Writing for the Web

Nielsen on Website Readers' Reading Habits

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

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

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

50 Open Source Resources for Online Writers

Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers.

They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

The Politics of Cyberspace

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.

More spring cleaning

In Webwriting Resources, over on the left, I've removed some sites that hadn't been updated in several months. Other old sites are still there. Even though inactive, they offer some useful materials.

It's striking to see that most of the sites are lively and very up to date. If you're running a site of interest to webwriters, and you're not on the list, drop me a line.

US Democrats waging web war

Via Netcraft: Clinton and Obama XSS battle develops. Excerpt:

Following the recent cross-site scripting attacks against Barack Obama's website, Finnish security researcher Harry Sintonen has published an example of a cross-site scripting vulnerability on votehillary.org.

Sintonen's example submits a POST request to the Vote Hillary website and injects an iframe, causing the site to display the contents of Barack Obama's website. Unlike the Obama incident, which redirected the user's web browser, Sintonen's method retains the votehillary.org URL in the address bar while displaying the opposing website.

Sintonen told Netcraft that he was inspired by the recent Obama attacks and first examined Hillary Clinton's official website at www.hillaryclinton.com. Sintonen did not find any cross-site scripting vulnerabilities on this site, adding that it looked quite secure, but subsequently found XSS opportunities available on the Vote Hillary website. Sintonen lives in Finland and has no strong interest in US politics.

While the example exploits have so far been relatively benign (limited to redirecting a user to the opponent's website, for example), future cross-site scripting vulnerabilities found on political candidate sites have plenty of scope to be much more serious. Obama's and Clinton's websites both accept monetary contributions towards their campaigns, so cross-site scripting vulnerabilities could be leveraged to steal money and identities from supporters.

Read the post on the Netcraft site to follow the links.

A US newspaper abandons print

Via Isthmus/The Daily Page: The end of an era in Madison, Wisconsin. Excerpt:

Good luck, Cap Times. You'll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool.

The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed.

One thing's for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years will be gone. Online publishing is a fundamentally different proposition for both journalists and readers. Experts consider it a classic disruptive technology that reorders daily life for just about everyone it touches and destroys what was thought to be a durable economic model for the eclipsed technology.

Newspapers won't die off as quickly as slide rules did when calculators were introduced, but the changes under way are so epochal you'd be foolish to believe anyone who speaks confidently of what publishing will be like in 10 years.

"Nobody knows anything," as veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the secrets to successful movie-making. The newspaper business is even more in the dark as to how it will make its next buck.

Meanwhile, via the Editor & Publisher website: Steep Decline at NYT while WSJ gains. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine also comments on the Madison metamorphosis.

A lot of journalists are becoming webwriters, but they don't necessarily like the idea, according to this post by Amy Gahran on Poynter.org. And a lot of webwriters, whether they know it or not, are becoming journalists.

Spring Cleaning

I've just finished grading the last assignments of the semester...and of my 41-year teaching career. With a little more free time, I hope to spend more time learning about webwriting, and overhauling this site, which is about four years old.

As a first step, I've gone through the Web Writers and Editors list, updating a few links and dropping those that don't seem active. If you're an online writer or editor, and you'd like a link to your site, drop me a note.

And if you're already on the list, drop me a note about how things are going for you. Are you getting enough work? Enough interesting work? Learning about the business? Joining the French Foreign Legion for better pay and working conditions? Found any other good webwriting resources?

Whatever, let me know and I'll post your observations.

A Forecast from 1994

Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was:

NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU

One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich man, I had become a campaign mechanism—a way of reaching voters with a political message.

The age of the sandwich man, however, was fast ending. A few blocks away, a TV set stood in our living room. It carried little but Felix the Cat cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy westerns, and primitive variety shows, but as a medium it would change politics before I was old enough to vote.

Over forty years later, politicians have a new medium to deal with: the Internet. So far they are using it clumsily, treating it as an odd mix of print and TV. But just as they learned the lessons of television, they will learn how to campaign in cyberspace.

Clichés of Journalese

If you write for print or electronic media, some of these terms will make you wince, because you've probably used them: Journalese-English Dictionary (first edition).

Most are British, and a little unfamiliar to North Americans, but we have plenty. Our public figures don't just promise to do something: they vow to do it.

The cliché du jour (to use a cliché) in North America's blogosphere is "nuanced." Whether it's Obama, Clinton, or McCain, whatever they say is nuanced.

Way more news sites, way less news

Via The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith offers some cogent comments: Way more news sites, way less news. Excerpt:

Every year, a report is published called "The State of the News Media." It is researched and written by a think tank called Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it deals solely with the U.S. media.

This think tank was created by the journalism school at Columbia University; it is now funded by a private foundation based in Washington. The report is a summary of a comprehensive study of the kinds of news being disseminated by all American media sources, mainstream and marginal.

Its primary preoccupation, of course, recently at least, has been the effect on the news of the Internet and of "citizen" (that is to say, amateur) participation in the creation of America's informational landscape.

It always attempts to answer some big questions, particularly whether newsgathering is more reflective of reality when run by democratic principles or by elitist ones.

This year's report summarizes its conclusions as a few major trends. Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported.

In fact, there may even be less.

The simple explanation for this is that most websites simply repackage news found and written by the conventional media. In other words, reporters who are trained and paid to do the often dry work of gathering facts and interviewing people, or the dangerous work of visiting wars or disasters, provide the news stories, and the news sites gather them up and the bloggers comment on them.

But because of the commercial nature of news sites, the stories are often filtered by popularity. There is more and more technology available to enable editors to gather reader votes on the appeal of stories and to sort stories by their popularity.

This leads to a narrowing of the number of stories that are posted: The most popular ones get the most play.

Read the whole article, and follow the links.

Mediated Cultures

Thanks to the colleague who sent me the link to this very interesting site: mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university.

It's a showcase of the "Digital Ethnography Working Group" at Kansas State University, and it offers some dramatic examples of web communication...especially the "Explorations of Mediated Culture" video. The links on the main page are worth exploring.

Reading Obama

The Tyee has published my article Reading Obama, a review of his book The Audacity of Hope. It should have some interest for webwriters, whatever their politics.

The Branding of Barack Obama

Here's a fascinating article in Newsweek that web writers and editors should ponder: Why the Obama "Brand" Is Working. It's an interview with designer Michael Bierut. Excerpt:

How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing?

He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham.

If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged.

Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it's all reflected there too--all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system. 

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?

I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect.

Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, we get an intriguing analysis of the candidates' logos.

The New Online Omnivores

Last weekend I attended Northern Voice, a bloggers' conference in Vancouver. The Tyee has now published my comments on the event: The New Online Omnivores.

Nielsen on the Top Ten Application-Design Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen has a good Alertbox post: Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes.

Nielsen generally makes good sense, but I wish he would update his own Alertbox site. His links are helpful, and the basic black-on-white layout is inviting. The summary at the top is a good idea. He keeps most of his paragraphs short.

But the text stretches across the screen when it would be more readable and inviting in a narrower column. An average of 10 to 12 words per line seems to work best for webtext.

As Nielsen himself has taught us, we look for boldface subheads as navigation guides. But he uses boldface in the body of his paragraphs, which is distracting...and when a boldface phrase shares the line with an underlined blue link and regular text, the result is pretty messy.

Bloggers suffer government repression

It won't be news to most of us, but Reporters sans frontières can quantify it in their Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2007: Saying online what you think can get you in big trouble. Excerpt:

Government repression no longer ignores bloggers

The Internet is occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations. Several countries fell in the ranking this year because of serious, repeated violations of the free flow of online news and information.

In Malaysia (124th), Thailand (135th), Vietnam (162nd) and Egypt (146th), for example, bloggers were arrested and news websites were closed or made inaccessible.

“We are concerned about the increase in cases of online censorship,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“More and more governments have realised that the Internet can play a key role in the fight for democracy and they are establishing new methods of censoring it. The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.”

At least 64 persons are currently imprisoned worldwide because of what they posted on the Internet. China maintains its leadership in this form of repression, with a total of 50 cyber-dissidents in prison.

Eight are being held in Vietnam. A young man known as Kareem Amer was sentenced to four years in prison in Egypt for blog posts criticising the president and Islamist control of the country’s universities.

We in the West can't congratulate ourselves. Canada ranks only 18th in press freedom, and the US comes in at a forlorn 48th.

Not quite getting it

Via The New York Review of Books, an attempt to explain Blogs. It's a long article, mentioning ten books about blogging, but this is the author's key misunderstanding:

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop.

They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.

Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you.

Much of the article is a calm, patient explanation of what blogs are, intending for people who sincerely don't know. Both the quote above and that calm, patient explanation seem to me serious misunderstanding about writing for the web.

The review, Sarah Boxer, assumes that her readers need this background about blogging because they don't know anything about it. She assumes that bloggers don't provide this background because they've all already got it.

For some teenage blogger writing for an audience of six or seven, the background may indeed be there. But for anyone trying to gather and disseminate serious information through a blog, the background is always doubtful.

On my blog Writing Fiction, I see that a striking number of my visitors arrive on the site after googling "How many pages in a novel?" Whether or not they've written a novel, that question means they're novice novelists. They lack the exformation of more experienced writers.

Similarly, people visit my bird flu blog, H5N1, with wildly different levels of knowledge about the subject. Some are officials with the World Health Organization, others are epidemiologists, and most know nothing at all except that bird flu is supposed to be bad.

Apart from assuming a basic level of English reading ability, I don't expect anything from my readers. For both blogs I have to find some way to bring the newcomers up to speed without boring the experienced visitors. I really do feel responsible for my readers' education, and I don't want to turn anyone away.

So on H5N1 I provide an introductory page, showing the new visitor what's on the site. Currently, I'm also providing definitions of Indian words like lakh, crore, and panchayat, because they keep turning up in Indian newspapers' reports on bird flu.

On Writing Fiction, I keep responding to comments to the "How Many Pages" post, which I originally made three long years ago. I also provide a link to Write a Novel, a self-guided online course containing the basic materials now lost in the archives of Writing Fiction. (Look for it in the Writers' Resources list.)

Some blogs, like some graduate courses, can assume a cozy familiarity with little-known material. Shared exformation creates an intimate atmosphere, a feeling of belonging that newcomers may not share. If anything, they'll feel deliberately excluded.

But most webwriters, whether serious amateurs or professionals, can't afford to think about the happy few who share our private jokes and roomed with us in college. We have to reach as many people as possible, and to provide something useful for each of them.

So we have to write in simple, clear language. We have to format our material for easy navigation and response. We have to think about our visitors' needs, not our own egos. That, it seems to me, is the exformation that Sarah Boxer doesn't yet have.

A new resource in French

I'm very happy to have received a copy of L'écrit Web, by Joel Ronez. Even with my primitive reading ability in French, I can see it's a well-organized and well-designed book for webwriters. I'm putting Joel's site in the list of Web Writers and Editors.

The 2007 List of Banished Words

It wouldn't be a new year without Lake Superior State University's list of banished words.

I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

Holiday Wishes

Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog.

But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself:

Download recipe_for_pulla.pdf

My old friend Merlin and I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday and a new year full of surprises that make you laugh.

On Foggy Writing

Dave Wood wrote to me the other day:

I was somewhat aghast at finding one of my web pages coming in at a fog reading of 15+ - I'm just in the middle of revamping it now and am determined to have an index below 9.

I did find a glitch in a site you'd recommended: Readability.info. It wasn't accepting my files and seemed to convert them to a read-only in my own files. I had to re-start the computer to get rid of that setting. It may be local to my computer?

I did find another site that worked better in that it didn't require me to upload my files but accepted a paste: Gunning Fog Index.

I've had a similar problem with Readability.info. When I try to upload a Word file, it instantly tells me it found no sentences. Put in a URL, however, and equally instantly it provides a number of readability indices. I've written to the owner of the site, and will pass along his response. (Update: He tells me the problem arose after a switch of servers. Look for a fix after Christmas.)

In the meantime, while it's helpful to know the general readability of your website's text, you can do a lot just by following a few simple practices:

1. Keep text columns narrow.
Ideally, the longest line in a column should be 15 words. Ten would be better.

2. Keep words short.
"Magic" is better than "prestidigitation." "Idea" is better than "conceptualization."

3. Keep sentences short.
On some of my blogs, I excerpt articles from print media. Too often, especially in the first paragraph, a sentence goes on for well over 20 words. I don't rewrite such sentences, but I wish I could. Bulleted lists can often replace strings of words and phrases.

4. Keep paragraphs short.
In most fonts used on websites, six or seven lines should be enough for a paragraph. Even if it's a long, complex idea that belongs in a long paragraph, break it up. A long, solid mass of screen text will discourage too many potential readers.

5. Put a little white space between paragraphs.
A short line at the end of a paragraph isn't enough of a break. Just one hit on the Return key can make a world of difference in helping people read your text.

6. Put important words and phrases in "hot spots."
Your sentence's beginning and end are its hot spots. Here readers pay most attention and react most strongly to what they read. Hot spots cool off in sentences buried in mid-paragraph. Then the end of the last sentence becomes hot again.

So a paragraph starting with "There" or "It" has wasted a good hot spot.

7. Use bolded subheads to help navigation.
A subhead every few paragraphs gives readers an overview of the whole document. A numbered list like this one, with bolded and numbered lines, is also easier to understand.

8. Break these rules when you must.
Follow them too closely, and your writing style may start to sound dull and predictable. Too many short sentences (and bulleted lists) will give you too many hot spots. That will make you sound as if you're ranting.

The above text, pasted into the Gunning Fog site, turns out to have a Fog index of 7.396. Out of 517 words, 47 have three or more syllables. I did some revision while writing it, but 7.396 seems like a reasonable level of clarity.

A link to the Gunning Fog Index site is now in the Webwriting Resources list in the left-hand column.

When governments don't understand the web

Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.

Is the Kindle the Next Big Thing?

According to Farhad Manjoo at Salon, no: Amazon's Kindle won't spark your e-book fire. But it's a very interesting description of a gadget that's almost got it right.

An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media

Via Editor & Publisher, an excellent column by Steve Outing—an old friend and colleague with a lot of experience in online content. The experience hasn't always been happy, but Steve has learned (and taught) a great deal about it. Case in point: An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media.

Steve describes the shutdown of his own efforts to create an online community whose members would create most of the content, and then goes on to analyze similar issues elsewhere:

If you look at the content that's on Backfence.com (and you can, since the servers are still running; there's just no new content being added to the site), it's predominantly press releases from local community groups, or local event announcements. Backfence staff did contribute content, but often of the same variety. There was some great content on Backfence.com, but to my eyes the bulk of it was pretty dull.

I see the same thing when I look at YourHub.com. The editors of YourHub can easily point to some great content that's been posted to the sites. But just as with our Enthusiast Group sites, the overall experience is a lot of average stuff punctuated by a lesser amount of great content.

As destination sites, I don't think that Backfence or YourHub work. My company's sites didn't work, which is why in hindsight I realize that a much higher level of professional content needed to be added into the mix. Quality matters.

Key in on that word, "destination," for a moment. If you're operating an online service that's keyed to user or citizen content submissions, I encourage you to think about how to utilize that content beyond just a destination website.

I don't expect YourHub-like sites to ever become huge traffic draws if they rely too heavily on user submissions. The quality just isn't there for them to be interesting -- especially in an Internet environment where there is so much high-quality news and information available elsewhere, for free.

It's a fine article with plenty of insights that web content developers should reflect upon.

On Blurbs and Summaries

Via Poynter Online, a lively and link-rich article by Chip Scanlan: B is for Blurb, S is for Summary. Blurbs can be very effective at drawing readers into the whole story.