The Global Language Monitor
The Global Language Monitor
Here's a site I've just discovered: The Global Language Monitor. It deals, among many other topics, with the language of the US presidential campaign just concluded. For webwriters, this looks like an important site.
Here's a site I've just discovered: The Global Language Monitor. It deals, among many other topics, with the language of the US presidential campaign just concluded.
For webwriters, this looks like an important site.
The 2008 Weblog Awards
The polls are now open for The 2008 Weblog Awards: Polls Archives. Even if you're not a fan of such competitions, you may find some worthwhile blogs in unexpected places.
New PageRanks Coming
Matt Cutts said on his blog that we should see a new Google Toolbar PageRank update over the next few days. He also mentioned that Google will be lifting some old penalties on websites. I’m not quite sure which one he’s referring to, but I think we will see some happy faces soon. To [...]
Matt Cutts said on his blog that we should see a new Google Toolbar PageRank update over the next few days. He also mentioned that Google will be lifting some old penalties on websites. I’m not quite sure which one he’s referring to, but I think we will see some happy faces soon.
To check your PageRank, you can use one of the online PageRank tools, but there’s a PageRank checker that I want to recommend to you. It’s called PaRaMeter. It is a free desktop software that tracks PageRanks on your websites. Instead of typing out a URL at a time, you can store all your domain information and have PaRaMeter update PageRank. It’s a neat software.
Download PaRaMeter and check your PageRank.
People Are Getting Banned from EPN, but Why?
EPN (eBay Partner Network) has been actively sending out account termination letters to the publishers. The termination looks something like this… “After reviewing your account transactions, we determined that your account has been generating non-bona fide transactions related to new registered users. This violates our Code of Conduct and breaches the agreement between us. Your [...]
EPN (eBay Partner Network) has been actively sending out account termination letters to the publishers. The termination looks something like this…
“After reviewing your account transactions, we determined that your account has been generating non-bona fide transactions related to new registered users. This violates our Code of Conduct and breaches the agreement between us. Your account will be terminated immediately and no pending commissions will be paid to you. You are not permitted to rejoin the eBay Partner Network.
Almost all of the publishers who was banned claim that they’ve done nothing wrong, but I found a pattern from their explanation. People who got banned from EPN usually purchased traffic from unknown sources. I don’t know if this triggered a flag, but I think this is why their account was banned; Not from purchasing the traffic, but from the quality of traffic generate from these traffic brokers.
Like I said, I don’t know the definite answer, but it seems like purchasing traffic to your EPN affiliate website is a big risk. Don’t do it. If you really want to do it, you should filter purchased traffic with a landing page. I think that should be safe.
Please share your thoughts. Why these people are getting banned from EPN without an apparent reason? I hope EPN gives out a warning first before closing an account.
A new blog for a new book
I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make good workspaces for print projects, especially those requiring access to online resources. And once the book is out, the blog becomes a promotional space and a way to update and...
I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make good workspaces for print projects, especially those requiring access to online resources. And once the book is out, the blog becomes a promotional space and a way to update and correct the text.
100 free open-courseware classes for web workers
Thanks to Kelly Sonora for sending me the link to 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers. They're on a site with the unfortunate name of "Learn-gasm," but the courses themselves look really good. Most are MIT courses, but I'm proud to say that some are from Capilano University, where I taught—when it was just a college—for 40 years. And as long as we're talking about open...
The tools of propaganda
Via Poynter Online: Here's your handy-dandy propaganda detector. Excerpt: No politician, Republican or Democrat, would admit he or she is in the propaganda business. And no journalist I know would admit to being an enabler of the propaganda efforts of a particular political party. Like it or not, every scripted moment of every convention, every syllable of every campaign speech, is an act of political propaganda. It follows that to...
Via Poynter Online: Here's your handy-dandy propaganda detector. Excerpt:
No politician, Republican or Democrat, would admit he or she is in the propaganda business. And no journalist I know would admit to being an enabler of the propaganda efforts of a particular political party.
Like it or not, every scripted moment of every convention, every syllable of every campaign speech, is an act of political propaganda. It follows that to cover politics responsibly, reporters must come equipped with a tuned-up, turbo-charged propaganda detector.
In an anthology of essays on language, I stumbled upon a pamphlet titled "How to Detect Propaganda," published in 1937 by a short-lived organization called the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.
As you can imagine, the years leading up to World War II frothed with propaganda. The Institute, co-founded by Clyde R. Miller of Columbia University, was an early advocate of what we now called "critical literacy."
The pamphlet begins, "If American citizens are to have clear understanding of present-day conditions and what to do about them, they must be able to recognize propaganda, to analyze it, and to appraise it."
Seventy-one years later, the lessons are as relevant as ever. I was pleased to see the IPA's propaganda devices mentioned in Poynter, because I tried for decades to teach them to my students. With political websites like memeorandrum working as propaganda geysers, we all need to be aware of what they're spouting.
On the same topic, I recently published an article on Blogs for Election Junkies in The Tyee.
The Layoffs Will Be Blogged
Via The New York Times, a article by Claire Cain Miller: The Layoffs Will Be Blogged. Excerpt:Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company - even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs. Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip...
Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company - even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs.
Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters, Mr. Musk said.
“We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.”
Blogging about staff cuts is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, where tech gossip sites pounce on every rumor and Web-savvy employees broadcast their every thought on personal blogs and Twitter feeds.
Start-up companies in particular seem to the feel pressure to break bad news on their own blogs so that they can better control the message.
Unlike more traditional firms, many of today’s Web companies were built on the mission of creating transparency for users. Executives have lived that mission, blogging about company successes. Now that bad times are coming, some of them feel the need to make that public, too. A blog post also comes across as more heartfelt than a press release with canned quotations.
Sir Tim on the Web's 20th birthday
Via The Star: Inventor eyes future as the Web turns 20. Excerpt:The inventor of the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday by encouraging fellow scientists at his former particle physics laboratory in Switzerland to look to the future. "The rate of development and innovation on the Web is actually getting faster and faster all the time," Tim Berners-Lee told a ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research....
The inventor of the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday by encouraging fellow scientists at his former particle physics laboratory in Switzerland to look to the future.
"The rate of development and innovation on the Web is actually getting faster and faster all the time," Tim Berners-Lee told a ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
"The Web is not all done. It's just the tip of the iceberg."
Berners-Lee said he wasn't sure when exactly he wrote his first proposal for using the Internet to allow physicists to browse from page to page, share images and click on links to access other sites.
"The exact date, I'll have to admit, is sort of a created one because I can't remember which day it was I actually wrote the darn thing," Berners-Lee told the celebration at the organization, known as CERN.
"I probably was thinking of it all through February."
He said it took a while to get an adequate computer and make the idea work, but that by December 1990 the Web was up and running – even if only between two computers at CERN.
It expanded rapidly, however, taking advantage of the Internet, which had already been running more than 15 years.
"It took off because, across the planet, random people got involved," Berners-Lee said.
He said Web usage grew tenfold every year.
"You think it's a great change to society that you can look things up on the Web," said Berners-Lee. But changes that are yet to come "are going to rock the boat even more."
Welcome to the White House—and the 21st Century (updated)
Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive. Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart...
posted by Insight for Authors at 10:15 AM
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