Viral Marketing

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

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

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.

Generating Revenue Through Advertising


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.

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 ..

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.

links for 2008-12-10
Buzz Marketing for Technology: C Level Tweeters (tags: CEO CMO twitter c-level) Vacation Deprivation Survey Facts and Vacation Ideas at Expedia.com "Despite earning the least amount of annual vacation days, Americans will leave an average of 3 days unused—totaling more...

Nielsen on Website Readers' Reading Habits
Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in...

Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary:

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in your reactions to his argument.

George Orwell Blogs
What a resource! The Orwell Diaries are the online journals of one of the 20th century's greatest writers, published 70 years to the day after he wrote them. I've put a link to them in the Webwriting Resources list.

What a resource! The Orwell Diaries are the online journals of one of the 20th century's greatest writers, published 70 years to the day after he wrote them. I've put a link to them in the Webwriting Resources list.

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 ..

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.

The planetary (and interplanetary) internet
Via The Guardian, an optimistic argument by Vint Cerf, one of the architects of the original internet: A founding father of the web says it's come a long way, but its potential for worldwide change can and will be greater still. Excerpt: It's amazing how quickly those of us with internet access have come to take for granted the remarkable amounts of information we have at our disposal, but we're...

Via The Guardian, an optimistic argument by Vint Cerf, one of the architects of the original internet: A founding father of the web says it's come a long way, but its potential for worldwide change can and will be greater still. Excerpt:

It's amazing how quickly those of us with internet access have come to take for granted the remarkable amounts of information we have at our disposal, but we're only seeing the beginnings. The bulk of human knowledge remains offline. As more of us get access to the internet, more of the world's information will find its way online.

The web is already making strides toward becoming truly global. While I was chairman of ICANN, one of the organisations that helps ensure that the internet works uniformly around the world, we adopted rules to allow the system of domain names to accommodate non-Roman characters, making the web more accessible to people whose languages use other scripts, such as Arabic, Korean or Cyrillic.

There are improvements in automatic language translation tools and, in particular, the field that we call machine learning. It is already possible to do a Google search and explore the results in English across web content in 23 different languages, from Czech to Hindi to Korean. Speakers of any of those languages can now explore content on the web written in any of the others.

The technology isn't perfect yet, but it's rapidly improving. Even in its present form, it's easy to imagine a not-too-distant future in which automatic translation will allow two people in the world to message one another in real time, each experiencing the chat in his or her tongue. Just imagine what a significant step that will be.

Cerf predicts that even space probes will be built to use the internet. I predict that such probes will need major spam filters.

More seriously, webwriters should begin to think about writing effectively in more languages than just English. Some languages are "wordier" than English; others are more concise. Do readers of Chinese or Arabic scan a computer screen the way English readers do? I wish I knew.

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.

Link popularity and tools for link building
Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

Everything you wanted to know about Copyrights