Writing for the Web

A blast against clichés

Via The Independent, Robert Fisk brings up points that all webwriters should heed: Tanks roll and guns fall silent, but the clichés go on for ever. Excerpt (but read the whole article):

In real life, do we really call borders "porous" – even when, like the Durand line which divides Afghanistan from present-day Pakistan, few of the people living on the frontier believe it's real? 

In ordinary conversation, do ever refer to "iconic" or "defining moments", even though speech-writers like to sprinkle them around the lexicon of third-rate politicians? 

Indeed, politics provides some of our most woeful clichés. Presidents and prime ministers like to demonstrate "soft power" – a descendant of the old "hitting above our weight" – when they are not on the "campaign trail". 

I have a special "AAAAAGH" for "campaign trail". It was presumably coined in the United States (the "trail" being a giveaway) but it now applies to any election anywhere on earth. MPs or US senators or French presidents are always "fighting for their political life", their arguments often "compelling". Which means what, exactly? 

Every newly inaugurated American president since Truman, it appears, has "hit the ground running".

A panel on writing for the web

About a year ago, I took part in an Internet Marketing Conference Writing for Web Panel. Now a 40-minute video of the panel is online. I turn up about 28 minutes into the video, but I thought everyone had something useful to say.

An early review of Wolfram Alpha

Via the Guardian: Wolfram Alpha: the semantic web search starts to take shape. Excerpt:

Wolfram Alpha is indeed a search engine, but it's not pretending to be Google, and unlike so many of the search engines that I've had pitched to me over the years, it isn't trying to do "search". It's actually doing something more subtle: it's doing semantic search. That thing that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been banging on about. 

Whereas Google simply uses tweaked versions of its original "lots of people link to this page" algorithm. 

So don't write it off just yet. In fact don't write it off at all. The only thing that might hold it back is the cost of running it - but as Wolfram has had huge success with its software package Mathematica (which it used to build Alpha), it may be able to sustain the cost for a while. 

The potential benefits mean that Wolfram Alpha could become both more reliable than Wikipedia for straight factual questions (though it will never be as in-depth as Wikipedia), and that its usefulness will grow very rapidly as more and more pages on the web get the sort of XML markup that means they can distinguish between Ford, the car, and ford, the method of getting across a river.

It's as though the enormous overpromise made all those years ago by Ask Jeeves - that it would understand natural-language queries - is finally starting to come true.

The next Google?

Via The Independent in the UK, a report that's high on hyperventilation but still interesting: An invention that could change the internet for ever. Excerpt:

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before. 

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. 

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers. Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. 

Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose. 

Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big." 

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts. 

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. 

Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Well, I've signed up for their email newsletter. We'll see what develops.

Surfing a news tsunami

On Monday I published an article in The Tyee, Surfing a Swine Flu News Tsunami. It describes the events of three or four days spent tracking the rise of H1N1 at my blog H5N1. 

The experience has taught me something about the ability of the web to find and aggregate enormous amounts of information on a single subject—and about how hard it can be for a lone blogger to select and interpret the best items from that flood.

Copywriting on the web

Via AIGA, a very good post by Cathy Curtis: How the Web Made Me a Better Copywriter. She cites my opinions on bulleted lists in the first (1999) edition of Writing for the Web, and disapproves of them, but I hope I've a bit since then.

Housekeeping changes

With the fourth edition of Writing for the Web just a couple of weeks away, I'm making some changes in this site.

The most obvious is the shifting of posts to the left-hand column. This will make it easier for visitors using mobile phones to read new posts without having to scroll through all the lists that used to fill the column.

I've also reshuffled some of the other lists, and dropped one or two. The next step will be to check all the remaining links and make sure they still work. If your site should be in one of my lists, email me and I'll be glad to include you.

A new blog for a new book

I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make good workspaces for print projects, especially those requiring access to online resources. And once the book is out, the blog becomes a promotional space and a way to update and correct the text.

It's also now possible, of course, to write and publish online, so webwriters may find some of the content of the new blog useful for that purpose also.

A must-read for all webwriters

Via the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism: The State of the News Media 2009. It makes grim reading for journalists in all media (and not just Americans), but those of us who specialize in writing for websites really need to understand what's happening. An excerpt from the introduction:

Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. 

The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%. 

Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue—the model that financed journalism for the last century—will be inadequate to do so in this one. 

Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining.

Clay Shirky on newspapers and what comes after them

Everyone seems to be linking to Clay Shirky's long, thought-provoking post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable ... so I might as well too. An excerpt:

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. 

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs? 

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. 

The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. 

We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Sir Tim on the Web's 20th birthday

Via The Star: Inventor eyes future as the Web turns 20. Excerpt:

The inventor of the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday by encouraging fellow scientists at his former particle physics laboratory in Switzerland to look to the future. 

"The rate of development and innovation on the Web is actually getting faster and faster all the time," Tim Berners-Lee told a ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. 

"The Web is not all done. It's just the tip of the iceberg." 

Berners-Lee said he wasn't sure when exactly he wrote his first proposal for using the Internet to allow physicists to browse from page to page, share images and click on links to access other sites. 

"The exact date, I'll have to admit, is sort of a created one because I can't remember which day it was I actually wrote the darn thing," Berners-Lee told the celebration at the organization, known as CERN. 

"I probably was thinking of it all through February." 

He said it took a while to get an adequate computer and make the idea work, but that by December 1990 the Web was up and running – even if only between two computers at CERN. 

It expanded rapidly, however, taking advantage of the Internet, which had already been running more than 15 years. 

"It took off because, across the planet, random people got involved," Berners-Lee said. 

He said Web usage grew tenfold every year. 

"You think it's a great change to society that you can look things up on the Web," said Berners-Lee. But changes that are yet to come "are going to rock the boat even more."

More free online courses

Thanks to Kelly Sonora at Online Degree World for letting me know about 100 Free Open Courseware Classes on Journalism, Blogging and New Media. These look like extremely useful opportunities. They come from schools as diverse as MIT, Utah State, and my own Capilano University.

Jakob Nielsen reviews the Kindle 2

For a quarter of a century, almost, Jakob Nielsen has lamented the low resolution of text on the computer screen, and he's been right. Webwriters have created a whole new style of writing to deal with that problem.

Now he's written a Kindle 2 Usability Review (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). The summary:

Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.

Quite apart from the excitement of a new toy, the reported sharpness of Kindle 2 text has a portent for webwriters: What happens when the same sharpness is available for ordinary computer monitors and even mobile phones?

For other reasons, Amy Gahran sees great promise in the Kindle 2 for journalists. In another post, she links to a story arguing that the New York Times should give every subscriber a free Kindle, and to a review of the Sony PRS-700—a competitor of the Kindle.

100 free open-courseware classes for web workers

Thanks to Kelly Sonora for sending me the link to 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers. They're on a site with the unfortunate name of "Learn-gasm," but the courses themselves look really good. 

Most are MIT courses, but I'm proud to say that some are from Capilano University, where I taught—when it was just a college—for 40 years.

And as long as we're talking about open courseware, I might as well mention my own course, Write a Novel.

Obama: The first hypertext inaugural speech?

I'm not a huge fan of Stanley Fish, but today in the New York Times he did the best parsing I've seen of Barack Obama’s Prose Style. Excerpt:

... if you look at the text – spread out like a patient etherized on a table – that’s exactly what it’s like. There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck in, providing a pause, not a marker of logical progression. 

Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate. 

Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror. 

But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication. 

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.” 

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word.

Parataxis is what hypertext is all about: individual ideas, with no connections between them except those that the reader chooses to make. For much of my forty years as a teacher of writing, I pushed my students to make connections. 

Lead your reader from one idea to the next, I told them. That "Next" or "Therefore" or "However" would put your reader into the right frame of mind.

But for close to two decades, we have increasingly read hypertext rather than print text, and made our own connections between chunks. Obama's own prose style is quite at home in print, where he's talking to us one on one. When he's talking to a million people face to face, and a couple of billion around the world, he settles comfortably into parataxis. 

No one seems to mind.

Welcome to the White House—and the 21st Century (updated)

Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive.

Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart understood the web far better than any other politician on the planet. 

Now, on the day of his inauguration, we have an invitation: Welcome to the White House.

Webwriters, take notes. Barack Obama has raised the standard. 

I've discussed the site in more detail on The Hook, the politics blog of The Tyee.

Update: Jimmy Orr at the Christian Science Monitor has a good article on the site, written from his perspective as W's original website guy.

Obama's wisdom about email

Via CNN Political Ticker: Obama thinks he can keep his blackberry. Excerpt:

President-elect Barack Obama told CNN Friday he thinks he may be able to “hang onto” his BlackBerry after all. 

In an interview with CNN’s John King, he talked about the privacy issues that threaten his ability to maintain normal communications – and his optimism that, unlike his predecessor, he’s going to be able to keep using e-mail after he enters the Oval Office. 

Then there’s the BlackBerry. “You like these,” said CNN’s John King. “I was just with you before this, and you had a couple of them. And there are a lot of people who say, because this will end up in the presidential library, because you don't have privacy any more. Your life's about to change Tuesday noon. You have to give this up.” 

“Yes,” conceded Obama. 

“You going to do it?” asked King. 

“I think we're going to be able to beat this back,” Obama responded. “….I think we're going to be able to hang onto one of these. Now, my working assumption, and this is not new, is that everything I write on e-mail could end up being on CNN. So I make sure that — to think before I press ‘send.’”

If only the rest of us would think before we press "send."

The 2008 Weblog Awards

The polls are now open for The 2008 Weblog Awards: Polls Archives. Even if you're not a fan of such competitions, you may find some worthwhile blogs in unexpected places.

The Layoffs Will Be Blogged

Via The New York Times, a article by Claire Cain Miller: The Layoffs Will Be Blogged. Excerpt:

Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company - even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs. 

Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters, Mr. Musk said. 

“We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.” 

Blogging about staff cuts is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, where tech gossip sites pounce on every rumor and Web-savvy employees broadcast their every thought on personal blogs and Twitter feeds. 

Start-up companies in particular seem to the feel pressure to break bad news on their own blogs so that they can better control the message. 

Unlike more traditional firms, many of today’s Web companies were built on the mission of creating transparency for users. Executives have lived that mission, blogging about company successes. Now that bad times are coming, some of them feel the need to make that public, too. A blog post also comes across as more heartfelt than a press release with canned quotations.

Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages

Via the December 30 New York Times: Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages. Excerpt:

The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. 

Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States.

The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn. 

So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from the cellphone maker Nokia and the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool. 

Mr. Ram Prakash said Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech. 

“You’ve got to give them an opportunity to express themselves correctly, rather than make a fool out of themselves and forcing them to use English,” he said.

It's a fascinating article about an important development. I've added a link to Quillpad in the Webwriting Resources list.

Worst websites of 2008

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.

Indonesia pushes Wordpress for blogger's identity; Canadians beat up redheads

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.

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?

Slow blogging

Via The Canadian Journalism Project: Slooowww is a post about "slow blogging," which has been around since at least 2006 but isn't in any hurry to impose itself.

Slow blogging has its own Slow Blog and an advocate at Oxford University Press.

I sympathize with the concept. Over at H5N1, I may post ten or twelve items in a busy day. Apart from the demands on my time, I wonder how much impact any given post may have.

But it's essentially a clipping service, and seems to be valued as such. Here and on some of my other blogs, the posts come less often. But I hope each has some useful value.

The Global Language Monitor

Here's a site I've just discovered: The Global Language Monitor. It deals, among many other topics, with the language of the US presidential campaign just concluded.

For webwriters, this looks like an important site.