Visit the Book Publicity Gallery to see Documents and Photos of Successful Book Publicity Tours and Information. Visit this link for a whole gallery full of scans from the NY Times and Publisher's Weekly.
How we read online Via Slate: Lazy Bastards: How we read online.. It's based on Jakob Nielsen's principles, and it's old stuff to veteran webwriters, but it could be useful in explaining to others why some webtext succeeds and other webtext fails. In this connection, see also Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the July/August 2008 Atlantic.
Via Slate: Lazy Bastards: How we read online.. It's based on Jakob Nielsen's principles, and it's old stuff to veteran webwriters, but it could be useful in explaining to others why some webtext succeeds and other webtext fails.
In this connection, see also Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the July/August 2008 Atlantic.
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.
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.
Internet Audiences Growing: How Will You Respond?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.
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.
Million Dollar Product Creation Secrets just released!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.
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 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
FONTs for Windows and MacintoshFree Bonus GiftsiPodder.org : What is podcasting?How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video 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.
American Red Cross Disaster Relief via AmazonHow To Transfer Tapes50 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.
Carl Galletti RecommendsArielle Ford, Publicist biography 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.
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.
Examples of Really Good BulletsCopywriting Course
So Android has arrived with the announcement of the T-Mobile G1. The HTC-manufactured phone certainly has a few nice touches, despite its lack of multi-touch (and with T-Mobile’s particular variant, no accelerometer).
