Most relevant news, techniques and tools for authors looking to promote their books inexpensively off and online. We refer to and utilize many of the Guerrilla Marketing techniques and have created some of our own geared specifically to book promotion and marketing. Our website is the ground where we put into practice our marketing efforts. Membership is FREE.
Firefox The IE Killer
posted by Insight for Authors at 11:45 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Business Blog Writing: Just Ask The Blog Squad
Written by 1000awesomethings
Munch lunch at a Chinese restaurant, brunch at a Holiday Inn, or dinner at a wedding reception, and chances are good you will come face to face with the The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet.
If you’re a Buffet Amateur like me, your pupils dilate and your mouth starts watering as soon as you spot the long table full of steam trays and criss-crossed table cloths. Soon it’s game on, and you grab a plate and pile it high with some bread, a few salads, and a couple rolled-up salamis or a bowl of Won Ton soup. For plate number two you tackle the entrees, scooping up sticky heaps of Kung Pao chicken, soggy French Toast, or paper-thin slices of roast beef soaking in dark mushroom gravy. Then you go back for a third plate, this one featuring a tipsy mountain of desserts - maybe some assorted squares, a thick, gummy slice of cheesecake, or some fluorescent pink, freezer-burned ice cream sliding around your plate.
Then as you lay bloated on your chair, your buttons bursting, your eyelids drooping, you face a final decision: Do you go back for The Fourth Plate?
The Fourth Plate is almost always a good idea before you do it and a bad idea afterwards. It’s the helping after the helping after. It’s the Greatest Hits Plate, a star-studded collection featuring the most popular items from Plate 1, 2, and 3, coming together for the reunion tour, the last hurrah, the final dance at the dinner table.
The Fourth Plate is also a famous mark of a Buffet Amateur, because it can be the sign of someone who realizes that Plate 2 was the best plate and they really just want more of Plate 2. For years, I scarfed down The Fourth Plate at the Indian buffet near my college. Buttery, pillowy-soft naans piled high, thick and creamy Butter Chicken, and spicy, simmering lamb in a hearty broth. It was just too much. I caved in every time and walked away with a curry-busting gut and a samosa hangover.
Since then I’ve been tutored on the art of mastering the all-you-can-eat buffet. Everybody’s got their own techniques, but here’s what I’ve learned over the years:
1. The Walk-Through. Don’t do what I used to do and blindly take a spoonful of everything. No, you’ve got to do your Walk-Through First. You’re a detective, popping open steam tray after steam tray, looking for recent fill-ups, traffic around popular items, and sure winners like omelet stations or a guy in a chef’s hat slicing big slabs of meat. Now’s also time for some Belly Space Analysis, where every item’s Tasty Deliciousness is weighed against it’s Projected Stomach Volume. Bread, soup, and salad rarely pass the Belly Space Analysis test. Skipping those means you just gained an extra plate and are on your way.
2. Drink Later. Sugary drinks just fill you up with carbs and cost extra. If you can postpone your Pepsi, then you’ll save belly space for the hot goods.
3. The Sampler. My dad is famous for the sampler plate. Within minutes of arriving he’ll dot a big white plate with small portions of every entree and proceed to say “Hmmm,” a lot while scooping up tiny forkfuls of each to see what will make the cut. You have to have willpower to pull off The Sampler, but it can be very rewarding. You know you aced it when your next plate is just piles of your two favorites. Good on ya.
4. Staggered Trips. If you’re with friends, don’t wait until everybody is done their first plate before uniformly filing up for a second trip together. No, go separately and act as each others eyes and ears out there - whats new, what’s hot, what’s fresh, what’s not. Your friends are doing their job when you see them running back to table to scream “They just brought out more coconut shrimp!” Also, be sure to designate someone at your table to be The Lookout. They should be seated with a clear view of the buffet and raise alarm whenever they see someone coming from the back with a new steam tray.
5. Big Plates Always. Be watchful of the small salad and dessert plates lurking about. Find your secret stash of full-size dinner plates and use them, know them, love them lots. The big plates will let you spread your meal around, and avoid piling things high, which generally results in meat gravy getting all over your salad.
6. One More Egg Roll. When the check arrives, take your time. Slow it right down now and see who still has room. Since you’ve been so busy scarfing your food and staggering trips, now really is the best chance to catch up with your friends. Then after ten or fifteen minutes, someone will likely cave in and say “Okay, one more egg roll.” This is buffet victory.
With these tips plus your personal experiences, you too can master the art of the all-you-can-eat buffet. After that, there’s really no stopping you. So eat all you can, my friend.
Eat all you can.
AWESOME!
Photos from: here, here, here, here, here, and here
posted by Insight for Authors at 2:15 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Blogging is Publishing
I’ve used both BANS and phpBay for my niche affiliate websites for a quite a while and I’ve experienced ups and downs of both scripts. Both scripts are excellent money makers, no doubt on that. I know that because both made money for me.
Because BANS and phpBay basically work similar to each other, I want to spend some time over the next few weeks to compare the two eBay affiliate scripts. In this post, I want to compare how both scripts deal with international traffic to your site.
Both BANS and phpBay were designed to work with international eBay sites. But the main difference is that BANS doesn’t have the capability to provide the international auction listings by Geo-targeting automatically. What I mean by this is that if you want to display Canadian auctions listings for Canadian visitors, you will have to build a separate BANS website just for that traffic.
With phpBay, you can build one affiliate website and make it display the international auction listings to the particular international traffic. In other words, if someone from United Kingdom visits your phpBay website, it automatically matches the Geo-IP and displays the auctions listings from eBay.co.uk instead of eBay.com.
This is a true advantage of phpBay over BANS. This translates more revenue from your eBay affiliate website. But in order to use this feature, you have to go through some steps describe on Brewsterware’s “Optimising your ebay affiliate profits” post.
Now, it took me a while to make it work right because the instruction was somewhat vague. The download file provided on that post didn’t work for me. Instead, when I used the default geo.php that came with phpBay, it worked. So use the downloaded file for country.php but use geo.php that comes with phpBay. Also, they should be placed inside “includes” folder. I don’t think that was mentioned in the post. If you have problems getting it to work, just let me know. I will help you setup correctly.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been blogging about niche marketing since 2005. After a few years, I’ve expanded my blog with several other blogs in subdomains because there was too much information to share in too many different categories. Since the move, I’ve lost my focus and got sidetracked. It was a big mistake.
Before it gets worse, I’m merging all my marketing-related blogs into a single blog. Everything’s imported to MarketingSyndrome.com, but all posts need to be reorganized into right categories. It might take me a few weeks to finish it. Everything’s in mess right now, so please use the search tool to find information on this blog.
I’m even bringing back the old design I’ve used last year to refresh my memory. :)
WordPress 2.6 was released today. I thought it was going to be released in August, but the developers really pushed it. WordPress 2.6 comes with a number of new features such as post revision tracking, live theme preview, Shift Gears, and Press This!
Watch the WordPress 2.6 release video to learn more about it.
As of today, .ME domains are open for public registrations. .ME has been the talk of the town because of its potential for internet users. .ME domains are just perfect for blogs. Just think about it, with a .ME domain you can register YOURNAME.ME.
.ME domains are not just limited to personal websites. It can be used as a catchy marketing tool. For example, verb-oriented domain names such as Contact.me, Drive.me, Date.me, Help.me, Love.me make perfect sense to visitors.
Well, you can purchase those premium domains only through the auction that’s coming up, but you can still get good .ME domain names if you hurry up.
It is little bit expensive and requires 2 years of contract, but it will be well worth your investment. I was going to register “Prayfor.me” but as I thought.. it’s gone. But I’ve found a couple of really nice domain names already. So register a .ME domain name now!
Another phpBay update. PhpBay 3.0.7 is released today and it’s available for download in your member’s area. It is a maintenance release so unless you need to use the new features, you don’t need to upgrade.
phpBay 3.0.7 release includes:
1) Fix on items displayed by country.
2) Added “free shipping” as a parameter.
3) Fixes a minor issue with the sidebar widget where the closing tag was not working correctly.
To update, upload all files and overwrite all existing files. Auction.php is not affected by this update.
posted by Insight for Authors at 4:45 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Tips for a New Website
Written by Ernesto
2008 is nearing its end, time to make a list of the top 10 BitTorrent sites that got the most traffic this year. The Pirate Bay is out in the lead followed by Mininova and isoHunt. TorrentSpy shut down earlier this year and is the most notable absentee.
The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa, backed up by visitor reports from some of the site admins.
It has been a good year for The Pirate Bay. The number of visitors spiked, despite efforts in Denmark and Italy to block access the site. Last month, The site celebrated its 5th anniversary, just after it broke the 25 million peers mark. At any given point in time, more than 25 million peers actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker.
Mininova has seen a steady rise in visitors in 2008, and more than 3 billion torrents were downloaded from the site in the past 12 months. In addition to user uploaded content, the Mininova team has started to focus more on premium publishers with their content distribution platform.
Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA and CRIA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. This year they partnered with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo, and just like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt added SSL encryption to the site, making it impossible for your ISP or the authorities to monitor users’ activities.
Torrentz.com, one of the oldest torrent sites around, celebrated its 5th anniversary in July. The site added a “verified torrents” feature this year, and inspired many other meta-search engines to do the same. Last month a “hacker” caused some problems after it took over the torrentz domain, but luckily this issue was resolved in a few hours.
TorrentReactor redesigned and optimized the site throughout 2008, which resulted in a significant increase in visitors. In addition, the TorrentReactor launched TorrentPrivacy, a service that allows BitTorrent users to download torrents anonymously.
After being forced to go offline following threats from the CRIA, Demonoid returned this April after 6 months of downtime. Since then it is business as usual, and most of the members returned quickly.
In December 2007 BTjunkie was forced to leave their ISP following a takedown notice from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This year there were no troubles, and the site continues to go strong.
In 2007, SumoTorrent quickly settled itself among the top torrent sites, and traffic continued to increase this year. The pop-ups and redirects are new though, and don’t make it one of the most convenient sites to browse.
BitTorrentMonster, BTmon for short, debuted in 10th place last year, and managed to climb a spot. Other than that, there is not much news surrounding the site.
Not much news about TorrentPortal this year either, but for BitTorrent sites that is usually a good thing. Traffic seems to be stable, although the site is not growing as fast as the other BitTorrent sites in this list.
In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.
In a response to this decision - and to ensure the privacy of their users - TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic, but still, it managed to make out top 10 list last year. March 2008 TorrentSpy owner Justin decided to shut down completely, and in May his company was ordered to pay a $110 million fine, which it will appeal.
posted by Insight for Authors at 9:18 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Reading speed on computer screens
As I'm pulling together materials for the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, I'm finding it hard to update one important issue.
For decades, it's been a given that reading text on a computer screen is harder than reading it on paper. The effect is that we read online text 25% more slowly than text on paper.
Jakob Nielsen made that critical point back in the 1990s, and said it was a problem with screen resolution. By 2009, he predicted, resolution would be equivalent to print on paper.
But Nielsen hasn't addressed the issue recently, and when I search for other studies, I find little or nothing published since about 2003. Can anyone point me to recent studies that indicate how quickly people read onscreen, using recent computers, compared to reading text on print?
Via The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt:
An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings.A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday.
In one message, he called Lee a "criminal" and described the GNP as a "department store of corruption."
In March, a lower court in Suwon acquitted Sohn on the grounds that he had never engaged in any political activities and that the internet has become a common means for citizens to express political opinions freely.
But the higher court ruled that he violated the election law, saying his messages go beyond a simple expression of opinions.
"The messages are clearly against Lee. The defendant is thought to have done so purposely considering he posted them 17 times. He appears to have been aware that his behavior could influence the result of the election," the court said.
Current law forbids the act of distributing documents, photographs and other materials aimed at influencing election results by supporting or opposing particular candidates and political parties 180 days prior to election day.
Civic groups criticize the law for restricting freedom of expression and political participation.
In a separate case, another high-court judge fined a defendant 800,000 won for criticizing Lee 30 times in messages on an internet message board, the court said yesterday.
Granted, the fines aren't serious—at least by North American and European standards. But if the same laws were applied to political blogs in the West, most countries could pay off their deficits with the fines extracted from bloggers.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't visited Web Pages That Suck in a long time, but I did so this evening. Not sure it was a good idea.
I clicked on the button for Contenders for worst web site of 2008 group 1, and no, it was not an exaggeration. I looked at the first ten, and decided not to go further.
While HavenWorks.com ranks just #3, it was the only site that made me cry out in horror.
Here we are, well into the web's second decade, and people are still creating sites like this?
Not only that, people are still providing Websites That Suck with plenty of new material.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This morning I took part in a panel on webwriting, part of the Internet Marketing Conference. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. One thing I learned: Miss 604, also known as Rebecca Bollwitt, is a very speedy blogger. She summed up my presentation (on concise text) with admirable concision and accuracy.
posted by Insight for Authors at 12:45 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
WordPress 2.6 Released
WordPress 2.6 was released today. I thought it was going to be released in August, but the developers really pushed it. WordPress 2.6 comes with a number of new features such as post revision tracking, live theme preview, Shift Gears, and Press This!
Watch the WordPress 2.6 release video to learn more about it.
As of today, .ME domains are open for public registrations. .ME has been the talk of the town because of its potential for internet users. .ME domains are just perfect for blogs. Just think about it, with a .ME domain you can register YOURNAME.ME.
.ME domains are not just limited to personal websites. It can be used as a catchy marketing tool. For example, verb-oriented domain names such as Contact.me, Drive.me, Date.me, Help.me, Love.me make perfect sense to visitors.
Well, you can purchase those premium domains only through the auction that’s coming up, but you can still get good .ME domain names if you hurry up.
It is little bit expensive and requires 2 years of contract, but it will be well worth your investment. I was going to register “Prayfor.me” but as I thought.. it’s gone. But I’ve found a couple of really nice domain names already. So register a .ME domain name now!
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.
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.
I’ve been blogging about niche marketing since 2005. After a few years, I’ve expanded my blog with several other blogs in subdomains because there was too much information to share in too many different categories. Since the move, I’ve lost my focus and got sidetracked. It was a big mistake.
Before it gets worse, I’m merging all my marketing-related blogs into a single blog. Everything’s imported to MarketingSyndrome.com, but all posts need to be reorganized into right categories. It might take me a few weeks to finish it. Everything’s in mess right now, so please use the search tool to find information on this blog.
I’m even bringing back the old design I’ve used last year to refresh my memory. :)
posted by Insight for Authors at 4:45 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
My Happy Crazy Life
posted by Insight for Authors at 5:03 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Magnetic Sponsoring Made Simple
posted by Insight for Authors at 7:30 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
8 + 2 Classic Writing Keys for Better Business Blogging
WordPress 2.6 was released today. I thought it was going to be released in August, but the developers really pushed it. WordPress 2.6 comes with a number of new features such as post revision tracking, live theme preview, Shift Gears, and Press This!
Watch the WordPress 2.6 release video to learn more about it.
Along with WordPress 2.6 release today phpBay also released its 3.0.6 version.
It is a minor update and if you do not use the sidebar widget, you don’t need this update installed. This update comes with a sidebar widget that displays auction listings of your choice. This feature was requested many times by the users over at the forum. I’m glad Wade really listens to his customers.
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.
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.
Thanks to Google, you can now view the real search volumes for your keywords with Google’s Keyword Tool. This is a great news for both webmasters and affiliate marketers like us. I’m so excited with this improvement.
As you can see from the screen shot, you can view the real search volumes for June and average search volume for the last 12 month period. Don’t miss the “Highest Volume Occured In” column at the end. With these stats, you can adjust your seasonal ad campaigns easily.
I just wanted to give you a quick update first before I go play with it more. Have fun!
Visit : Google Keyword Tool
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.
As of today, .ME domains are open for public registrations. .ME has been the talk of the town because of its potential for internet users. .ME domains are just perfect for blogs. Just think about it, with a .ME domain you can register YOURNAME.ME.
.ME domains are not just limited to personal websites. It can be used as a catchy marketing tool. For example, verb-oriented domain names such as Contact.me, Drive.me, Date.me, Help.me, Love.me make perfect sense to visitors.
Well, you can purchase those premium domains only through the auction that’s coming up, but you can still get good .ME domain names if you hurry up.
It is little bit expensive and requires 2 years of contract, but it will be well worth your investment. I was going to register “Prayfor.me” but as I thought.. it’s gone. But I’ve found a couple of really nice domain names already. So register a .ME domain name now!
Another phpBay update. PhpBay 3.0.7 is released today and it’s available for download in your member’s area. It is a maintenance release so unless you need to use the new features, you don’t need to upgrade.
phpBay 3.0.7 release includes:
1) Fix on items displayed by country.
2) Added “free shipping” as a parameter.
3) Fixes a minor issue with the sidebar widget where the closing tag was not working correctly.
To update, upload all files and overwrite all existing files. Auction.php is not affected by this update.
posted by Insight for Authors at 8:15 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
2009 Will Be the Year of Content Marketing...are you prepared?
posted by Insight for Authors at 11:18 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
posted by Insight for Authors at 11:45 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday
posted by Insight for Authors at 1:15 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video
posted by Insight for Authors at 4:45 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
FONTs for Windows and Macintosh
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.
posted by Insight for Authors at 9:30 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Keyword Tool
posted by Insight for Authors at 1:30 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
BEA Book Expo America: Smart Strategies for Independent Publishers
posted by Insight for Authors at 1:48 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
Written by lifehacker
In the past year we’ve highlighted hundreds of Windows apps aimed at making your life easier, boosting your computer productivity, and powering up your PC.
For those of you who weren’t able to keep up, here’s a look back at the most popular Windows downloads of 2008.
Keep in mind that this list is based on the popularity of posts we’ve published in 2008 only, regardless of the original release date of the app. Many were brand new this year, while others were solid updates to popular software. Here’s the full run-down of the 12 most popular Windows downloads of 2008:
Firefox 3 was easily one of the biggest events in software in 2008 regardless of what platform you run. We may be well on the way to Firefox 3.1 now, but if you’re looking to brush up on your Firefox 3 chops, be sure to check out the top 10 Firefox 3 features and our power user’s guide to Firefox 3.
Mojo makes it easy to download music from your friends’ iTunes libraries over the internet. Mojo comes in both free and premium flavors, but the free version offers plenty of functionality for the money. If you’re just getting started with Mojo, check out our guide to using Mojo.
It’s easy to convert or print Microsoft Word documents to PDF, but what about when you want to go the other way around? The aptly named Free PDF to Word Doc Converter does exactly that. (Original post)
If the limitations on Mojo aren’t for you, the open-source classic ourTunes-which downloads music from any shared iTunes library on your network-made a comeback earlier this year, as a new developer took up the reigns and continues to release updates. (Original post)
The popular PC colonic CCleaner (the first ‘C’ stands for Crap) pushed out a 2.0 release earlier this year and you were quick to update and enjoy the crap cleaning goodies. (Original post)
AVG Free Anti-Virus 2008 hit the streets in May, and the application that you voted the best antivirus applications for Windows was unsurprisingly popular. (Original post)
Microsoft released the first major service pack for Vista, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (x64 version), in March, and you were eager to download and update to the latest and greatest from Redmond. (Original post)
Looking to protect your browsing privacy or access US-only content from outside the US? HotSpot Shield received a lot of attention in ‘08 from users looking to do that and more. (Original post)
Quick Media Converter converts virtually any media file (audio or video) from one format to another. The application has an emphasis on simplicity: Just drag and drop a file you want to convert onto the app, click the icon of the device you’re converting for, and let Quick Media Converter take care of the rest. (Original post)
Freeware application DExposE2 is a clone of Mac OS X’s Expose feature for Windows XP and Vista, providing an attractive, innovative interface for switching and managing windows in Windows. Check out the original post to see a video DExposE2 in action.
Instantaneous file syncing was huge in 2008, with free, cross-platform application Dropbox leading the pack. Dropbox boasts web-based version control, fast and instant syncs, and a dead-simple setup. Among other things, Dropbox makes for the perfect password syncer. (Original post)
Open-source application Launchy has long been a favorite of savvy keyboarders looking for quick app launching in Windows, but a saucy newcomer called Executor hit the ground running when it was released earlier this year. Check out our original post for a more detailed rundown of what makes Executor so impressive.
\
Want to free yourself from the shackles of iTunes but still want full functionality from your iPod? Sharepod is a lightweight iTunes alternative that runs directly from your iPod, so it’s with you whenever and wherever you plug in your player. (Original post)
Whether or not your favorite Windows download of ‘08 won out in the popularity contest, let’s hear more about your favorite download of the year in the comments.
posted by Insight for Authors at 4:33 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
How to write an effective copy
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.
I’ve been blogging about niche marketing since 2005. After a few years, I’ve expanded my blog with several other blogs in subdomains because there was too much information to share in too many different categories. Since the move, I’ve lost my focus and got sidetracked. It was a big mistake.
Before it gets worse, I’m merging all my marketing-related blogs into a single blog. Everything’s imported to MarketingSyndrome.com, but all posts need to be reorganized into right categories. It might take me a few weeks to finish it. Everything’s in mess right now, so please use the search tool to find information on this blog.
I’m even bringing back the old design I’ve used last year to refresh my memory. :)
Along with WordPress 2.6 release today phpBay also released its 3.0.6 version.
It is a minor update and if you do not use the sidebar widget, you don’t need this update installed. This update comes with a sidebar widget that displays auction listings of your choice. This feature was requested many times by the users over at the forum. I’m glad Wade really listens to his customers.
As of today, .ME domains are open for public registrations. .ME has been the talk of the town because of its potential for internet users. .ME domains are just perfect for blogs. Just think about it, with a .ME domain you can register YOURNAME.ME.
.ME domains are not just limited to personal websites. It can be used as a catchy marketing tool. For example, verb-oriented domain names such as Contact.me, Drive.me, Date.me, Help.me, Love.me make perfect sense to visitors.
Well, you can purchase those premium domains only through the auction that’s coming up, but you can still get good .ME domain names if you hurry up.
It is little bit expensive and requires 2 years of contract, but it will be well worth your investment. I was going to register “Prayfor.me” but as I thought.. it’s gone. But I’ve found a couple of really nice domain names already. So register a .ME domain name now!
posted by Insight for Authors at 5:00 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
posted by Insight for Authors at 7:30 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
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 Olive, a columnist for The Star in Toronto, is not impressed.
I haven't visited Web Pages That Suck in a long time, but I did so this evening. Not sure it was a good idea.
I clicked on the button for Contenders for worst web site of 2008 group 1, and no, it was not an exaggeration. I looked at the first ten, and decided not to go further.
While HavenWorks.com ranks just #3, it was the only site that made me cry out in horror.
Here we are, well into the web's second decade, and people are still creating sites like this?
Not only that, people are still providing Websites That Suck with plenty of new material.
This morning I took part in a panel on webwriting, part of the Internet Marketing Conference. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. One thing I learned: Miss 604, also known as Rebecca Bollwitt, is a very speedy blogger. She summed up my presentation (on concise text) with admirable concision and accuracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Via the Jakarta Post: Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID.
The Department of Communication and Information has sent a formal request to blog hosting site Wordpress to cooperate in the investigation of a blogger allegedly behind a blog containing a comic of Prophet Muhammad.
Telecommunication Technology director general Cahyana Ahmadjayadi said legal processing was to continue regardless of the blog's shutdown.
"This is considered as a cybercrime," Ahmadjayadi said, as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.
"Even in its terms of services it's clear that hate speech isn't allowed," he said, adding that he is confident the identity of the blogger would eventually surface.
"If Wordpress declines to disclose the blog owner's identity, we will trace the person ourself," said Ahmadjayadi, referring in particular to the National Police's digital forensic lab.
But it's not a simple issue of repressive Indonesians versus free-spirited bloggers. What happens if such a post leads to someone's being hurt or killed?
It's just happened here in British Columbia thanks to Kick a Ginger Day, a half-witted online prank that led to some redheaded kids being assaulted by their classmates. The BC Teachers' Federation is highly angry, and I don't blame them.
posted by Insight for Authors at 9:30 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Viral Marketing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
posted by Insight for Authors at 9:45 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
SES Chicago V ideo Interviews
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.
posted by Insight for Authors at 11:00 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Personal Stories on Your Business Blogs: the fine line
posted by Insight for Authors at 11:15 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
SES Chicago V ideo Interviews
posted by Insight for Authors at 12:00 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
10 Great Things About 2008: Feeling gratitude for business
posted by Insight for Authors at 2:45 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Add My Blog To Your My Yahoo! Page
posted by Insight for Authors at 6:18 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Google, You Open or Closed? Make Up Your Mind Then Call Us
Via the Jakarta Post: Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID.
The Department of Communication and Information has sent a formal request to blog hosting site Wordpress to cooperate in the investigation of a blogger allegedly behind a blog containing a comic of Prophet Muhammad.
Telecommunication Technology director general Cahyana Ahmadjayadi said legal processing was to continue regardless of the blog's shutdown.
"This is considered as a cybercrime," Ahmadjayadi said, as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.
"Even in its terms of services it's clear that hate speech isn't allowed," he said, adding that he is confident the identity of the blogger would eventually surface.
"If Wordpress declines to disclose the blog owner's identity, we will trace the person ourself," said Ahmadjayadi, referring in particular to the National Police's digital forensic lab.
But it's not a simple issue of repressive Indonesians versus free-spirited bloggers. What happens if such a post leads to someone's being hurt or killed?
It's just happened here in British Columbia thanks to Kick a Ginger Day, a half-witted online prank that led to some redheaded kids being assaulted by their classmates. The BC Teachers' Federation is highly angry, and I don't blame them.
Via The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt:
An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings.A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday.
In one message, he called Lee a "criminal" and described the GNP as a "department store of corruption."
In March, a lower court in Suwon acquitted Sohn on the grounds that he had never engaged in any political activities and that the internet has become a common means for citizens to express political opinions freely.
But the higher court ruled that he violated the election law, saying his messages go beyond a simple expression of opinions.
"The messages are clearly against Lee. The defendant is thought to have done so purposely considering he posted them 17 times. He appears to have been aware that his behavior could influence the result of the election," the court said.
Current law forbids the act of distributing documents, photographs and other materials aimed at influencing election results by supporting or opposing particular candidates and political parties 180 days prior to election day.
Civic groups criticize the law for restricting freedom of expression and political participation.
In a separate case, another high-court judge fined a defendant 800,000 won for criticizing Lee 30 times in messages on an internet message board, the court said yesterday.
Granted, the fines aren't serious—at least by North American and European standards. But if the same laws were applied to political blogs in the West, most countries could pay off their deficits with the fines extracted from bloggers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This morning I took part in a panel on webwriting, part of the Internet Marketing Conference. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. One thing I learned: Miss 604, also known as Rebecca Bollwitt, is a very speedy blogger. She summed up my presentation (on concise text) with admirable concision and accuracy.
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 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.
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.
posted by Insight for Authors at 8:03 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Frank Kern Audio and PDF Leaked to Public
posted by Insight for Authors at 9:45 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
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 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.
Via the Jakarta Post: Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID.
The Department of Communication and Information has sent a formal request to blog hosting site Wordpress to cooperate in the investigation of a blogger allegedly behind a blog containing a comic of Prophet Muhammad.
Telecommunication Technology director general Cahyana Ahmadjayadi said legal processing was to continue regardless of the blog's shutdown.
"This is considered as a cybercrime," Ahmadjayadi said, as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.
"Even in its terms of services it's clear that hate speech isn't allowed," he said, adding that he is confident the identity of the blogger would eventually surface.
"If Wordpress declines to disclose the blog owner's identity, we will trace the person ourself," said Ahmadjayadi, referring in particular to the National Police's digital forensic lab.
But it's not a simple issue of repressive Indonesians versus free-spirited bloggers. What happens if such a post leads to someone's being hurt or killed?
It's just happened here in British Columbia thanks to Kick a Ginger Day, a half-witted online prank that led to some redheaded kids being assaulted by their classmates. The BC Teachers' Federation is highly angry, and I don't blame them.
In his Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw argues that News websites should make more use of cartoons (and infographics). He describes how a cartoon on OJR got 40,000 hits from around the world. The cartoon was also widely translated.
It's a point worth considering, especially for webwriters and bloggers who deal with worldwide audiences.
As I'm pulling together materials for the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, I'm finding it hard to update one important issue.
For decades, it's been a given that reading text on a computer screen is harder than reading it on paper. The effect is that we read online text 25% more slowly than text on paper.
Jakob Nielsen made that critical point back in the 1990s, and said it was a problem with screen resolution. By 2009, he predicted, resolution would be equivalent to print on paper.
But Nielsen hasn't addressed the issue recently, and when I search for other studies, I find little or nothing published since about 2003. Can anyone point me to recent studies that indicate how quickly people read onscreen, using recent computers, compared to reading text on print?
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.
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.
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.
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 The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt:
An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings.A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday.
In one message, he called Lee a "criminal" and described the GNP as a "department store of corruption."
In March, a lower court in Suwon acquitted Sohn on the grounds that he had never engaged in any political activities and that the internet has become a common means for citizens to express political opinions freely.
But the higher court ruled that he violated the election law, saying his messages go beyond a simple expression of opinions.
"The messages are clearly against Lee. The defendant is thought to have done so purposely considering he posted them 17 times. He appears to have been aware that his behavior could influence the result of the election," the court said.
Current law forbids the act of distributing documents, photographs and other materials aimed at influencing election results by supporting or opposing particular candidates and political parties 180 days prior to election day.
Civic groups criticize the law for restricting freedom of expression and political participation.
In a separate case, another high-court judge fined a defendant 800,000 won for criticizing Lee 30 times in messages on an internet message board, the court said yesterday.
Granted, the fines aren't serious—at least by North American and European standards. But if the same laws were applied to political blogs in the West, most countries could pay off their deficits with the fines extracted from bloggers.
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.
I’ve used both BANS and phpBay for my niche affiliate websites for a quite a while and I’ve experienced ups and downs of both scripts. Both scripts are excellent money makers, no doubt on that. I know that because both made money for me.
Because BANS and phpBay basically work similar to each other, I want to spend some time over the next few weeks to compare the two eBay affiliate scripts. In this post, I want to compare how both scripts deal with international traffic to your site.
Both BANS and phpBay were designed to work with international eBay sites. But the main difference is that BANS doesn’t have the capability to provide the international auction listings by Geo-targeting automatically. What I mean by this is that if you want to display Canadian auctions listings for Canadian visitors, you will have to build a separate BANS website just for that traffic.
With phpBay, you can build one affiliate website and make it display the international auction listings to the particular international traffic. In other words, if someone from United Kingdom visits your phpBay website, it automatically matches the Geo-IP and displays the auctions listings from eBay.co.uk instead of eBay.com.
This is a true advantage of phpBay over BANS. This translates more revenue from your eBay affiliate website. But in order to use this feature, you have to go through some steps describe on Brewsterware’s “Optimising your ebay affiliate profits” post.
Now, it took me a while to make it work right because the instruction was somewhat vague. The download file provided on that post didn’t work for me. Instead, when I used the default geo.php that came with phpBay, it worked. So use the downloaded file for country.php but use geo.php that comes with phpBay. Also, they should be placed inside “includes” folder. I don’t think that was mentioned in the post. If you have problems getting it to work, just let me know. I will help you setup correctly.
The Tyee has published my article Winning Cyberspace in '08. Excerpt:
... the sudden advent of interactive media has changed propaganda into a two-way street, a conversation, a screaming match -- and a rock concert. One-way media and interactive media are themselves interacting, creating a political environment unlike any before it.
The campaign of Barack Obama is not just thriving in this environment -- it's defining 21st-century campaign politics.
This morning I took part in a panel on webwriting, part of the Internet Marketing Conference. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. One thing I learned: Miss 604, also known as Rebecca Bollwitt, is a very speedy blogger. She summed up my presentation (on concise text) with admirable concision and accuracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
posted by Insight for Authors at 12:15 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
Content is King on a Website
posted by Insight for Authors at 1:03 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
BEA Book Expo America: Smart Strategies for Independent Publishers
posted by Insight for Authors at 4:33 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
posted by Insight for Authors at 7:30 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
links for 2008-12-01
posted by Insight for Authors at 11:45 PM
|
0 comments
links to this post
How To Make An Absolute Fortune in the Information Products Business by Shawn Casey
From Stealth Health
Bring out the laughter from within.
What is the greatest reward of being alive? Is it chocolate, sex, ice cream, tropical vacations, hugs from children, a perfect night’s sleep, or the satisfaction of a job well done? A thousand people, a thousand different answers. But one supreme pleasure that spans all people is laughter.
Little can compare to the feeling of a deep, complete, heartfelt laughing spell. No matter your age, wealth, race, or living situation, life is good when laughter is frequent.
Life is also healthier. Research finds that humor can help you cope better with pain, enhance your immune system, reduce stress, even help you live longer. Laughter, doctors and psychologists agree, is an essential component of a healthy, happy life.
comstockcomplete Laughter is one of life’s greatest pleasures!
As Mark Twain once said, “Studying humor is like dissecting a frog — you may know a lot but you end up with a dead frog.” Nonetheless, we’re giving it a try. Here are 19 tips for getting — or growing — your sense of humor, based partly on the idea that you can’t be funny if you don’t understand what funny is.
1. First, regain your smile. A smile and a laugh aren’t the same thing, but they do live in the same neighborhood. Be sure to smile at simple pleasures — the sight of kids playing, a loved one or friend approaching, the successful completion of a task, the witnessing of something amazing or humorous. Smiles indicate that stress and the weight of the world haven’t overcome you. If your day isn’t marked by at least a few dozen, then you need to explore whether you are depressed or overly stressed.
2. Treat yourself to a comedy festival. Rent movies like Meet the Parents; Young Frankenstein; Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; This Is Spinal Tap; Animal House; Blazing Saddles; Trading Places; Finding Nemo. Reward yourself frequently with the gift of laughter, Hollywood style.
3. Recall several of the most embarrassing moments in your life. Then find the humor in them. Now practice telling stories describing them in a humorous way. It might take a little exaggeration or dramatization, but that’s what good storytelling is all about. By revealing your vulnerable moments and being self-deprecating, you open yourself up much more to the humorous aspects of life.
4. Anytime something annoying and frustrating occurs, turn it on its head and find the humor. Sure, you can be angry at getting splashed with mud, stepping in dog poop, or inadvertently throwing a red towel in with the white laundry. In fact, that is probably the most normal response. But it doesn’t accomplish anything other than to put you in a sour mood. Better to find a way to laugh at life’s little annoyances. One way to do that: Think about it as if it happened to someone else, someone you like — or maybe someone you don’t. In fact, keep running through the Rolodex in your head until you find the best person you can think of to put in your current predicament. Laugh at him, then laugh at yourself!
5. Read the comics every day and cut out the ones that remind you of your life. Post them on a bulletin board or the refrigerator or anywhere else you can see them frequently.
6. Sort through family photographs and write funny captions or one-liners to go with your favorites. When you need a pick-me-up, pull out the album.
7. Every night at dinner, make family members share one funny or even embarrassing moment of their day.
8. When a person offends you or makes you angry, respond with humor rather than hostility. For instance, if someone is always late, say, “Well, I’m glad you’re not running an airline.” Life is too short to turn every personal affront into a battle. However, if you are constantly offended by someone in particular, yes, take it seriously and take appropriate action. But for occasional troubles, or if nothing you do can change the person or situation, take the humor response.
9. Sign up to receive the Top 10 list from David Letterman every day via e-mail. You can find it at www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow.
10. Spend 15 minutes a day having a giggling session. Here’s how you do it: You and another person (partner, kid, friend, etc.) lie on the floor with your head on her stomach, and her head on another person’s stomach and so on (the more people the better). The first person says, “Ha.” The next person says, “Ha-ha.” The third person says, “Ha-ha-ha.” And so on. We guarantee you’ll be laughing in no time.
11. Read the activity listings page in the newspaper and choose some laugh-inducing events to attend. It could be the circus, a movie, a stand-up comic, or a funny play. Sometimes it takes a professional to get you to regain your sense of humor.
12. Add an item to your daily to-do list: Find something humorous. Don’t mark it off until you do it, suggests Jeanne Robertson, a humor expert and author of several books on the topic.
13. When you run into friends or coworkers, ask them to tell you one funny thing that has happened to them in the past couple of weeks. Become known as a person who wants to hear humorous true stories as opposed to an inpidual who prefers to hear gossip, suggests Robertson.
14. Find a humor buddy. This is someone you can call just to tell him something funny; someone who will also call you with funny stories of things he’s seen or experienced, says Robertson.
15. Exaggerate and overstate problems. Making the situation bigger than life can help us to regain a humorous perspective, says Patty Wooten, R.N., an award-winning humorist and author of Compassionate Laughter: Jest for the Health of It. Cartoon caricatures, slapstick comedy, and clowning articles are all based on exaggeration, she notes.
16. Develop a silly routine to break a dark mood. It could be something as silly as speaking with a Swedish accent (unless you are Swedish, of course).
17. Create a humor environment. Have a ha-ha bulletin board where you only post funny sayings or signs, suggests Allen Klein, an award-winning professional speaker and author of The Healing Power of Humor. His favorite funny sign: “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
18. Experiment with jokes. Learn one simple joke each week and spread it around. One of Klein’s favorites relates to his baldness: “What do you call a line of rabbits walking backward? A receding hare line.”
19. Focus humor on yourself. “Because of my lack of hair,” Klein says, “I tell people that I’m a former expert on how to cure baldness.”
posted by Insight for Authors at 3:03 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
What Are Pay Per Click Reports?
posted by Insight for Authors at 7:00 AM
|
0 comments
links to this post
I'm the CEO/Founder of Guerrilla Marketers Cafe - Free Book Promotion Site, Where Authors and Readers Mingle. I'm passionate about helping others succeed.
