Get aboard the Cluetrain again

Get aboard the Cluetrain again
Via Inspecht, an Australian blog: The Cluetrain rides again. Excerpt: Almost 10 years ago Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine published a book that was going to change the way we saw the world, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The basic premise in the book is that markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, and honest, sometimes even direct. Basically you can’t fake it....

Via Inspecht, an Australian blog: The Cluetrain rides again. Excerpt:

Almost 10 years ago Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine published a book that was going to change the way we saw the world, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

The basic premise in the book is that markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, and honest, sometimes even direct. Basically you can’t fake it.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to engage in a corporate monotone of mission statements, product strategies and , marketing brochures.

However everything is now changing. People are connecting, and working together. The Internet is enabling these conversations and there is nothing corporations can do to stop it.

The blog post contain a slide show of the Cluetrain Manifesto's key points. Very much worth reviewing (for the old-timers) and discovering (for the newbies).

Thanks to Amy Gahran for the link.

Avoid cliché like the plague? Never
Robert Fisk is best known as a journalist specializing in the Middle East. But today he turns his attention to another chronic problem. Via The Independent: Avoid cliché like the plague? Never. Excerpt: Opposite my apartment in Beirut there used to live an American-born English teacher called Marion Lanson. When she departed Lebanon, I inherited her 1949 Random House American College Dictionary, edited by one Clarence L Barnhart "with the...

Robert Fisk is best known as a journalist specializing in the Middle East. But today he turns his attention to another chronic problem. Via The Independent: Avoid cliché like the plague? Never. Excerpt:

Opposite my apartment in Beirut there used to live an American-born English teacher called Marion Lanson. When she departed Lebanon, I inherited her 1949 Random House American College Dictionary, edited by one Clarence L Barnhart "with the Assistance of 355 Authorities and Specialists". I like "authorities" and "specialists" very much because we have largely abandoned such words.

I was keen to look up Mr Barnhart's definition of that plague of modern journalism, the cliché. "A trite, stereotyped expression, idea, practice, etc, as 'sadder but wiser', 'strong as an ox'."

Alas, I fear these are imaginative expressions compared with the stuff we now consume. Mr. Barnhart's German translation of cliché – "klitsch" or "doughy mass" – seems more appropriate for the assaults on literacy that we commit today.

All this came to mind when I learned this week of the coup in Mauretania, where the army took power after President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi unwisely tried to fire some of his senior officers.

Would tanks "roll" into the capital, I asked myself? Tanks always "roll", don't they? I have never actually seen a tank perform this extraordinary act but, clichés being what they are, my eye sped down the Mauretania story for my friendly "roll". And sure enough – perhaps because Mauretania doesn't have a lot of tanks – there it was. The president, said the agency report, "was arrested after military convoys rolled through the capital Nouakchott".

Why do we use these dead words? There is a dictionary of clichés on my desktop in Beirut and I heartily recommend Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words by the Australian Don Watson.

It contains one of my most hated clichés: core. As in "core issues", "core business" or "core learning outcomes". Rather like "key speakers" – of which I always refuse to be a member – these clichés attempt to smother idiocy with deep learning (or "core" learning, perhaps).

What is this fascination with stale language? Let me rage. I hate all reports about wars where "the guns fall silent"; the retirement period for artillery being rather short, it's only a matter of time before the "clouds of war" begin to gather once more, when opponents are "pitted" against each other, when guns "soften up" their targets, and national governments complain about "terrorists" crossing (ergo: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan) "porous borders". In Iraq, we may experience a "spike" of violence, followed – of course – by a successful "surge".

By all means read the whole thing.

When Choosing a Niche for Your BANS Site…
A number of Build a Niche Store forum members suggest that one should target niches that can’t be found anywhere but at auction. But I disagree with this. The majority of my BANS (Build a Niche Store) sites sell things that can be purchased in any retail stores, but I also have vintage auctions that sell only [...]

A number of Build a Niche Store forum members suggest that one should target niches that can’t be found anywhere but at auction.

But I disagree with this.

The majority of my BANS (Build a Niche Store) sites sell things that can be purchased in any retail stores, but I also have vintage auctions that sell only the things that can be bought through auctions.

What I learned from my EPN transaction stats is that people who buy stuff from auction sites already are likely to have an eBay account already.  I have more ACRUs generated from a kitchenware BANS site than anything else. That kitchenware I’m talking about averages $20 and it can be purchased at any local stores like Walmart and Target.

The advice given by the BANS members is good, but ignoring the other half of the market isn’t a good idea. I suggest that you build BANS sites for both, because both work well.

Just a quick thought.

More spring cleaning
In Webwriting Resources, over on the left, I've removed some sites that hadn't been updated in several months. Other old sites are still there. Even though inactive, they offer some useful materials. It's striking to see that most of the sites are lively and very up to date. If you're running a site of interest to webwriters, and you're not on the list, drop me a line.

In Webwriting Resources, over on the left, I've removed some sites that hadn't been updated in several months. Other old sites are still there. Even though inactive, they offer some useful materials.

It's striking to see that most of the sites are lively and very up to date. If you're running a site of interest to webwriters, and you're not on the list, drop me a line.

Spring Cleaning
I've just finished grading the last assignments of the semester...and of my 41-year teaching career. With a little more free time, I hope to spend more time learning about webwriting, and overhauling this site, which is about four years old. As a first step, I've gone through the Web Writers and Editors list, updating a few links and dropping those that don't seem active. If you're an online writer or...

I've just finished grading the last assignments of the semester...and of my 41-year teaching career. With a little more free time, I hope to spend more time learning about webwriting, and overhauling this site, which is about four years old.

As a first step, I've gone through the Web Writers and Editors list, updating a few links and dropping those that don't seem active. If you're an online writer or editor, and you'd like a link to your site, drop me a note.

And if you're already on the list, drop me a note about how things are going for you. Are you getting enough work? Enough interesting work? Learning about the business? Joining the French Foreign Legion for better pay and working conditions? Found any other good webwriting resources?

Whatever, let me know and I'll post your observations.

A Handy Reference
I recently ran across a useful little book, The Elements of Visual Style: The Basics of Print Design for Every PC and Mac User, by Robert W. Harris. While it's aimed at print-based writing, webwriters can also draw some lessons from it. Harris gives us a quick guide to typography, layout, and the use of art in print documents. The illustrations show bad and good examples, and the book itself...

I recently ran across a useful little book, The Elements of Visual Style: The Basics of Print Design for Every PC and Mac User, by Robert W. Harris. While it's aimed at print-based writing, webwriters can also draw some lessons from it.

Harris gives us a quick guide to typography, layout, and the use of art in print documents. The illustrations show bad and good examples, and the book itself is pretty well designed. I wish it were more "hypertextual": We get no references to other books on document design, and no links to sites dealing with this and related issues.

Still, it's a compact, concise, and inexpensive handbook. Even if you find most of the advice very familiar, the book could help you back up the points you're trying to make to your clients.

Why the Print Media Still Don't Get It
We're having a federal election here in Canada, and The Globe and Mail is covering it very well. But this story by one of the paper's top reporters, Michael Valpy, shows why print text doesn't work online: Outlook gets gloomier for Tories, polls suggest. Here's an excerpt from the end of the story, with my comments and revisions between paragraphs: There have been a number of theories offered for Canadians'...

We're having a federal election here in Canada, and The Globe and Mail is covering it very well. But this story by one of the paper's top reporters, Michael Valpy, shows why print text doesn't work online: Outlook gets gloomier for Tories, polls suggest. Here's an excerpt from the end of the story, with my comments and revisions between paragraphs:

There have been a number of theories offered for Canadians' growing coolness toward Mr. Harper as the campaign progresses, most focusing on his response – or perceived absence of response – to the gathering economic crisis.

[A sentence of online text should normally run to 20 words maximum. This is 34 words, starting with the dead word "There."]

Observers suggest several theories for Canadians' growing coolness to Mr. Harper. Most focus on his poor response to the current economic crisis.

But a leading social scientist, speaking for background, suggested yesterday that Canadians see in Mr. Harper a Robespierre-type character, the French revolutionary leader who at first was embraced by the people for his unflappability, control and appearance of towering moral rectitude and then rejected by them for the same reasons.

[Fifty words in one sentence! Three sentences convey the same meaning more clearly:]

A leading social scientist, speaking on background, said yesterday that Canadians see Mr. Harper as a Robespierre. In the French Revolution, the people embraced Robespierre for his calm, control, and apparent morality. Then they rejected him for the same reasons.

“Because there was no sense that if he took his clothes off, he'd be the same as the rest of us,” the social scientist said.

[You've got to quote your sources word for word. I wish the source had said:]

"They didn't think he'd be the same as the rest of us if he took his clothes off," said the social scientist.

Pollsters said the possibility exists that the gap between the Conservatives and Liberals will widen again before voting day but it's less and less likely.

Pollsters said the Liberal-Conservative gap may widen again before election day. But they consider it unlikely. [25 words in the original sentence. Revised: 17 words in two sentences.]

In Quebec, the Liberals now have replaced the Conservatives as the federalist option to the Bloc. “There are no rabbits to be pulled out of the hat for the Conservatives,” Mr. Donolo said.

In Quebec, the Liberals have replaced the Conservatives as the federalist choice. "The Conservatives have no rabbits to pull out of their hat," said Mr. Donolo.

There are signs the Green vote, which is as high as 14 per cent in B.C., is becoming unstuck. And Mr. Graves said the three groups with the most aversion to Mr. Harper – young voters, low-income voters and NDP supporters in Ontario – have historically shown a willingness to swing to the Liberals.

[Another boring "There" sentence, plus a 33-word sentence. Consider this version with two sentences and 33 words total:]

The Green vote, up to 14 percent in BC, is weakening. Mr. Graves said three groups hostile to Mr. Harper are historically likely to vote Liberal: young voters, poor voters, and Ontario New Democrats.

Michael Valpy is a fine and thoughtful writer. But if his paper won't edit him for online readers, he won't reach the readers he deserves. And his paper won't survive online as long as it should.

A new edition of Writing for the Web
I dropped in to see my publisher yesterday, and he blindsided me by reporting that Writing for the Web 3.0 has practically sold out. But he doesn't want to reprint it—he wants a fourth edition. Well, that was welcome news, and I can think at once of several areas that deserve fuller treatment. Writing for blogs is an obvious one. Maybe some concrete advice on search-engine optimization. And certainly some...

I dropped in to see my publisher yesterday, and he blindsided me by reporting that Writing for the Web 3.0 has practically sold out. But he doesn't want to reprint it—he wants a fourth edition.

Well, that was welcome news, and I can think at once of several areas that deserve fuller treatment. Writing for blogs is an obvious one. Maybe some concrete advice on search-engine optimization. And certainly some more exercise material, both in the book and here on its blog, would be useful.

But this is an interactive medium, so I'd be grateful for your suggestions on what you'd like to see in a new edition of the book. Even if you haven't read it, tell me about what your concerns and interests are. If the present edition already deals with them, great. If not, even better—I'll be sure to address your issues in the new edition.

50 Open Source Resources for Online Writers
Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers. They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers.

They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

A US newspaper abandons print
Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt: Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool. The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed. One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years...

Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt:

Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool.

The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed.

One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years will be gone. Online publishing is a fundamentally different proposition for both journalists and readers. Experts consider it a classic disruptive technology that reorders daily life for just about everyone it touches and destroys what was thought to be a durable economic model for the eclipsed technology.

Newspapers won't die off as quickly as slide rules did when calculators were introduced, but the changes under way are so epochal you'd be foolish to believe anyone who speaks confidently of what publishing will be like in 10 years.

"Nobody knows anything," as veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the secrets to successful movie-making. The newspaper business is even more in the dark as to how it will make its next buck.

Meanwhile, via the Editor & Publisher website: Steep Decline at NYT while WSJ gains. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine also comments on the Madison metamorphosis.

A lot of journalists are becoming webwriters, but they don't necessarily like the idea, according to this post by Amy Gahran on Poynter.org. And a lot of webwriters, whether they know it or not, are becoming journalists.

US Democrats waging web war
Via Netcraft: Clinton and Obama XSS battle develops. Excerpt: Following the recent cross-site scripting attacks against Barack Obama's website, Finnish security researcher Harry Sintonen has published an example of a cross-site scripting vulnerability on votehillary.org. Sintonen's example submits a POST request to the Vote Hillary website and injects an iframe, causing the site to display the contents of Barack Obama's website. Unlike the Obama incident, which redirected the user's web...

Via Netcraft: Clinton and Obama XSS battle develops. Excerpt:

Following the recent cross-site scripting attacks against Barack Obama's website, Finnish security researcher Harry Sintonen has published an example of a cross-site scripting vulnerability on votehillary.org.

Sintonen's example submits a POST request to the Vote Hillary website and injects an iframe, causing the site to display the contents of Barack Obama's website. Unlike the Obama incident, which redirected the user's web browser, Sintonen's method retains the votehillary.org URL in the address bar while displaying the opposing website.

Sintonen told Netcraft that he was inspired by the recent Obama attacks and first examined Hillary Clinton's official website at www.hillaryclinton.com. Sintonen did not find any cross-site scripting vulnerabilities on this site, adding that it looked quite secure, but subsequently found XSS opportunities available on the Vote Hillary website. Sintonen lives in Finland and has no strong interest in US politics.

While the example exploits have so far been relatively benign (limited to redirecting a user to the opponent's website, for example), future cross-site scripting vulnerabilities found on political candidate sites have plenty of scope to be much more serious. Obama's and Clinton's websites both accept monetary contributions towards their campaigns, so cross-site scripting vulnerabilities could be leveraged to steal money and identities from supporters.

Read the post on the Netcraft site to follow the links.

How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details

Clichés of Journalese
If you write for print or electronic media, some of these terms will make you wince, because you've probably used them: Journalese-English Dictionary (first edition). Most are British, and a little unfamiliar to North Americans, but we have plenty. Our public figures don't just promise to do something: they vow to do it. The cliché du jour (to use a cliché) in North America's blogosphere is "nuanced." Whether it's Obama,...

If you write for print or electronic media, some of these terms will make you wince, because you've probably used them: Journalese-English Dictionary (first edition).

Most are British, and a little unfamiliar to North Americans, but we have plenty. Our public figures don't just promise to do something: they vow to do it.

The cliché du jour (to use a cliché) in North America's blogosphere is "nuanced." Whether it's Obama, Clinton, or McCain, whatever they say is nuanced.

A promising new search engine (updated)
I can still recall the day I first logged on to Google, then just the latest of a host of search engines. This morning I heard a news item about a new search engine: Cuil. After a very quick inspection, I'm impressed. It's fast and it's pretty—you get graphics as well as links. I'd welcome your comments about it and how well it meets your needs. Update, July 30: David...

I can still recall the day I first logged on to Google, then just the latest of a host of search engines. This morning I heard a news item about a new search engine: Cuil.

After a very quick inspection, I'm impressed. It's fast and it's pretty—you get graphics as well as links. I'd welcome your comments about it and how well it meets your needs.

Update, July 30: David Olive, a columnist for The Star in Toronto, is not impressed.

Webwriters, meet your great-grandfather
A fascinating article in The New York Times: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web. Excerpt: On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels...

A fascinating article in The New York Times: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web. Excerpt:

On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files.

He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough.

“The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

For more about Paul Otlet, visit Wikipedia.

But I still insist that the true father of the internet was none other than Mark Twain.

Why a Book About Blogging Fails
A few months ago I got a review copy of Blogwars, by David D. Perlmutter. Of course I was delighted, and I started to read it at once. Then I put it down. Today, facing a serious reading shortage, I picked it up again and made a real effort to get into it. It hadn't improved, but these stupid machines have taught me that we learn more from our mistakes...

A few months ago I got a review copy of Blogwars, by David D. Perlmutter. Of course I was delighted, and I started to read it at once.

Then I put it down.

Today, facing a serious reading shortage, I picked it up again and made a real effort to get into it. It hadn't improved, but these stupid machines have taught me that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes.

So what's wrong with a book by a highly successful writer and professor of journalism, on the subject of political blogs and their growing impact on American life?

Put briefly, it's a print-on-paper document that needs to be more like web text.

A major design problem
I can't blame Perlmutter for the design of his book, but design is a major problem. The body text appears in a reasonably legible serif font. But the paragraphs are absurdly long, and subheads appear rarely. When they do, they're cramped boldface, barely legible—with underlines.

Now, I've been telling my students since the mid-1990s that you don't underline boldface text. Robin Williams made that simple point in 1995 in The Mac is Not a Typewriter.

Worse yet, the book includes excerpts from blogs using vast swathes of sans serif text, much of it in italics (see pages 144-147 for a really bad example).

You can get away with sans serif in short paragraphs with short lines, but not in lines of 17 to 20 words—not on screen, and not on paper.

Much of Perlmutter's text offers some interesting observations on the effect of political blogging in the 2004 US presidential election. But by failing to exploit the style of effective web text, he effectively muffles himself and undercuts whatever he's trying to say about this medium.

How web text is changing print text
When I started to teach webwriting in the late 1990s, I tried to draw a distinction between the habits of print readers and those of online readers. As one who started reading print on paper in 1947, I'm very habituated to it indeed.

But Perlmutter's book has taught me that the web is actually changing all our reading habits. Short, concise web text, well laid out, has an impact we don't get over. When we go back to print on paper, we're too impatient to put up with long sentences and long paragraphs.

Some of my favourite political bloggers, like Glenn Greenwald, still haven't learned that. His posts are long, with endless paragraphs and tedious patches of italic quotations.

A blog like Power Line, whose politics I find regrettable, at least presents itself in short, well-designed paragraphs. (But Power Line should keep its text columns narrower, and use a serif font for body text.)

Greenwald is influential despite his print-oriented text. But he'd more influential if he turned his long-winded paragraphs into short, punchy statements.

Power Line doesn't persuade me, but at least I get its point in a hurry. And I recognize that its authors are trying to make their text readable.

I hope David Perlmutter does a new edition of Blogwars, preferably in time for the fall election. But I hope he gets an editor and a designer who know how to create a print analog of a website, so his readers will understand what he's trying to tell us.

A Forecast from 1994
Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was: NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich...

Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was:

NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU

One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich man, I had become a campaign mechanism—a way of reaching voters with a political message.

The age of the sandwich man, however, was fast ending. A few blocks away, a TV set stood in our living room. It carried little but Felix the Cat cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy westerns, and primitive variety shows, but as a medium it would change politics before I was old enough to vote.

Over forty years later, politicians have a new medium to deal with: the Internet. So far they are using it clumsily, treating it as an odd mix of print and TV. But just as they learned the lessons of television, they will learn how to campaign in cyberspace.

They’ll have their work cut out for them. Most sensible politicians, after lurking on the Net for a time, would prefer to campaign by throwing bottled leaflets into the Pacific rather than use the Internet.

Political discourse on the Net—at least in the Usenet newsgroups—is on a par with turf wars among the howler monkeys. Tribes of fanatics battle for control of newsgroups: gun nuts, anti-gun nuts, school voucherists, libertarians, semiliterate teenagers.

Some Netters can supply sustained, documented argument for their views, but no one else pays much attention. Instead the Net provides a steady diet of flame wars, newsgroup highjacking, and debates that digress from their original topics with dizzying speed.

It’s not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that’s equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They’re too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn’t encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it.

Well, earlier politicians learned to use new media or die. If they failed to adapt, their careers ended whether they were good politicians or not. (In Richard Nixon’s case, TV killed and resurrected him several times.) So the successful politicians of the early 21st century will indeed exploit the Net—probably more effectively than they have with television.

Most 1990s politicians, if they use the Net at all, treat it as an extension of print media. They have reason to do so. Most users see the Net as text: tiny, semi-legible words scrolling up their monitors. The resemblance to newspapers and magazines is there, however distorted. So politicians from Clinton on down have been pumping out electronic news releases, press-conference transcripts, and speech texts.

For a long time I was on one of Bill Clinton’s mailing lists. He sent me verbatim texts of every speech he made on education, welfare, and related social issues. He always began with a joke, and every joke triggered what the transcripts called (laughter). When I tried to unsubscribe, however, Clinton wouldn’t let me; the jokes and (laughter) and presidential eloquence kept coming.

Eventually I pried myself away, but not before I’d learned something about the Clinton administration’s attitude towards the Net. For all the yelling about the Information Superhighway, the metaphor at work was the small-town newspaper editor’s office. When you signed on to Clinton’s mailing list, you had little choice: you could pick social issues, foreign affairs, the economy—and that was about it. What you got was raw government-issue rhetoric.

A small-town editor, getting this stuff over the wire, would know how to adapt it. A presidential speech would undergo heavy rewriting and paraphrase, or supply a few excerpts for a local columnist, or fail to appear at all. The editor, knowing local readers, would present only as much of the speech as the readers could understand and respond to. Otherwise readers would start treating the newspaper like just another kind of junk mail with nothing to say to them personally.

Clinton’s releases ran into another problem, directly related to the medium of the computer screen: It doesn’t like long stretches of text.

A monitor screen packed full of writing is ugly and hard to read. Text works best on the screen when it’s short, even fragmentary—more like a caption than a paragraph. One-liners and bulleted lists can assert and describe, but they can’t really argue.

So no matter how funny the jokes in Clinton’s speeches, few Netters would trouble to scroll past the first screen or two.

The medium’s built-in hostility to text has evidently sunk in. More recently, Clinton and other politicians are trying to use the Net like TV itself. Thanks to interfaces like Mosaic and NetScape, computer users can now access home pages full of color graphics: the White House, the president’s smiling family, and so on.

But this approach limits the potential audience still more. To get these pretty pictures you need a big, recent computer and a fast modem (better yet, direct Net access), and you need to know how to use them. So the potential audience is a small group of affluent hobbyists, a few serious professionals, and some university students.

Even with snappy graphics, this kind of Net access is right back there with Felix the Cat on a 5-inch screen, or picking up Philadelphia on your crystal-set radio: Gee whiz, you can see the White House on your computer, even if the quality isn’t as good as on your TV. This kind of thrill has a short half-life.

Plenty of politicians are using the Net as an auxiliary postal service, receiving e-mail from their constituents and replying with boilerplate comments just as they do with snail mail. As a barometer of public sentiment, however, e-mail is dubious; again, the sources are few and demographically confined to a relatively well-educated and privileged social stratum. Only in a desperately tight race would Netters be likely to swing an election—assuming they all voted the same way.

A few politicos are venturing into cyberspace themselves. David Schreck, a member of the British Columbia provincial government, goes online to debate with local flame artists—but he’s on a local BBS, not the Internet, in such discussions. “I’ve been in touch with maybe four of my 27,000 constituents,” he says.

Granted that scores of lurking constituents may also read his comments as lurkers, he’s still right to describe his online activities as a hobby.

A Toronto candidate for city council, meanwhile, did go onto the Net even though the vast majority of his readers, living far outside his district, had no interest in his campaign. For his pains he suffered intense flaming and won only 4 per cent of the municipal vote.

So the Net at this point is an also-ran as a print medium. As a TV-like medium, it’s barely better than a test pattern. For all the millions reportedly joining the Net every month, it’s not really a mass medium, and therein lies both its weakness and its strength: it’s a medium for narrowcasting, not broadcasting.

A broadcast medium assumes (or imposes) common values among millions of essentially passive consumers. As a newspaper columnist, I reached over a quarter-million readers every week; a really inflammatory article might provoke two or three letters. Print is not interactive; neither are radio and TV, for all the popularity of talk shows.

But they are “public” in the sense that we share a sense of some kind of community with other consumers. Most of us watch TV with friends or family, or split up the paper and read it together at the breakfast table.

When we go on the Net, however, we go solo. The technology puts us a few inches from a monitor, and even if we’re in a computer lab we are on our own. We read highly public messages, but we do so in private; our responses, however public they may eventually be, feel private.

That’s one reason for the flame wars that keep breaking out. It’s a problem of “register”—finding the right words to talk about the right subject to the right person under the right circumstances.

When introduced to Queen Elizabeth, we don’t say: “Hey, Liz, great to meetcha, you look a lot younger than you do on TV.” When introduced to the 13-year-old who’s come to baby-sit, we don’t say: “I am deeply honored to make your acquaintance on this memorable day, your ladyship.”

Politicians making speeches on TV sound like pompous liars because they’re usually in an “oratorical” register suited to large groups of people within earshot. Franklin Delano Roosevelt scored politically with his radio-based “Fireside Chats” because he found the right register for what seemed like small-group face-to-face discussion with a mass audience. Ronald Reagan did something similar with TV, finding a register that worked on the small screen.

So if politicians are going to gain votes on the Net, they’re going to have to find a highly intimate register, reflecting the fact that millions of users are getting the message when they feel like isolated individuals, not like members of a larger group.

The Net, then, makes its users tough customers for a political marketer. You can’t spam the voters with a generic message; for every one you get through to, you anger a dozen others. You have to tailor the appeal as precisely as possible, on the basis of as much information as possible.

Doing a simple “finger” on every Netter wouldn’t help much. But it might well be possible to track significant numbers of users as they make their way through various newsgroups—especially if they post plenty of comments. If they hang out on alt.rush-limbaugh, that may tell you something.

But most Netters are lurkers, as passively unresponsive as most newspaper readers and TV watchers. Is a given lurker a Limbaugh fan, or a left-liberal onlooker morbidly fascinated by the group? Here’s where the medium’s interactivity offers politicians a big opportunity.

E-mail the Limbaugh posters with a political message. But don’t just sit back and wait for flames. Offer them (and the lurkers) some reward for responding with details about themselves: a slick little software application, for example, as a reward for filling out a questionnaire. Maybe it even comes with a Rush icon showing him with a halo or horns.

This gives you a start on establishing Net focus groups, which while small will reflect values of larger populations. Now the political marketers can begin to tailor their appeals more accurately.

Net culture, at this point in its development, is still hung up on the technology itself. Telephone and TV users don’t think much about the hardware they’re using, but Netters do. If appeals from politicians are technically slick, the subliminal message is that the politico is a happening dude, riding the electronic surf. (Not long ago, The New Yorker magazine was breathlessly reporting on how many of Clinton’s young staffers were running around with PowerBooks, as if that were reason in itself to endorse his policies.)

This attitude will change as millions of non-technical users move into cyberspace, but it will be a factor for several more years.

The appeals will also reflect the limits of the medium: not good for extended print, not great for video or audio, but combining elements of all of them. So Net propaganda will probably tend to look like a TV commercial: strong visuals, snappy sound bites, and minimal text.

But it will be aimed at a very small audience. The multimedia ad that comes to my computer may be strikingly different from the one that ends up on my neighbour’s. Part of the difference will be content: in the version I get, the candidate pushes commitment to excellence in education, while my neighbor gets promises of spending cuts.

More importantly, each ad will be personal. When I open up the e-mail message, I hear the candidate saying: “Crawford, I’ve got some news for you and your family.” What follows will offer more TV-style jolts than hard information, but it will also offer quick, easy interaction. A slide-show questionnaire: just point and click to register your views on gun control, abortion, illegal immigration. Then see how your answers stack up against the total so far registered. Want more information? Click again for more specific messages on those issues, the candidate’s personal resume, or a free, autographed copy of his latest speech or her last book.

This is personal campaigning on a level rarely seen these days, even among main-streeting small-town politicos. But it’s taking place in a medium that’s also very public. How do you avoid looking like a liar when Netters compare your different messages? In part, you just don’t openly contradict yourself, and while your message is personal it’s not very concrete. If glittering generalities are the stock in trade of public oratory, sweet nothings are the currency of this more intimate medium.

In other cases, the strategy will be to highjack public newsgroups, just as candidates often pack meetings with their own supporters. Even now, one or two people can take over a newsgroup and set its agenda by dominating the discussions, flaming opponents, and dragging every thread in the desired direction. A couple of dozen supporters should be able to dominate debate even more thoroughly.

None of this will be official, of course—just the natural behavior of ordinary citizens who happen to support the candidate.

Home pages, still relatively primitive, could become highly effective infotainment tools for politicians. A candidate could even create captive audiences: for example, he might donate computers to nursing homes, recreation centers, and libraries. Each computer would be already programmed to log on to the candidate’s home page, which would supply plenty of data on how the candidate has supported seniors, recreation programs, and libraries. It might also include software applications that would provide a running tally of the size of the national debt, or the number of seniors murdered in the last 24 hours.

Sometimes the computer might look and act more like a video game. Imagine two or three of them set up in an employee dining hall, offering entertainment as well as political information: a game, perhaps, in which the goal is to corner the candidate’s opponent and force him to admit how he voted on some crucial bill. Or guess how much your taxes have gone up since the incumbent took office, and if you’re within 10 per cent of the answer, you get an extra 15 minutes’ time on the computer. Too expensive to work? Maybe not, if the employer is willing to cover some of the computers’ cost as a campaign contribution.

Hackers and crackers could find themselves in a new golden age. Once upon a time politicians had to break into one another’s offices. Now they can get into one another’s databases. Lists of contributors and supporters would be there for the taking—and the burglars could also damage such lists or destroy them altogether.

Dirty tricks could get really dirty. Imagine a forged home page providing violent distortions of the candidate’s position and record, or campaign ads that really come from the opposition. Such “black propaganda” would be hard to fight; publicizing the forgery would only draw more attention to its lies.

E-mail bombings could flood the candidate’s server with thousands of junk messages, making it difficult or impossible to reach voters and staffers. A software giveaway, sabotaged with a virus, would infuriate potential voters. The same virus could also disable the candidate’s system.

Scurrilous rumors could travel the Net in seconds, as hard to stop as neutrinos but with much more impact. The candidate’s private e-mail could turn up in conveniently downloadable form at FTP sites outside the country.

All of these tactics would not only resonate in cyberspace but would gain enormous attention in other media. The dirty tricksters, with very little threat of punishment facing them, could be as nasty as they liked...while their political masters hypocritically complained about them and called for more controls over the Internet.

Despite these threats, politicians are likely to get into the medium for one reason: Other politicians. Hardware and software defenses will emerge to hold off the tricksters, and the first politicos to master the Net will enjoy a measurable advantage over latecomers. Mastery will come from recognition that this is not just electronic print or low-res TV, but a medium that can and should answer back.

Net propaganda can’t just hammer on voters who do nothing until election day. It has to provoke them into response after response, with each response helping to define the politician’s next step. Many of those provocations will be inane, patronizing or downright vicious. But for once the voters’ reactions may actually force the politicos to treat them like intelligent, informed citizens.

And for the politicians, that could be the Net’s most frightening threat of all.

Infobahn, Summer 1994