Writing for the Web

Ken Auletta's media maxims

Having recently completed a book about how Google has changed everything, Ken Auletta has published a cut chapter as an online stand-alone: Media Maxims. Very much worth reading and pondering.

Is Cory Doctorow the future of webwriting?

Via the Globe and Mail: Meet publishers' enemy No. 1: Cory Doctorow. Excerpt:

The traditional publishing industry's worst nightmare arrived in Toronto this week when science-fiction author Cory Doctorow addressed the TD National Reading Summit on the burning question of “How to Destroy the Book.” 

As one of the world's most successful bloggers, a writer who freely gives away his work as well as selling it – and not least, a genuine expert in the suddenly fraught world of international copyright – this Toronto-born phenom knows as much about wrecking traditional publishing as anyone alive.  

For serious students of the art, Doctorow is currently conducting an experiment in both giving away and selling his latest work of self-published fiction, Makers , in every way possible – and scrupulously documenting the financial results in a series of columns in Publishers Weekly. 

The novel, about the struggles of technology hackers in a future economic upheaval, is being made available in a dizzying variety of forms – from downloads and “aps” to a deluxe limited edition of 250 copies made at a family-owned bindery near Doctorow's London home, priced at $250 a piece. 

But like Little Brother, Doctorow's bestselling young-adult novel of 2008, Makers will be free on his website to any reader with the hard-drive space to store it. Those who want a $15 paper copy will be able to order it from print-on-demand publisher lulu.com.

'Fakeosphere' latest Web trap for consumers

Via Jerz's Literacy Weblog: 'Fakeosphere' latest Web trap for consumers. Bogus blogs are now being used as advertising gimmicks.

I've seen a few in Flublogia, where some sites are clearly trying to part visitors from their money in exchange for "cures" for H1N1 and other ailments.

The Fake AP Stylebook

Anyone who writes for the online news media will welcome the Fake AP Stylebook (FakeAPStylebook) on Twitter. This may be the best collective translation effort since the committee that produced the King James Bible.

Now we can await web text that rigorously follows the new style.

Happy birthday, Internet

Via the Globe and Mail: The Web at 40: How the world got wired. Excerpt:

Oct. 29, 1969, 10:30 p.m., Pacific Time The Internet is born ... and promptly crashes. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency were trying to figure out a way to combine physically distant computers into one virtual network. 

Exactly 40 years ago today, the first such network - called Arpanet - was established between machines at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute. 

The first message transmitted was supposed to be the word "login." The baby network got through "l" and "o" without trouble, but crashed at "g." 

By the end of 1969, the Internet was four computers old. Within that fledgling circuitry lay the groundwork for what would become, just a few decades later, one of the most important tools in human history.

A couple of years before that, 1966-67, I was an apprentice tech writer at what was then called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. I well recall the anxiety when the new CDC 6600 computer was installed; it required weeks of testing and debugging, and we got truly dirty looks from the technicians if we dared to look in and see what was going on.

The CDC 6600 took up a large room full of equipment, and we bragged that a few years earlier it would have required the space taken up by the Empire State Building. Within a few months of its launch, someone was playing Space War on it, a simple computer game that ate up untold thousands of taxpayers' dollars.

Meanwhile, others at the Rad Lab were trying to figure out how to use computers to inform the scientists about what was being published in their fields. In effect, they were groping their way toward Google. The idea of using computers to communicate never crossed our minds in the mid-1960s. That was what telephones were for.

Happy birthday, Internet. And thank you very much.

How not to write for the web

I have a Google Alert for "writing for the web," and it's turned up a depressing number of trivial tips ("Keep it simple"). 

But this evening Google has brought me this item from a site called Writing Tips: Web Writing – A Succedaneum to the Usual Terms of Living. It's clearly an attempt at irony, but irony works poorly in webwriting. Excerpt, followed by comments:

An efficient way to lend support to the inflow of cash in your quotidian life can be attributed to the concepts of web writing. Millions of websites are available at your fingertips to provide a large data base of information, these websites require the urgency of being updated regularly and hence members of the admin hire employees to create some unique content for their websites. Traffic generated by the unique contents enhances the sale and business of the websites, allowing the execution of a wide profit margin and a moderate interface to display your writing efficiencies and increase the popularity in your professional field. 

Adequate focus and devotion to the activity of writing is of crucial importance. Great pieces of contents are generated if the work is performed in solitude and if it bars the involvement of deviation. It is mandatory to analyze the prospect of writing and determine its usefulness whether they are merely the articles or some kind of promotional contents. Highlighting the usage of appropriate keywords should elevate the status of your articles and attain proclivitous importance among diverse category of readers. In the new genre of web oriented globe, content writing and blogs have made a grandiloquent progress. A proper coalescence of skill, commitment, punctuality and authenticity could enable you to achieve great mundane pleasures in the environment of writing.

I'm grateful to have had to learn a word I'll never use again: "succedaneum" means a substitute medicine. 

The post commits a striking number of errors in such a short passage, from run-on sentences and subject-verb disagreement to passive voice to the use of exotic words like "quotidian" (it means "daily"). 

The passage is wordy. But if this was a conscious effort to show how wordiness fails, it defeats itself: Facing such solid blocks of text on screen, any sensible reader would simply stop reading and go elsewhere.

Other posts on the site are a bit better written, but far too brief and superficial to be of use. How to write articles, for example, says little or nothing about the structure of an article, and urges readers to write in their own style but about subjects readers are interested in.

So if this post and its site are some kind of prank, they fail. If they're the serious advice of the site's author, they fail horribly.

Worst government website in the world?

At my flu blog H5N1, I link to a lot of government health websites, but I spare my visitors the shock of the Indian government's Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.

At first glance you might think it was a relic of the 1990s, last updated perhaps in 1997. But it's up to date, more or less, with a crawling banner about swine flu that will take you to a site that looks completely different--and is not quite as up to date as it should be. Click on links to other sites, and you wouldn't know they were all part of one ministry.

Given that India has a flourishing high-tech industry, I'm baffled that its government would tolerate such a dismal website.

Writing for the web in Spanish

Here's a fascinating offer from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas: A free online course in Spanish in How to Write for the Web. Excerpt:

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas is offering the online course “How to Write for the Web,” from Nov. 16 – Dec 20, 2009. The course will be taught by Colombian journalist Guillermo Franco, based on his recent book How to write for the web. Applications will be accepted online until Nov. 1. 

The free five week course has been designed specifically for the Knight Center. Using Franco’s text as a central reference, the book combines exercises and concepts that help journalists understand how to write for the digital platform in a variety of contexts. 

Space in the course is limited to applicants from Latin America and the Carribean that work as full-time journalists for online news media as reporters or editors. Online journalism instructors can also apply.

Those aren't the only requirements, but it sounds like a lot of fun. Franco's book is available for free downloading en español and em português

Does the brain like E-books?

Via the New York Times: Does the Brain Like E-Books? Excerpt:

Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out “vooks,” which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. 

Others are republishing old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are offering more e-books for download. 

Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?

Read the whole piece to learn what five heavy thinkers say.

A guide to online business-writing advice

A site called OnlineDegreePrograms.org has published The Ultimate Guide to Better Business Writing: 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources. I distrust the word "ultimate," which always implies it's all downhill from here, but it looks like promising site nonetheless.

Writing for the web: guidelines for an introductory writing class

Via JPROF, a post by Jim Stovall: Writing for the web: guidelines for an introductory writing class. Excerpt:

-- No story should be more than 200 words unless there is a compelling reason for it.

--Summaries should be a maximum of 35 words. 

-- Headlines should be a maximum of eight words. They should be abstracted sentences. That is, they must contain a subject and a verb and be as specific as possible. No puns, no play-on-words. Use alliteration only when it makes sense. In the words of Jakob Nielsen, they should be “pearls of clarity.” 

-- Use lists when appropriate. Teach your students how to create lists. Check out what I say about lists in the third lecture on writing for the web. 

-- Paragraphs should be a maximum of two sentences and 50 words. 

-- Only one direct quotation per story. Direct quotations generally do not pull their informational weight. They add a bit of color and character to the story, but that’s about it. 

-- Every story should contain at least one in-line link to additional information. The link should be constructed in a way so that the reader will have a good idea as to where the link goes. Check out this article on linking on JPROF. Teach your students how to set up a link in HTML. 

-- Teach the concept of key words. Students should identify key words and put the tag around them. The goals of our writing should be to deliver as much information to the readers as quickly as possible. Send the readers on their way satisfied, and they will return.

I wouldn't agree with all these rules; at The Tyee, stories range all the way from 500 words to 2000 or even more. But the items we post on our politics blog, The Hook, come fairly close to Stovall's guidelines.

A plug for Rachel McAlpine

Bennett, at the blog Semicolon, has a plug for Rachel Mcalpine's Web Word Wizardry. Excerpt:

I read this good short guide to writing for the web a year or two ago. Even though the book is a few years old now, its advice is still relevant: Web technologies change quickly, but the rules for good web writing are the same now as they were when the web was new.

Agreed. McAlpine was one of the first to look at how text works on the web, and I've learned a lot from her. Her own site is Quality Web Content, very much worth visiting. You'll also find a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list.

Where are the webwriting courses?

Blogger Shelley Sanders asks for Mainstream Web Writing Courses, Please.. Excerpt:

With all things web hurtling toward us at the speed of light, it’s clear that the web is the way of the future. Actually, it’s already kind of the way of today. 

So, when are we going to stop teaching fluffy writing? When will we have educated people who don’t have to unlearn and who can just get better at doing? 

Have we started yet? 

If a Google search for “web writing class” is an indication, not really.

I know whereof Shelley speaks. For the last dozen years of my college-teaching career, I worked like mad to develop and teach a good solid 3-credit course in writing for the web. 

It ran three or four times, with varying degrees of success. But we finally had to drop it because we simply couldn't attract enough students.

I used elements from the course in other courses, like advanced communications for tourism, an industry now utterly dependent on the quality of its websites. 

The students there understood the value of the course--they were working in teams of consultants, overhauling the marketing efforts of real tourism operators. The websites were invariably in need of heavy makeovers, and the students did respectable revisions.

I saw the same interest and skill development in other business students, and in tech-writing students. Yet for some reason "academic" students had little or no interest in webwriting (and don't get me going about my colleagues!).

Since retiring, I've had some success in one-day workshops designed for specific groups, like teachers and trade unions (especially when the workshop includes a critique of websites of individual unions and school districts). As the post just below indicates, free online webwriting courses are available. But education is an intensely conservative profession, and it will be a long time before it recognizes the need to write well for this new medium.

Fifty online courses for webwriters

Via Accredited Online Colleges.org: 50 Awesome Open Courses for Web Writers. Some of these look pretty interesting. An "open course" is one that's free--and free of teacher feedback. The concept was pioneered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many of these are MIT courses.

A useful lesson in web journalism

The other day a journalism student sent me an item that might have made an item for The Hook, the politics blog of Vancouver's online magazine The Tyee. 

It was a dramatic story: A Guatemalan had come to Vancouver, attended the meeting of a Vancouver-based corporation, and denounced it for the damage it was doing to his community and region.  A few months later, the man's son had been shot dead. 

A number of Spanish-language websites had reported this murder and of course denounced it. The journalism student wanted to publish a story about it on The Hook.

At first glance, it looked fine: Vancouver angle, Third World sorrow, justice not yet done. The web is the medium of knee-jerk reactions, and this looked like a good one. 

But I went into the Spanish-language sites that had reported this story, and then tried to run down the original source. 

I found it, an organization with a lot of sites, but most of them were "parked," with nothing on them. The sites that reported the story used the identical wording, and none offered any kind of evidence beyond the basic fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc"--after this, therefore because of this.

Googling the names of the victim and his father showed that the family had made a lot of enemies, and had had several run-ins before the shooting of the son. I'm sure the enemies were very nasty people, and they should have been arrested, tried, and put in jail.

But nothing showed any connection with the Vancouver corporation. To have published a story with so little confirmation would have been to invite an exciting lawsuit--not to mention the skepticism of our readers. They may not be fans of big, exploitive corporations, but they're not stupid.

The web tends to encourage shocks and to discourage careful, patient building of logical arguments. A lot of Spanish-language websites had gone for the shock, assuming that their readers were predisposed to think the worst of a Canadian corporation.

But a Canadian online journal needs strong evidence for strong claims, and this story had almost no evidence at all. The young man's death was certainly a tragedy, but only innuendo could link it to the corporation. 

I advised the student to dig further into the story; until we had some solid evidence, we had no story at all.

Except a story about how the web gives us stories, and also gives us the refutation of those stories.

Get acquainted with A List Apart

One of the few constants in the changing world of webwriting has been A List Apart, an excellent resource for web creators. I'm especially fond of ALA's Writing section. I don't always agree with what the articles suggest, but they all show evidence of experience and strong views—and they're pretty good webwriting!

Business Writing Today

I'm delighted to introduce you to Business Writing Today, dedicated to the kind of clear, concise writing that websites need. I've put a link to BWT in the Webwriting Resources list.

Overhauling Writing for the Web

I've neglected this blog for some time, partly because covering swine flu has taken up much of the last four months. (That's been a lesson in webwriting in itself, and one I'll touch on here now and then.)

But starting today I'm making some changes in both design and content, and (I hope) reviving the discussion about what makes good webwriting. 

If you know of good sites dedicated to writing for the web, please let me know and I'll link to them. Good articles on the subject? Let me know. 

And if you yourself are writing or editing for the web, by all means send me your URL and I'll add you to the list of Webwriters and Editors.

A profile of Dave Beers

Via the Globe and Mail, a story about my friend and colleague Dave Beers, editor of The Tyee: A site for sore journalists. Excerpt:

When he launched the site in 2003, modelling it on U.S. online site salon.com, Beers was taking a step into the journalistic unknown. 

A former chief features editor and columnist at the Vancouver Sun, he thought he was engaging in an interesting experiment, but had few illusions about its potential for longevity. He expected to be wrapping the whole thing up within a year or two. 

“The first question was: Would anybody read it?” Beers says, shrugging amiably over lunch a half block from his house in Vancouver's SoMa neighbourhood. 

“When you launch a website, the first person who comes along is your mom. She wrote a little comment: ‘Dave, this is a nice project. Good luck.'” 

Six years later, The Tyee boasts 250,000 page hits a month. That may be a tiny fraction compared to mainstream media sites, but next to its peers, The Tyee is more than holding its own. The biggest similar site in the United States, minnpost.com reported 200,000 hits a month last year, while Californian site voiceofsandiego.org, “San Diego's non-profit source of local news,” mustered just 18,000 over the same period.

UK: A critique of the NPFS website

Via the blog Helpful Technology, a very effective critique of the design and content of the British government's new pandemic flu site. Excerpt:

When the National Pandemic Flu Service launched last week, it was always going to be big. As it transpired, the demand was massive, beyond even what the developers had predicted with over 2,000 requests a second for the homepage. 

When I checked the site later that day (for professional reasons), I was surprised. To be clear: I don’t really know how or why the site looks as it does: I’ve not been involved in that to date, and there’s always internal politics, a technical backstory and a team doing their best behind every government website. But as a lay outsider I started thinking: in a fantasy scenario, how would I have done it?

As it turns out, considerably better than the government. But don't get me going about the problems of corporate webwriting.

A really useful resource for webwriters

If you're writing for websites, you don't have to be a professional journalist to benefit from the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, which is now available online. Even the most casual blogger should try to follow Reuters' 10 Absolutes of ethical journalism.

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.