BlogWrite for CEOs Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well....
Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well.
Sir Tim Warns Us About Online Fraud Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt: The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness. His creation...
Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt:
The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.
His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.
But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way".
He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.
Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what."
The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.
A Freelance Job in Vancouver This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...
This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:
The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days. To learn more about our company please visit The Conference Publishers.
If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.
Where to Put the Links? Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question: Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant...
Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question:
Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant links at the foot of the page or in the right-hand margin. Another school of thought says no. You need to make it easy for readers to find the link as they read the main copy. If you place it anywhere else, many will miss it.
And here's my answer:
The blessing and curse of hypertext is that it can take you so many places.
In regular print-based text, we follow the writer's line of thought. That "line of thought" is a metaphor for a great deal of pre-writing: consulting sources, reflecting on them and on one's own preferences and principles, reacting to the actual ideas as they appear in the words the writer has drafted. The final version is like a good meal, with each course carefully prepared and served in the proper sequence.
In hypertext, we have scarcely sat down and opened our napkins before we're invited to jump up and visit the kitchen to confirm that oregano was indeed used in making the soup. Before we can enjoy the first bite of beefsteak, we're back in the slaughterhouse and from there to the feedlot.
This can be both informative and entertaining. We may learn a lot about what went into our meal, but we risk missing dessert, coffee, and liqueur...not to mention some good dinner-table conversation.
How Scholars Use Hypertext
It's helpful to see what scholars do with such links. You could say they invented the first hypertext in their annotations to earlier documents and the footnotes by which they cite their sources. These break the narrative also, but scholars manage to ignore the disruptions. They absorb the information and then check the footnotes.
In the online medium, the "footnotes" are links—not to the original sources, but to citations at the bottom of the document, which in turn lead to the sources. A typical example is a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Go visit it and come back for my comments.
Welcome back. You've probably noticed that the NEJM article is not designed to be read online. The text sprawls across the whole screen. We have to scroll forever to follow the narrative. (We do have the option of clicking through to see the report's tables.) A sensible strategy would be to print it out, read it in our favourite armchair, and then return to the computer to check the links to the sources. We can click on a footnote number and "rappel" down the screen to the footnote, and then go on to the online source.
Serving Readers and Users
This is a pretty good format for "readers"—those who use the Web as a convenient archive for print documents. For "users"—those looking for information to apply to their own documents, or just for entertainment—it can be a bit awkward. It's especially awkward for bloggers, as I've learned in running my own blogs.
Most bloggers are writing for users, "hit and run" visitors who arrive, grab a fact or comment, and surf on to somewhere else. Blog posts (and many other website texts) should therefore be fairly brief. If they do run long, like this one, it helps to put most of the post "below the fold" on its own page. The user can see two or three posts on one screen, and then decide which to follow onto the next page.
So on my own blogs, like H5N1, I'm quite happy to include the links to my sources within the text of the post, usually with an excerpt. Only the most dedicated visitors need to visit the original source, so the link to that source won't instantly distract them. They can read the gist of the post at a glance (or with a little scrolling). And then they can visit the source for the full story.
Other Options?
Links on the side are another option. A good service of any website is to supply links to related sites, and blogs usually provide them. This is a convenience, but it may be necessary to supply blurbs with those links as well—many surfers are hesitant to click through to a different site unless encouraged to do so. But these links tend to be "stand-alone," unrelated to the main posts: They stay put in a side column, while the main posts gradually move down the page and disappear.
No doubt you might design a page so that links stayed to one side of the main text, but it doesn't seem worth it. Readers will still print out the text and then return to the computer to check the sources. Users will still want to grasp the main points of the post and then (perhaps) click through to the links, whether they're in the text itself or off to one side.
So designing the links of a post depends on knowing the kinds of readers you're writing for, and then providing what those readers are most comfortable with.
This post itself is a compromise. I expect people to read it online, not as a printout, so I've included a number of subheads to break up the text and help navigation. And of course I've included my links in the text, not at the bottom.
Of course I'd love to hear other opinions, whether you agree or disagree. This is an interactive medium, after all.
American Zeitgeist The Tyee has published my review of American Zeitgeist, a documentary about the origins of the Afghan and Iraqi wars....
The Tyee has published my review of American Zeitgeist, a documentary about the origins of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
Are citizen-journalists just amateurs? Nicholas Lemann, in the current New Yorker, takes issue with many bloggers' conviction that they are doing the job the mainstream media are too complacent or arrogant to do. It's an entertaining piece, and in the online version you can of course visit the sites he mentions...and see what some blogger-journalists think of the article....
Nicholas Lemann, in the current New Yorker, takes issue with many bloggers' conviction that they are doing the job the mainstream media are too complacent or arrogant to do. It's an entertaining piece, and in the online version you can of course visit the sites he mentions...and see what some blogger-journalists think of the article.
An Intellectual Property Issue Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along: I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book. One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes...
Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along:
I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book. One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes on a yahoo e-group website (and admitted to it), and sent links to those recipes in an e-mail to the 2,610 members of that group, thus depriving me of who knows how many sales. I only have until
Thanksgiving to sell my book, after all.
I sent an e-mail to the group and the woman saying she was violating copyright law. She wrote back apologizing and saying she removed the files from the website. But for the period of time that they were up, who knows how many people downloaded those recipes and e-mailed them to others.
I went to the FBI's website, which has a division on internet crime. It said that not all of the complaints registered with them will be investigated, as they're sent to various agencies, and that if a matter is urgent, a complainant should contact local authorities. I then called the local sheriff's office and explained the situation. They sent a deputy over. Neither the phone person nor the in-person deputy had ever heard of the term "e-book." The deputy said this was a civil matter.
Do you know of any intellectual property lawyers who would take this case on contingency?
I told Judy I don't know of such lawyers, but perhaps some of the readers here will know of an affordable and effective way to estimate and recover damages.
In Judy's shoes, I'd join the e-group, explain the predicament my customer had put me in, and ask those who'd downloaded the recipes to send me something by way of compensation. But I wouldn't build my retirement plans around the anticipated revenue.
Directly Grabbing RSS Subscribers and Getting Syndicated Through Pheedo RSS Advertising Pheedo just released a new RSS advertising concept, called FeedPowered Advertising, that helps you generate new subscribers to your RSS feeds using RSS advertising, through Pheedo's RSS advertising network or through other ad networks.
The Key Facts
Their new RSS ad format ...
[a] Displays the latest content items from your RSS feed, including video content with direct "watch" links
[b] Allows the user to also add your content (directly from the ad) to del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Furl or e-mai it to a friend
How the New Format Integrates DM, PR and Brand
The implications of this are quite strong.
[a] The ad format allows you to syndicate your RSS content to targeted online media, displaying your content there directly to generate more brand awareness, build your credibility and get new readers by actually demonstrating your value
[b] Furthemore, the ad itself contains further syndication options that will virally spread your content through the key social networking sites
[c] The ad functions as a direct subscription generation tool, enabling you to quickly capture new subscribers through other sites ... and actually works towards increasing your conversion rate by first demonstrating the content and so making the subscription decision easier and more educated, thus generating better qualified subscribers/prospects
In essence, the ad format integrates PR, direct marketing and brand advertising.
Is it perfect? While it is an amazing idea, it does need some further refinement.
Further Improvements Needed
[a] Looking at their example on their site using Internet Explorer 7 shows that the feed subscription option in the ad is not highlighted through the IE7 native RSS Reader, making it less intuitive to subscribe
[b] The existing example is clearly targeted to RSS Aware users. But data shows that more than 80% of RSS users are not actually aware of using RSS. The ad format also need to include other subscription options, in addition to the RSS button, such as Add to MyYahoo!
[c] The ad also needs some space at the bottom to better entice viewers to subscribe, using enticing copy and perhaps bribing the viewers to subscribe by offering them a free whitepaper
[d] For direct marketers, the ad format should also allow an in-between data capture window, allowing the direct marketer to capture prospect information prior to being given access to the feed
[e] The next step would be for Pheedo to add additional metrics for advertisers, such as new subscriber retention and long-term customer conversion, and perhaps even the CPO.
If you want to check it out yourself, here's the screenshot (working version available here):
I'm a little biased here, because I've always dug Pheedo work, but in my opinion this is the best RSS advertising development yet ... and finally an RSS advertising tool to generate real results by taking advantage of the power of RSS.
Links to the New Edition Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group. In the next few days...
Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group
As I sit at a pavement cafe in Camps Bay drinking red Africa tea and hanging out with my son and his family, blogging has been the last thing on my mind.
Yesterday afternoon the LA Times announced a new model for the newspaper's reporting with the Internet at its center - go figure! 
Prevailing wisdom says you can't control the message anymore. User-generated content has a life of it's own and any attempt to make it into a marketing or PR vehicle will backfire.
Last year I made the comment that many PR professionals had their heads in the sand about new media and online PR.