A BBC Online news story about North Korea provided a link to the Official Page of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It reminds me of when my wife and I were teaching in China 20 years ago, and we'd sometimes pick up a North Korean English-language broadcast. It was like a message from another world...superficially understandable, but operating on very strange rhetorical principles.
John Dvorak has recently attacked blogging as a waste of time for most people and a crass bid for additional readership by a few professional writers. Co-opting the Future goes on to argue that big media are taking over the blog phenomenon the way IBM took over the personal-computer world in 1981.
Maybe I'm too much an enthusiast (and I haven't owned a PC clone since 1991), but I'm unpersuaded.
Timing may not be everything, but it's more than half the pie chart. I knew the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination was coming up, but never quite got around to writing the memoir about it that I'd been planning. And of course, after November 22 the story would be unmarketable until, probably, the 50th anniversary in 2013.
Then The Tyee, a new online newspaper, appeared here in Vancouver just this past week. I queried the editor about becoming a contributor and got a positive response. So I wrote the memoir last night, on spec. Again the response was positive, and the story went up on the paper's site late this morning—less than 12 hours after completion.
Always glad to find a new resource: Writing the Web looks as if it's going to be a good one. It's still in early stages, but very much worth a visit by anyone seriously interested in Webwriting.
Raquel Recuero, a blogueira colleague in Brazil, has been discussing the issue of whether blogs are literary in any sense of the word. If you read Portuguese, you can see her November 16 post at Every flower is perfect.
If we could see a typical bookstore maybe 20 years after Gutenberg, we would probably be appalled at the speed with which junk was duplicated on the primitive presses of the time. Time and chance have buried the junk, leaving us with a tiny residue of superb writing and thought.
Similarly, for every Swift and Sterne and Johnson writing in the 18th century, hundreds of dreadful writers scribbled more junk...buried under the junk of the 19th century, and so on. Many American authors of mid-century rated a portrait on the cover of Time, and are now forgotten even by desperate Ph.D. candidates in search of a dissertation subject.
The Nigerian-con email is of course one of the great genres of Internet writing. It's flourished for years, bilking all kinds of people out of all kinds of wealth, and raising the question: "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"
Now, I'm happy to report, Nigerian email conmen fall into their targets' net. The Guardian describes a flourishing new subgenre: the counterscam, fiendishly designed to con the conmen. And it's working!
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox has just published an online article on the Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines. Not all apply to all Websites, or all Webwriters, but they're worth a look.
Maybe it's because one of my first novels was set in the Antarctic, but I've become a huge fan of Antarctica2003, a bilingual German/English blog. The description is vivid, and his excitement is contagious.
Nick Usborne has written a witty and cogent parable for Jeffrey Zeldman's "A List Apart": A Fairy, a Low-Fat Bagel, and a Sack of Hammers. Very much worth reading for anyone who writes in this medium.
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