting. It may be local to my computer?

I did find another site that worked better in that it didn't require me to upload my files but accepted a paste: Gunning Fog Index.

I've had a similar problem with Readability.info. When I try to upload a Word file, it instantly tells me it found no sentences. Put in a URL, however, and equally instantly it provides a number of readability indices. I've written to the owner of the site, and will pass along his response. (Update: He tells me the problem arose after a switch of servers. Look for a fix after Christmas.)

In the meantime, while it's helpful to know the general readability of your website's text, you can do a lot just by following a few simple practices:

1. Keep text columns narrow.
Ideally, the longest line in a column should be 15 words. Ten would be better.

2. Keep words short.
"Magic" is better than "prestidigitation." "Idea" is better than "conceptualization."

3. Keep sentences short.
On some of my blogs, I excerpt articles from print media. Too often, especially in the first paragraph, a sentence goes on for well over 20 words. I don't rewrite such sentences, but I wish I could. Bulleted lists can often replace strings of words and phrases.

4. Keep paragraphs short.
In most fonts used on websites, six or seven lines should be enough for a paragraph. Even if it's a long, complex idea that belongs in a long paragraph, break it up. A long, solid mass of screen text will discourage too many potential readers.

5. Put a little white space between paragraphs.
A short line at the end of a paragraph isn't enough of a break. Just one hit on the Return key can make a world of difference in helping people read your text.

6. Put important words and phrases in "hot spots."
Your sentence's beginning and end are its hot spots. Here readers pay most attention and react most strongly to what they read. Hot spots cool off in sentences buried in mid-paragraph. Then the end of the last sentence becomes hot again.

So a paragraph starting with "There" or "It" has wasted a good hot spot.

7. Use bolded subheads to help navigation.
A subhead every few paragraphs gives readers an overview of the whole document. A numbered list like this one, with bolded and numbered lines, is also easier to understand.

8. Break these rules when you must.
Follow them too closely, and your writing style may start to sound dull and predictable. Too many short sentences (and bulleted lists) will give you too many hot spots. That will make you sound as if you're ranting.

The above text, pasted into the Gunning Fog site, turns out to have a Fog index of 7.396. Out of 517 words, 47 have three or more syllables. I did some revision while writing it, but 7.396 seems like a reasonable level of clarity.

A link to the Gunning Fog Index site is now in the Webwriting Resources list in the left-hand column.

Copywriting Makeovers: Watch a Pro in Action
I don't know about you, but one of the best ways I learn about writing - especially writing sales copy - is by looking over the shoulder of a pro while they edit and tweak content to make it more...

Naming Your Blog
Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog. He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit. Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles,...

Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog.

He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit.

Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles, like this one and Writing Fiction. When I started blogging avian flu, H5N1 was also pretty self-descriptive, but set slightly apart from other blogs that played variations on "bird flu," "avian influenza," and so on.

Without realizing what I was doing, I picked names that people tend to Google. Type "writing fiction" into Google Advanced search and my site comes up first out of a million hits. "Writing for the Web" is #7 out of 634,000. And "h5n1" is #5 out of 7,870,000 hits.

In a course blog, where only my students are likely to visit, I may use a flat-footed name or a cute one—in a course on storytelling for media, the blog is Raconteur. But I'm just as comfortable with a course blog named for the room the class meets in, like Cedar 224.

For a blog that I co-author with a teacher in China, the name is English Corner, a reference most Chinese students will understand because every campus and town has an "English corner" where students gather to practice their English on one another—and any native English speakers who wander by.

Now I'm getting interested in climate change, and recently started Homage to Arrhenius, an allusion to the Swedish scientist who first developed the theory about CO² as a greenhouse gas, back in the 1890s. This may be a little too cute.

And for another blog, created as a journal for the second edition of one of my books, I've chosen the flat-footed name Pioneers...since the book is titled Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.

I'd be curious to know how bloggers visiting here chose the names for their sites. And can you point to any blogs that are either very well named, or horribly misnamed?

Starting a new blog
I don't where I got this preoccupation with disaster. But when I'm not teaching business writing or blogging about H5N1, I try to follow the climate-change issue. After thinking about it for a while, I've started a new blog, Homage to Arrhenius to try to educate myself more systematically. Svante Arrhenius was the scientist who over a century ago identified the influence of greenhouse gases on the earth's climate. You're...

I don't where I got this preoccupation with disaster. But when I'm not teaching business writing or blogging about H5N1, I try to follow the climate-change issue.

After thinking about it for a while, I've started a new blog, Homage to Arrhenius to try to educate myself more systematically. Svante Arrhenius was the scientist who over a century ago identified the influence of greenhouse gases on the earth's climate.

You're welcome to pop over and take a look, and if you have any suggestions, I'd be grateful to have them.

Content Marketing: It's not enough to publish
Our friend Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer, did a good job of answering an email from a client who questions the value of writing articles and submitting them to online article directories. The person asks a question which many...

Legal Hazards of Writing Online
Via today's Globe and Mail, a report on libel chill: Media stardom is pricey. Excerpt: Many bloggers dream of getting mainstream recognition for their work, but unfortunately for some, the attention they're getting comes in the form of a lawsuit instead of media-star status. Earlier this week, Steelback Brewery president Frank D'Angelo filed a $2-million libel suit against Ottawa-based blogger Neate Sager for making what he says are disparaging comments...

Via today's Globe and Mail, a report on libel chill: Media stardom is pricey. Excerpt:

Many bloggers dream of getting mainstream recognition for their work, but unfortunately for some, the attention they're getting comes in the form of a lawsuit instead of media-star status.

Earlier this week, Steelback Brewery president Frank D'Angelo filed a $2-million libel suit against Ottawa-based blogger Neate Sager for making what he says are disparaging comments about him.

In another recent case, Montreal art-gallery owner Chris (Zeke) Hand has found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit as a result of something he wrote on the blog he maintains for Zeke's Gallery.

Warren Kinsella, a prominent blogger and newspaper columnist, sued another blogger for libel last year, but settled the case after the blogger apologized for his remarks and paid Kinsella's legal costs.

Zeke, also known as Chris Hand, is being sued for libel for comments he posted on his blog in Montreal. ‘Once you start dragging things into court, I do tend to dig my heels in,’ he says.

And p2pnet, a British Columbia-based news site that writes about file-sharing, is still fighting a libel lawsuit launched by Kazaa tycoon Nikki Hemming based on comments that were posted on an article about the company.

Read the whole item.

Who and Why? 2 Questions Your Site Should Answer
A client asked for feedback on their blog the other day. I visited and was amazed. While the content was definitely oriented to reader benefits (earn more money, have more time off, create a dream life) --always a good first...

My Happy Crazy Life
It isn’t often that I come across a blog that I am so impressed by that I find myself wanting to tell everyone I know about it, but My Happy Crazy Life is definitely one blog that I want to share with others.    When I found this blog, authored by Amy Sue of the Zany Zebra, [...]

The Revolution is Being Blogged
The upheaval in Burma is setting off tremors on the web as well. An online magazine run by Burmese exiles in Thailand, The Irrawaddy, is covering the protests and the junta's crackdown: High tech gets the truth out. Excerpt: Despite efforts by the reclusive regime to seal off its cowed people from the outside world, pictorial evidence of the crimes now being committed in the junta’s name is getting out,...

The upheaval in Burma is setting off tremors on the web as well. An online magazine run by Burmese exiles in Thailand, The Irrawaddy, is covering the protests and the junta's crackdown: High tech gets the truth out. Excerpt:

Despite efforts by the reclusive regime to seal off its cowed people from the outside world, pictorial evidence of the crimes now being committed in the junta’s name is getting out, thanks in large measure to the ingenuity of young people with the high-tech know-how to sidestep official attempts to gag them.

Worldwide news services such as the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera are illustrating news reports with clandestine pictures and video footage that confirm the extent of the tragedy now unfolding in Burma.

The Irrawaddy is supplying a wide range of TV stations and publications with material obtained by its own sources.

“We are getting e-mailed pictures taken by mobile phones and digital cameras,” said The Irrawaddy’s Managing Editor, Kyaw Zwa Moe. “They are being sent in by people who hold private e-mail accounts, usually with Skype or Gmail. They don’t worry about the risk they are running—they just want the outside world to know what is happening.”

Many of Rangoon’s Internet shops remained closed on Thursday as the violent suppression of the peaceful demonstrations entered its second day. Traders Hotel in the city center, popular with foreign business people and journalists, was searched room by room for evidence of Internet use.

The worldwide demand for information about what is happening in Burma is so large that traffic on The Irrawaddy’s own Web site has more than doubled since the crackdown began.

More than 1 million hits were recorded on Wednesday, closing the site down for a while.

The Irrawaddy Web site has had 22 million hits so far this month, more than double recorded in a normal month.

Meanwhile, The Independent in the UK is quoting Burma's bloggers bearing witness to the unfolding revolution. For a link to some of those blogs ( mostly in Burmese, but the photos are eloquent), go to Rule of Lords.

Political Bloggers as Webwriters: I
I would post here more often if I weren't such a political-blog addict. But I'm going to try to exploit this vice by posting an occasional critique of political blogs as examples of webwriting. After all, some of these blogs attract enough visitors to generate ad revenue, so they must be doing something right. Or are they? So I'll start this series with Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt is an American...

I would post here more often if I weren't such a political-blog addict. But I'm going to try to exploit this vice by posting an occasional critique of political blogs as examples of webwriting. After all, some of these blogs attract enough visitors to generate ad revenue, so they must be doing something right. Or are they?

So I'll start this series with Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt is an American right-wing commentator, and he shares the blog with several other writers of similar persuasion. Their politics aren't very attractive to me as a Canadian centre-leftist (which puts me, in American terms, out there somewhere beyond the Nepalese Maoists). But that's not the point.

An Attractive Layout
In its general layout, Hewitt's site is very attractive: an off-white background for black sans serif text, with colour used for headlines. Hewitt and his associate Dean Barnett write in (mostly) short paragraphs with (mostly) short sentences, and they break up their text with blank spaces between paragraphs and short quotes that stand out clearly from the main text.

Another poster, going by the name of Generalissimo, is much less effective in basic post design. The first paragraph of the post I've linked to is 19 lines long. Most of the sentences within that great block of text are individually short, concise, and readable—but they're buried alive. Better to break the text up into three or even four paragraphs.

Generalissimo's difficulties are compounded by the basic column width of posts, which allows lines that average around 15 words long. This is tolerable (barely) in paragraphs of 6 or 7 lines, but the whole site would benefit from a narrower text column.

That's because most readers are more comfortable with a line of 10 to 12 words. It's easier to track back and down to the next line.

Hypertext and Eye Candy
The Hewitt site uses links well. Links either have blurbs or are self-describing, and they don't distract from reading the text. Webwriting depends on orientation/information/action, and the site design is excellent on offering options for action: email the post, print it, take action, comment, or trackback.

On orientation, the site could improve. Navigation is a problem unless you're only there to read the latest posts. Some posts are long and take forever to scroll through, so it's hard to see what else is new on the site. Providing a click-through to a new page would permit putting more headlines on a single screen. Subheads, like the ones in this post, would also help to break up long posts and tell readers what to expect.

The text dominates a wide column on the left, with ads and other links in the narrow right-hand columns. The ads stand out fairly well (they'd better), but the links to archives and sympathetic blogs are hard to find and hard to read with blue text on a dark-grey background.

Graphics can certainly enliven a text-rich site, but a good computer-graphics person needs to have a quiet talk with the Hewitt posters. Site graphics tend to be too big (see the "stupidity meter"). A flyer for Mitt Romney's Iowa campaign is held up as "a nice piece of mail" when it's atrociously ugly.

Readability
I haven't run any of the Hewitt site text through Readability.info, but I'd expect it to come through very well. As mentioned, most sentences are short, punchy, and full of single-syllable words. Readability would improve still more with fewer monster paragraphs.

No doubt the site attracts thousands of readers a day, most of whom will patiently read much of what they find. The site is preaching to a particular choir, so readers will put up with design and writing flaws for the sake of the message.

Still, a site's fervent fans deserve the happiest experience the writers can provide. Even the idly curious (and the actively hostile) will recognize when a site shows respect for them by making the material attractive and accessible. This site is partway there, but could improve with a more navigable design and tight editorial consistency.

So as an example of webwriting, I'll give the Hewitt site a B.

Great Content vs Marketing: What do I write about?
So now you realize that you need to publish content to get found online and use the Internet to grow your business; then there's that big question looming like a dark cloud: What do I write about? Brian Clark writes...

An Online Editing Job in Canada
Just picked this up in my morning email: Editor / Curator Closing Date: August 10, 2007 Contract: Two to three days per week Location: Canada (virtual office) rabble.ca, Canada's leading alternative online news and analysis Web site, seeks a dynamic editorial curator to direct day-to-day operations, edit the site's features section and integrate multi-media and social media functions into the website on a daily basis. Responsibilities include assigning, editing and...

Just picked this up in my morning email:

Editor / Curator
Closing Date: August 10, 2007

Contract: Two to three days per week
Location: Canada (virtual office)

rabble.ca, Canada's leading alternative online news and analysis Web site, seeks a dynamic editorial curator to direct day-to-day operations, edit the site's features section and integrate multi-media and social media functions into the website on a daily basis.

Responsibilities include assigning, editing and posting stories, working with other editorial staff, planning
editorial calendar, image research, supervising editorial interns and volunteers, and some writing.

Candidates should have strong organizational skills, extensive editing experience, a demonstrated ability to
meet deadlines, a collaborative approach to teamwork, familiarity with Web editing, a creative approach to
working with limited financial resources, a knowledge of progressive politics and world affairs, combined with experience in progressive activism and a keen interest in the potential of Web 2.0 tools. At least three years experience in journalism or publishing, mainstream or alternative is required.

The editor works in a virtual office environment and can be based anywhere in Canada.

Please send cover letter, resume, references and a short writing sample outlining your vision for rabble.ca (one page max) by August 10th to rabble publisher Kim Elliott, jobs@rabble.ca. In the spirit of the virtual office, only electronic applications will be accepted. The subject line should read: rabble editor application.

Closing date for application: August 10, 2007
Start Date: early September 2007
Competitive remuneration rates

Please note: only candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.

rabble.ca is an employment equity employer.

Kim Elliott, Publisher
jobs@rabble.ca