Writing for the Web

Hype or Hyperventilation?

Just ran across Maria Veloso's site promoting her book Web Copy That Sells: The Secret to Creating a Profitable Website.

Not sure if the secrets are all that great, at least on first scanning the site, but it's interesting to see how she creates a kind of heavy-breathing text on a long, long scrolling site. It almost feels like an infomercial for some gadget to give you buns of steel.

I'll go back and look at it in more detail. But what do you think of it?

What Americans Do on the Net

The Pew Research Center has just released the Pew Internet & American Life Project, documenting how Americans in different parts of the country use the Net. Apparently the Pacific Northwest is the most wired part of the US.

Pew seems to be doing some good research about the Net. I should explore their site. So should you.

Postponed

The course I'm scheduled to teach in Web content development has had to be postponed to January. It's designed to serve both the students in our new Professional Communications certificate program and anyone else interested in the subject.

Alas, we just didn't get enough people. We have half a dozen certificate students, but that's all. So they'll be taking other courses in the program while we spend the fall semester marketing both the program in general and the Web content course in particular.

Those of us in the field have been baffled by the phenomenon: enormous interest in the techie end of Web creation, and enormous apathy toward the content for which the Website is merely a platform. I decided to write "Writing for the Web" after seeing a university bookstore with (I estimated) 170 shelf-feet of books on HTML, Perl, Web graphics, etc., and not a single title dealing with Web site text.

During the dot-com boom, Web writers were hired all over the place, but they were the first to go when boom went bust. A lot of them left the field entirely, going back to print media or into specializations like tech writing.

I keep telling myself that it's like early American TV, when people actually watched test patterns, ancient Felix the Cat cartoons, and live shows of truly agonizing amateurishness. A few years later, I keep telling myself, TV was broadcasting brilliant dramas, written for the medium. (I try not to tell myself that the golden age ended in Newton Minow's "vast wasteland," which has now endured for over 40 years.)

So, my argument by analogy goes, people will eventually recognize that good Web text is critical to a site's success. And so they will. Eventually. Until then, we have to keep the faith, learn from good and bad sites alike, and set a good example ourselves.

Nick Usborne's Blog

I already have a link to Nick Usborne's Web site, and another that will let you buy his book through Amazon. Now he's created a TypePad blog, nick usborne's excess voice, and I'm happy to give him yet another plug here.

The more discussion we can trigger about the nature and value of online writing, the better that writing will get. So if you're concerned about such writing, drop by Nick's blog and offer a comment or two.

Baghdad Burning

Here's a remarkable blog that I discovered today. When everyone from Tony Blair on down has been lying to us about Iraq, it's tempting to mistrust anyone who claims to be reporting from Baghdad itself, especially in such fluent English. Still, Baghdad Burning sounds real to me. I'd be grateful to hear your comments about it—not just about "Riverbend" and her politics, but about the effectiveness of her text as Web writing.

Rottweilers

Some left-wing political blogs have been upset about The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. Well, I don't much care for their politics either, but they're interesting for other reasons—mostly because of their rhetoric.

Forty Years Ago Today

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington. I remember watching it on TV (I was living in LA then, 22 years old and soon to go into the army). Having heard King in person at a civil-rights rally in Washington in 1959, I knew how powerful an orator he could be. This speech too was good—a stirring speech, but not one that would be remembered into the next century.

In hindsight, King's speech now looks like the high tide of American greatness—a greatness of spirit and hope that has receded steadily ever since. Within 90 days, Kennedy would be dead in Dallas, and that would be only the first of our losses.

More Resources

TypeLists are a very helpful attribute of TypePad. I've just added a few new links in my list of Webwriting Resources. Will continue to do so as I find good resources, and by all means let me know of good sites in this field.

Who's Blogging What?

Thanks to yet another Brazilian correspondent for the following link to the NITLE Census News, reporting on various subjects including gender variations in types of blogs.

Interesting that women dominate in the personal-diary blogs, while men would rather solve the world's problems instead of confronting their own. (Trust us to seek the easy way to glory.)

b u r u n d a n g a: typepadistas unite!

b u r u n d a n g a: typepadistas unite!