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.

Bloggers suffer government repression
It won't be news to most of us, but Reporters sans frontières can quantify it in their Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2007: Saying online what you think can get you in big trouble. Excerpt: Government repression no longer ignores bloggers The Internet is occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations. Several countries fell in the ranking this year because of serious, repeated violations...

It won't be news to most of us, but Reporters sans frontières can quantify it in their Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2007: Saying online what you think can get you in big trouble. Excerpt:

Government repression no longer ignores bloggers

The Internet is occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations. Several countries fell in the ranking this year because of serious, repeated violations of the free flow of online news and information.

In Malaysia (124th), Thailand (135th), Vietnam (162nd) and Egypt (146th), for example, bloggers were arrested and news websites were closed or made inaccessible.

“We are concerned about the increase in cases of online censorship,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“More and more governments have realised that the Internet can play a key role in the fight for democracy and they are establishing new methods of censoring it. The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.”

At least 64 persons are currently imprisoned worldwide because of what they posted on the Internet. China maintains its leadership in this form of repression, with a total of 50 cyber-dissidents in prison.

Eight are being held in Vietnam. A young man known as Kareem Amer was sentenced to four years in prison in Egypt for blog posts criticising the president and Islamist control of the country’s universities.

We in the West can't congratulate ourselves. Canada ranks only 18th in press freedom, and the US comes in at a forlorn 48th.

Publicity for Your Book


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, [...]

Nielsen on the Top Ten Application-Design Mistakes
Jakob Nielsen has a good Alertbox post: Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes. Nielsen generally makes good sense, but I wish he would update his own Alertbox site. His links are helpful, and the basic black-on-white layout is inviting. The summary at the top is a good idea. He keeps most of his paragraphs short. But the text stretches across the screen when it would be more readable and inviting in a narrower...

Jakob Nielsen has a good Alertbox post: Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes.

Nielsen generally makes good sense, but I wish he would update his own Alertbox site. His links are helpful, and the basic black-on-white layout is inviting. The summary at the top is a good idea. He keeps most of his paragraphs short.

But the text stretches across the screen when it would be more readable and inviting in a narrower column. An average of 10 to 12 words per line seems to work best for webtext.

As Nielsen himself has taught us, we look for boldface subheads as navigation guides. But he uses boldface in the body of his paragraphs, which is distracting...and when a boldface phrase shares the line with an underlined blue link and regular text, the result is pretty messy.

Can You Make a Living Writing Web Content?
An email arrived recently: I want to make a living writing content for websites. I have spent the past few decades raising children and working as an elementary school teacher. Teaching just isn't working for me anymore and I intend to return to university in several years for a completely different kind of degree. In the meantime, however, I am a single mother with one ten-year-old still in the nest....

An email arrived recently:
I want to make a living writing content for websites. I have spent the past few decades raising children and working as an elementary school teacher. Teaching just isn't working for me anymore and I intend to return to university in several years for a completely different kind of degree. In the meantime, however, I am a single mother with one ten-year-old still in the nest. What do you think are the most important things for me to focus on and do in order to become a financially successful online writer?

I explained that I've been in a fortunate situation, making a living from teaching while exploring webwriting as a sideline. What I've learned has improved my teaching, but I haven't had to pay the groceries out of my webwriting income.

So I'll turn the question over to people who drop in here. What makes for a successful career as an online writer?

WebsiteGuru.com
Are you looking for some direction from website gurus?   As most of you know, I have only recommended one forum to all y’all ever, but I am about to recommend another. If you are looking for a new community that is completely different from any that you have ever been a part of, I would like to [...]

Publicity for Books


On Blurbs and Summaries
Via Poynter Online, a lively and link-rich article by Chip Scanlan: B is for Blurb, S is for Summary. Blurbs can be very effective at drawing readers into the whole story.

Via Poynter Online, a lively and link-rich article by Chip Scanlan: B is for Blurb, S is for Summary. Blurbs can be very effective at drawing readers into the whole story.

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.

Getting Your Book on National TV - 8 Tips


BEA Book Expo America: Smart Strategies for Independent Publishers


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 [...]

BEA Info


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.

The Future of Social Media
Tod Maffin, the tech guru of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has published a short article in The Tyee on The Future of Social Media. He includes to blogs worth exploring.

Tod Maffin, the tech guru of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has published a short article in The Tyee on The Future of Social Media. He includes to blogs worth exploring.