Writing for the Web

Obama: "My message is simple"—but is it simplistic?

Via Smart Politics: "My Message is Simple": Obama's SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year. Excerpt:

For the third consecutive State of the Union Address, Barack Obama spoke in clear, plain terms. 

And for the third straight Address, the President's speech was written at an eighth-grade level. 

In Obama's own words: "My message is simple." 

But was it too simplistic? 

A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama's 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level. 

Obama also delivered the second lowest scoring address in 2011 (at an 8.1 grade level) and the sixth lowest in 2010 (at an 8.8 grade level). 

The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. 

Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores. 

Smart Politics ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on each of the last 70 State of the Union Addresses that were delivered orally by presidents before a Joint Session of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt. 

Excluded from analysis were five written addresses (by Truman in 1946 and 1953, Eisenhower in 1961, Nixon in 1973, and Carter in 1981) and two addresses that were delivered orally, but not by the President himself (Roosevelt in 1945 and Eisenhower in 1956). 

The vast majority of State of the Union speeches were delivered in writing prior to FDR. 

Each of Obama's three addresses are among only seven of 70 in the modern era that were written shy of a 9th grade level, and among the six that have averaged less than 17 words per sentence. 

Obama's 2012 and 2010 addresses averaged 16.6 words per sentence with his 2011 address coming in at 16.8. 

Other low-scoring addresses on the Flesch-Kincaid scale over the decades are George H.W. Bush's 1992 address, Harry Truman's 1951 and 1952 addresses, and Lyndon Johnson's 1965 address. 

Obama's speeches are a continuation of a general pattern that finds as State of the Union Addresses have perhaps become more and more political, they have been written more and more simplistically.

This seems to me to be misplaced anxiety. As I've often commented, the King James version of the Book of Ecclesiastes is at the third-grade level of readability. But no one complains that it's "simplistic." 

Writing at a lower grade level is actually a major challenge for all writers, and especially for web writers. If your content is good and you're writing at a lower grade level, you can reach the poor readers and everyone with good reading skills as well. And if your content is bad or weak, writing at a "higher" grade level takes you only to a higher grade of bullshit.

Some supplementary materials for my book

I should have re-posted these materials after the last reorganization of this site (and the site needs another update soon!). In any case, here they are. They include a PowerPoint slide show, some PDFs, and several Word files.

Download Exercise on Education

Download Exercise on Teaching

Download Exercise Work Habits

Download Towards An Interactive School (PDF)

Download W4WLinksList

Download Webwriting

Download Webedit01 (PDF)

Download Webedit02 (PDF)

SOPA: Sites go dark as part of anti-piracy law protests

Via BBC News: Sopa: Sites go dark as part of anti-piracy law protests. Excerpt:

Thousands of internet sites are taking part in a "blackout" protest against anti-piracy laws being discussed by US lawmakers. 

The Wikipedia encyclopedia and blogging service WordPress are among the highest profile pages to remove material. 

Google is showing solidarity by placing a black box over its logo when US-based users visit its site. 

The Motion Picture Association of America has branded the action as "irresponsible" and a "stunt". 

Visitors to Wikipedia's English-language site are greeted by a dark page with white text that says: "Imagine a world without free knowledge... The US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia."

It provides a link to more details about the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa). 

If users try to access its other pages via search sites, the text briefly flashes up before being replaced by the protest page. However, people have been sharing workarounds to disable the redirect. 

Global protest 

WordPress's homepage displays a video which claims that Sopa "breaks the internet" and asks users to add their name to a petition asking Congress to stop the bill. 

"The authors of the legislation don't seem to really understand how the internet works," the site's co-founder, Matt Mullenweg told the BBC. 

Across the globe, several Pirate Party sites have been taken offline. The political parties - which advocate reform of copyright laws - took the action in the UK, Spain, Sweden, Argentina, Canada and elsewhere. 

Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, has replaced the game's website with a protest message The news recommendation site Reddit, the online magazine Boing Boing, the software download service Tucows and the German hackers' group the Chaos Computer Congress also removed access to their content. 

The tech news site Wired covered its headlines and pictures with black boxes which were only removed when covered with the cursor. 

The US news website Politico estimated that 7,000 sites were involved by early Wednesday morning.

Can you over-link a web news story?

According to Justin Martin at Poynter.org, the answer is yes. His argument: Why Christian Science Monitor stories have too many links, wrong ones. Excerpt:

I often don’t read my own articles in The Christian Science Monitor. The volume of hyperlinks the publication drops in their copy is just too distracting. Consider this Op-Ed on volunteerism among Millennials. 

Not only does it contain no fewer than 28 links, but among them are a number of highly disruptive, full-line links to Monitor content, screaming things like, “RELATED: Top 4 obstacles for young people – and how to cope.” The all-caps grabber and full-line disruption is more befitting an ad for a used-car dealer than the innards of a respected news provider. 

This one article contains five full line-break links to Monitor articles, and a sixth pasted after the writer’s bio. Every one of the 28 hyperlinks connects readers to Monitor content; readers aren’t afforded a single axon to outside information. The reason the article is littered with so many hyperlinks, a Monitor editor told me, is that the publication uses a computer program which scours copy and inserts links beneath words like “Tulsa,” “Harvard,” and “Twitter,” which direct readers to past Monitor stories. 

These links are not placed to provide readers with the richest evidence and information accrued during newsgathering for the story at hand. The Monitor tries hard to keep its readers contained in its site. On many occasions I’ve submitted Op-Eds to The Monitor containing links to information and evidence I think readers will find helpful; the links also support the integrity of my reporting. These links, though, don’t make it past the publication’s self-containing software, in part due to technical limitations. But that’s not all. 

“We also don’t have the manpower to vet and shepherd through links that our contributors might ask us to include,” Monitor editor John Yemma told me in an email. 

“We do favor links to our own journalism, since we invest heavily in it, are confident about its quality, and want to invite readers to engage more deeply with the Monitor,” he said. “We weigh all opinions — as we will yours — in our ongoing effort to improve our presentation of news.”

I can understand the Monitor's interest in drawing readers to related Monitor stories; it helps to boost on-site traffic. But it can be overdone. The function of links in a news story should be to document sources and strengthen arguments—not to lure readers in front of "related" stuff with new ads.

On some issues, however, you may have a real case for linking to related reports. On The Tyee, we regularly link to earlier articles because we keep exploring the same political issues, such as inequality, in the light of new events and evidence. But we usually limit such links to three or four, in a sidebar.

Ideally, links in a web article should enhance the value of the article without sending the reader off to get lost in a labyrinth of hypertext.

A Literary History of Word Processing

Via The New York Times, a reminder of how quickly we forget the machines and programs that changed our lives: A Literary History of Word Processing. Excerpt:

The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” 

The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time. 

Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s. 

“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”

It's an exquisite irony that documents created on such machines, with such programs, had lifetimes far shorter than that of, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A new direction in webwriting

Via The Blognostifier, a blog run by Weh-Ming Cho in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the ad that has transformed web writing overnight: Some long overdue Kijiji Action. Excerpt:

Do you like shoveling snow? Then stop reading this and go back to your pushups and granola because you are not someone that I want to talk to. 

Let’s face it, we live in a place that attracts snow like Magnetic Hill attracts cars, only that ain’t an illusion out there. That’s 12 inches of snow piling up and, oh, what’s that sound? Why it’s the snow plow and it’s here to let you know that it hates you and all the time you spent to shovel your driveway. Did you want to get out of your house today? Were you expecting to get to work on time? Or even this week? 

You gave it your best shot. You tried to shovel by yourself and I respect you for that. I did it, my parents did it, some of my best friends did it. But deep down inside, we all wanted to murder that neighbor with the snowblower who was finished and on his second beer while you were still trying to throw snow over a snowbank taller than you are.  

So, here we are. You could murder your neighbour, which could ensure that you won’t need to shovel a driveway for 25 to life, but there are downsides to that too. What to do?  

Here’s the deal. I have a snow blower and I want you to own it. I can tell you’re serious about this. It’s like I can almost see you: sitting there, your legs are probably crossed and your left hand is on your chin. Am I right? How’d I do that? The same way that I know that YOU ARE GOING TO BUY THIS SNOWBLOWER.

This ad breaks most of the rules of webwriting, especially concision. Never mind. The ad got over 500,000 hits, and his blog had over 100,000 hits by November 24. This evening he was interviewed by Carol Off of CBC Radio's As It Happens program, a tribute paid to a new medium by an old one.

Mr. Cho is onto something, and I plan to keep an eye on him.

Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

Via the blog NeuroTribes, a wonderful article: The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face. Now I know whose universe I've been living in for almost thirty years. Excerpt (but read the whole post):

Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. 

Jobs was determined to come up with something better for his sleek new machine, having been impressed by the grace of finely wrought letterforms in calligraphy classes he audited at Reed College, taught by the Trappist monk Robert Palladino, a disciple of master calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds. (The lasting impact of Reynolds’ instruction can also be seen in the playful cursive of the seminal West Coast Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, making Reynolds and Palladino the human hyperlinks between desktop publishing and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.) 

For the Mac, Kare designed the first proportionally spaced digital font family that allowed text to breathe as naturally on the Mac’s white screen as it does in the pages of a book. The distinctive Jobs touch was upgrading the original monikers of these elegant typefaces from the names of train stations near Philadelphia — like Rosemont and Ardmore — to those of world-class cities like Geneva, Chicago, and New York.

Robert Fisk: The never-ending war against cliché and jargon

Via The Independent, Robert Fisk carries on The never-ending war against cliché and jargon. Excerpt:

Even the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury is now, according to its presumably literate publicists, "an attractive space" – when surely "is attractive" or merely "attractive place" would have made more sense. Last week, I even found a "workshop space" available at a conference, thus combining two of my most hated words in one phrase. 

The British Museum, I note, is advertising "interactive [sic] workshops" on 11 November. Stay away, O readers. Workshops are for carpentry. 

Even old clichés are constantly being revived. "Crackdown" died for a while, but is now in daily use for an "Israeli crackdown" or a "Syrian crackdown" or a Cameron "crackdown" on crime (presumably of a less lethal kind). 

A writer in The Lawyer said last week that lawyers were "up in arms" about a website. My God, I used to write in the Sunday Express about villagers who were "up in arms" about proposed motorways that would cut through their "greensward" – and that was more than 40 years ago! 

I fear we will always have to live with this trash. I am constantly advised of boring academic conferences whose participants will hold "plenary sessions" – as if they were at the Big Three talks at Yalta or Potsdam. 

The Irish Times (again) tells me of New York City Fire Department families who are only now "coming to terms with" their 9/11 tragedies. After which they will presumably be expected to "move on". 

Cameron added a new version of this when he last week spoke of "an international agenda that should be progressed" over Libya. Which PR idiot decided to use "progressed" in his speech? Or was it Cameron, the PR man himself? 

It goes on and on. Sewage turns into "raw sewage" when people decide to swim through it on the Thames – "treated sewage" being, I suppose, beneficial to health – while politicians continue to "fight for their political life" and Africans die from the "deadly Ebola virus" (the non-deadly version probably being as harmless as the common cold). 

Someone at the Belfast Buildings Preservation Trust announced last month that "my background is in lobbying and public affairs, about encouraging people to think outside the box". I really – truly – believed that "thinking outside the box" had had a stake run through into heart. 

I thought another ghastly cliché had expired until I read that the television presenter Tim Lovejoy had found that Ho Chi Minh City was "outside of my comfort zone".

The blog I've been waiting for: Unnecessary Journalism Phrases

Just ran across Unnecessary Journalism Phrases, which battles expressions like "For all intents and purposes" and "moving forward." Highly recommended.

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse

Via The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes a fascinating account of Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse. Excerpt:

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox parc. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs. 

Xerox parc was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. 

To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. 

A visitor to parc, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. 

If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox parc—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

Forbes's new experiment in social media

Via Forbes.com, a very interesting article: Forbes Update: Our New Article Page for the Era of Social Media Is Now Live. My chief criticism: They're writing overlong sentences and paragraphs. Re-paragraphed excerpt (but read the whole thing):

Today, FORBES launched Phase 1 of an exciting new article page for the era of social media, the next step in the iterative rebuild of Forbes.com. 

It’s a key component of our unfolding strategy to put our authoritative journalism at the center of a social experience by providing reporters and writers with the publishing tools and audience data they need to connect with consumers. If you total up our FORBES staffers and contributors, we have 850 topic-specific experts using our platform to do just that. 

This new page has a history that reflects the dramatic changes in news consumption. A digital media colleague of mine, Jim Brady, saw early-stage concepts before its initial launch a few years ago. His reaction was immediate: “What you’re doing is turning Facebook inside out.” 

Jim’s description has always worked for me. If the core of Facebook is self-published community content and the sharing of links the community finds valuable, the core of FORBES is that valuable information with the community gathering around the expert who published it. 

Today’s article page release tightens the author-audience relationship and furthers our effort to build a scalable content-creation engine of individually branded journalists, authors, academics and other qualified contributors.

If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault

Thanks to Jay Rosen for linking to these sage observations from Anil Dash: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault. Excerpt (but read the whole post):

How many times have you seen a website say "We're not responsible for the content of our comments."? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. 

Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation: Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are. When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. 

If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them.

And always bear in mind the difference between a jerk and an asshole: The asshole knows what he's doing.

The top 100 really bad journalistic clichés

Via The Independent, John Rentoul offers The Banned List: Top 100. Anyone who writes for the media will cringe with guilt; I certainly did. The first ten:

1. It’s the economy, stupid. 

2. A week is a long time in politics. Or variants thereof, such as, “If a week is a long time in politics then a month seems an eternity.” 

3. What part of x don’t you understand? Although this one seems to have nearly died out already. 

4. Way beyond, or way more. 

5. Any time soon. 

6. “Events, dear boy, events.” (Except as the name of an excellent political blog, currently in abeyance.) 

7. Learning curve. 

8. Raising awareness. 

9. Celebrating diversity. 

10. In any way, shape or form.

Words we shouldn't say on the web

Via Columbia Journalism Review: Words We Shouldn't Say. Excerpt:

Last Friday New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren posted a list of “words we don’t say” to the magazine’s 6th Floor blog. The list was a leftover from former New York editor Kurt Andersen—he had left it tacked to the office bulletin board back in 1997—and contains words and phrases he felt were hackneyed, over-used, or, in Lindgren’s words, “phoney-baloney.” 

Fourteen years later, Lindgren says the list is still pretty useful as a guide to what should be cut from any decent magazine story. We agree. 

There’s “boast” (meaning have), “graced,” “flicks,” “penned”, “sport” (as a verb), “comely,” “celeb”, “New York’s finest,” “indie” (with an exception for indie rock), “duo,” “eponymous,” and a slew of others. (Should we add “slew” to the list?). And there’s a nice dart to those hoity-toity pre-Millenium types who overused the Frenchified “fin de siècle.” 

Today we’re asking what words should be added to that list. What stale and lazy words and phrases would you like your favorite news sources to kick to the curb send packing give the flick banish? And who are the worst offenders?

This post appeared on May 24; the comments are many and furious.

Iran plans "national" internet

Via the Wall Street Journal: In Censorship Move, Iran Plans Its Own, Private Internet. Excerpt:

Iran is taking steps toward an aggressive new form of censorship: a so-called national Internet that could, in effect, disconnect Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world. 

The leadership in Iran sees the project as a way to end the fight for control of the Internet, according to observers of Iranian policy inside and outside the country. 

Iran, already among the most sophisticated nations in online censoring, also promotes its national Internet as a cost-saving measure for consumers and as a way to uphold Islamic moral codes.

The Iranians seem to be blocking TypePad sites already. This would be a dramatically stupid step beyond that.

The article as luxury or byproduct

Via BuzzMachine, a very interesting post by Jeff Jarvis: The article as luxury or byproduct. Here's the intro:

A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process. 

* See the amazing Brian Stelter covering the Joplin tornado and begging his desk at The Times to turn his tweets into a story because he had neither the connectivity nor the time to do it in the field and, besides, he was too busy doing something more precious: reporting. (It’s a great post, a look at a journalist remaking his craft. Highly recommended for journalists and journalism students particularly.) 

(And aren’t you proud of me for not drawing the obvious and embarrassing comparison to Times editor Bill Keller’s Luddite trolling about Twitter even as his man in Twitter, Stelter, proves what a valuable tool it is?)

Jarvis goes on to talk about other examples such as the nonstop blogging and tweeting done by many reporters in the recent Canadian election. And it wasn't just the reporters—all kinds of ordinary folks were doing the same thing and joining the conversation at #elxn41 and #cdnpoli.

At The Tyee, we were covering the coverage, following the online campaigns with great interest.

Jarvis makes some very strong points in his post, though I wouldn't write off "the article" just yet. Until we can organize tweets and blog posts into meaningful mosaics, we're going to need writers who can concentrate on an issue long enough to make sense of it in 1500 to 3000 coherent words.

Wise advice for webwriters

Via YouTube: El portátil en casa. Vodafone. It's a little animation, with no narration in any language, and it made me sit up straighter at my keyboard. 

I've been using computers for 25 years without (so far) any serious injury—and that after over 30 years of banging away on typewriters. 

But I've also got two Aussie shepherds as my personal trainers, and they relentlessly haul me away from my desk for four or five walks a day. Without them, I'd have been a goner long ago.

Derek Miller's last post

Via his blog Penmachine, Vancouver blogger Derek K. Miller's Last Post. I am sorry to read it, but I admire his courage and his writing ability. He began it:

Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive. 

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

Getting a word in edgewise in a multitasking world

Via a tweet from Jay Rosen, a link to an article on A List Apart by Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney: Conversation is the New Attention. Maybe I'm making a point of this because when I last taught, in the spring of 2010, my students were slaves of their smartphones, and it wasn't pleasant. Excerpt:

You’re in a not-too-comfortable chair, in a large, slightly-darkened room. On stage, someone speaks into a microphone. Like your peers around you, you’ve come to hear someone speak about something you’re interested in. The speaker, in turn, has thought a lot about their subject—perhaps a lifetime’s worth. 

Looking around, you see that your neighbors aren’t entirely there. Some faces are turned downward, brightly underlit, gazes focused not on the speaker but on a glowing screen. Perhaps you, too, want to pull out your laptop or smartphone. Before long, it seems like much of the audience has their attention focused…elsewhere. 

Whether it’s a professional conference like SXSW or An Event Apart, a concert or a political speech, a college classroom or lecture hall, the dynamic between speakers and audiences is changing. Some argue they’re disconnecting. 

We've thought a lot about this problem, about how technology is changing how we pay attention and learn. We've paid special attention to professional conferences, where the lecture room dynamic can be so monotonous that some conferences actually brag that the best stuff happens in the halls. 

Speakers blame the audience’s insatiable addiction to being connected and multitasking. They ask or even demand that audiences close their laptops. They disable WiFi so people have no choice but to pay attention to the speaker. Solutions like these, however, smack of “blaming the user”—user experience design’s cardinal sin. Even though audiences are often and easily distracted, audiences are not the problem. 

Conversely, audiences blame speakers for depending on PowerPoint and mind-numbing bullet points. Yes, speakers need help. There are many great resources to help empower speakers, build their confidence, stagecraft, and interpersonal skills. Instead of adding to that body of work, we chose to examine the very format of professional conference public speaking. We call this “the public speaking technology,” meaning: (a) gathering people in a room, (b) giving the speaker(s) a microphone and a projector, and (c) allowing the audience to ask questions at the end. 

That’s the extent of what public speaking technology is today. 

In a world where every piece of information can, with a single tap on a pocket-sized glass screen, lead to more and more information, our ideas need to move faster, people need to share ideas and bounce them off of each other more spontaneously than ever, anytime, anywhere. Public speaking technology has not kept pace with the technology of everything else. 

So we asked ourselves: how can we improve the technology of public speaking?

Click through the link to get their answer.

Webwriters and the Japanese disasters

I haven't been posting often here because, ironically, I've been too busy writing for the web on my blog H5N1—especially about the consequences of the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. But The Tyee has published my article "Shaky Coverage in Japan," which deals in large part with the bloggers and tweeters reporting on the multiple disasters of March 11. Excerpt:

In Japan, the story arc has been complicated: We don't know much about the Japanese or about nuclear power, so we fall back on even more stereotypes: brave samurai, stoic peasants, evil bureaucrats and ticking time bombs.

The Japanese themselves, and long-resident foreigners, are keenly aware of how the story arc misrepresents them and their present problems. And in a literate, fully wired society, they are pushing back online against the stereotypes.

Go to #JPQuake and you'll find individuals and Japanese news sources tweeting about the latest developments, including events that never reach the mainstream media. English-language Japanese media like Japan Today and NHK World provide calm, up-to-date reports

Local blogs like Gakuranman and Japan Probe also present pretty straightforward reports, as well as some sharp criticism of media bias.

In one widely read post, Michael Gakuran wrote: "Even previously respectable papers seemed to be gripped by sensationalism and unable to report the basic facts needed to keep people from worry... Something amazing was happening on Twitter, though. Those of us in Japan and able to understand Japanese noticed a stark contrast between the relatively calm Japanese media and foreign press... A team of citizen journalists had assembled and were disseminating information that was not only factually correct but balanced and peer-reviewed. A far cry from the exaggerated coverage by many professional journalists and in some cases reporting that bordered on the unethical."

via thetyee.ca

The impact of one online op-ed

Back on January 25, my friend and colleague Dave Beers published an online op-ed in The Globe and Mail. Next day it appeared in The Tyee: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers. Excerpt:

YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, iPad. . . and whatever else is about to take the world by storm, making all of those digital breakthroughs seem old news. Surely it's obvious by now that Canadians are going to be better off if we foster digital media creativity, rather than leaving it to people in other countries. 

But tell that to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the body supposedly responsible for regulating electronic media for our well-being. The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges. The move is sure to stifle digital creativity in Canada while the rest of the world looks on and snickers.

A week later, the Conservative government, and all the other political parties, are scrambling to demand that the CRTC reverse its decision. As Hosni Mubarak has learned to his cost this week, you'll have better luck metering oxygen than metering online access.

Why you're not getting Twitter followers (and why you should care)

Via SocialMediaToday.com, Paul Sutton lists 10 Reasons You’re Not Getting Followers on Twitter. Excerpt:

Twitter thrives on the relationship between you and your followers. And yet many small businesses struggle to gain a following and end up abandoning their profiles due to fundamental errors in the way they manage them. 

This often boils down to a lack of understanding of Twitter as a social channel and an inability or unwillingness to invest the time to learn. But the secret to success is simple: put yourself in your followers’ shoes and consider what you’re adding to their lives. 

There are some common mistakes that I see again and again on Twitter, and encountering one or more of these on a profile significantly decreases the chances of me following and/or increases the chances of me unfollowing or blocking.

Twitter tells me I've tweeted over 8,000 times, but I'm still pretty hazy about it; it's just part of posting a blog item, especially on my blog H5N1. That's a kind of clipping service about infectious diseases and the politics of public health. For the last three months, I've mostly been covering Haiti's cholera outbreak, and I've found several overlapping Twitter communities doing the same thing. 

So I've found Twitter a pretty good source of news, and that's what drives me to follow one person rather than another. A good correspondent, tweeting on the ground in Haiti, will find me a loyal follower.

I assume (perhaps mistakenly) that my followers are also interested in infectious diseases and public-health politics, and are using me to get quick links to breaking news. So I don't feel obliged to follow most of my followers.

As for the "ideal Twitter profile" that Paul Sutton recommends in #6, I don't come anywhere near it. Sometimes I'll re-tweet, but I'd rather pick up a tweeted link, post a blog item about it, and then tweet to my own followers plus those following hashtags like #cholera and #haiti and #babydoc.

Following can have drawbacks. I follow a number of Canadian journalists who are a bit over-smitten with tweeting and re-tweeting. Some of them have thumbs of steel and post nonstop tweets to one another. (From this they make a living?) This obliges me to scroll past long giggle-parties to find something I can use. Yes, I can always unfollow, but then I might miss the occasional scrap of real political gossip.

I suspect that we're dealing with Twitter as we dealt with blogging circa 2002: A kind of neat tool for various forms of self-publishing, but with its best days yet to come. If you have thoughts on where Twitter might go from here, or how you're using it in your own webwriting, I'd love to hear about it.

The debate rages on: One space or two after a period?

Via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a lively debate on the radio program Q: Q's Great Spaces Debate. You can listen to the 17-minute discussion between Farhad Manjoo and engineer-blogger Tom Lee.

I well recall the moment in 1952 when, as a novice SF writer just starting to type my stories, a somewhat older reader told me "two spaces after a period." I followed that rule ever after, even after the advent of word processing. 

Then in 1995 I read The Mac is Not a Typewriter, which made a forceful case for one space. I henceforth taught my students to use just one space, and met resistance just about every semester. Now I'm safely retired, but the debate continues.

Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it

Via Slate, a polemic I wish I'd written: Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. And of all people, Julian Assange stands indicted of this error. Excerpt:

Here's a fellow who's been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that's revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. 

Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. 

Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. 

You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) 

The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy). 

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. 

Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. 

When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know. 

Typographers, that's who.

Banned words list for 2011

This is a time of year I always look forward to. Via The Star: Banned words list for 2011 includes ‘viral,’ ‘epic,’ a dozen others. Of course I don't endorse the idea of "banning" words, but this list at least makes us think about terms we may use unthinkingly. Excerpt:

It’s official: Viral went viral, and now it’s been virtually vaporized. 

Michigan’s Lake Superior State University features the term linked to popular online video clips in its annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. 

The 2011 list, compiled by the university from nominations submitted from across North America throughout the year, was released Friday. 

Nominators did more than vanquish “viral.” They also repudiated Sarah Palin’s “refudiate,” flunked “fail” and weren’t at all wowed by “wow factor.” 

In all, 14 words or phrases made the cut to be, well, cut from conversation. 

The call to banish viral was vociferous, garnering more nominations than any other. “This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined,” Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles wrote in his submission. “If one more thing goes viral, I’m buying a Hazmat suit and moving into a clean-room.” 

Other entries showed people’s apparent aversion to simple language, hence the call to “live life to the fullest” when they could just live, promoting every foible or stumble to “fail,” or super-sizing every reasonably good time to an “epic” event. 

“Standards for using ‘epic’ are so low, even ‘awesome’ is embarrassed.” said Mike of Kettering, Ohio, whose submission came with no last name. 

Appropriately, Lake Superior State spokesman Tom Pink stopped short of describing this year’s batch of submissions as “epic.” Rather, he viewed it as solid and typical — based on more than 1,000 nominations, once he and his colleagues sorted out phrases previously banned in the list’s 36-year history.