Writing for the Web

Film Criticism from a New Angle

Larry Ribstein has a very worthwhile blog, Busfilm, which looks at the portrayal of business in (mostly) American movies.

Dr. Samuel Johnson once observed that "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money." If so, all deceased Hollywood moguls are now sitting in heaven at God's right hand. Yet the movies they produced often show business in a less than innocent light.

Ribstein's analysis is entertaining and challenging, but I wish he'd break up some of his long paragraphs for easier reading. A Website isn't the columns of The New Yorker.

A Brazilian Interview

Raquel Recuero, one of my Brazilian blogueiras, recently interviewed me by email about blogs as literature. You can read it in English at Projeto Casulo, but I think I sound more intelligent in Portuguese...even though I can't speak it. Obrigado, Raquel!

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen, the patriarch of usable Web content, has just published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003. Go and consider them, and then sin no more.

In Defense of Scrooge

Does hearing "Winter Wonderland" make you wish you were in downtown Mecca? Does the pathological greed in the air since Thanksgiving make you reach for the Gravol?

Help is at hand. A wicked man in Vancouver (home to many such, including your humble correspondent) has published a stirring polemic In Defense of Scrooge.

If it doesn't make you go "Ho-ho-ho," you'd better drown your sorrows in more eggnog.

Blogger Profiling

If TypePaddicts were suddenly declared a menace to society (and stranger things have happened), those in charge of protecting the rest of us would show a strong and hostile interest in international travelers displaying (or concealing) the following traits:

1. At least one TypePad blog. Possible mitigating factor: the blog is the yucky green and blue default template, signalling new-recruit status. Such persons might be rescued by a serious talking-to at the hands of large, serious Web designers. A Plus or Pro account, however, would get you a one-way ticket to Guantanamo and an all all-expenses, open-ended holiday in sunny Cuba.

2. A rabid interest in Macintosh computers. Public admission that you waited in line to buy Panther the moment it was available would get you 24 hours' free nonstop interrogation.

3. Intense, undiscriminating affection or hatred for the George W. Bush administration and all its works. Extra air miles on your trip to Guantanamo if you're an American. Canadian, Brit, or Australian political bloggers would not qualify, because American exceptionalism doesn't apply to them.

4. A compulsive need to blog about The Return of the King—and extra truncheon work on anyone who was at the first midnight showing, or who admits to having seen it three times before New Year's Eve.

Those are the Four Dead Giveaways of a serious TypePaddict. Lesser traits might raise the eyebrows of Homeland Security without automatically getting the blogger into trouble:
•bragging about how drunk they got the night before,
•putting an apostrophe in the possessive of it,
•using the word "fuck" in one's first test post (or any other),
•posting photos of cat barf,
•apologizing for not having posted anything for 12 hours,
•being an expat in Korea with strong negative opinions about the governments of North and South alike, and
•deliberately using gross color schemes that make text almost unreadable.

Those being almost universal traits of bloggers, non-TypePaddicts would bitterly resent being treated like the genuine menace. But with so many bloggers out there, you can't be too careful.

The Best British Blogs

Here they are: The winners in the Guardian's best of British blogging contest. Haven't had time to visit them yet, but I will.

Forbidden Words

As an English teacher, I am ex officio a senior officer of the English Inquisition (no one expects the English Inquisition, least of all in the semiliterates' Utopia known as the Web).

And while I don't expect uniformly brilliant and original writing on blogs and other sites, I would be a happy inquisitor if people would only avoid some unfortunate words and phrases. If you go to Buzzwords, you'll find a highly therapeutic array of terms to avoid.

Worst Blog in the World: Proudly Canadian!

Ian King, the dyspeptic young observer of the Vancouver media scene at Vancouver Scrum, reports on the Google bombing of our brand-new prime minister. The Right Honourable Paul Martin's sporadic bloggings have now earned his site the title of worst blog in the world as determined by a Google search for that term.

What Kind of Canadian Are You?

The Canadian pollster Environics has a pretty good quiz about your values and the tribe those values put you into. You don't have to be a Canadian to take it, either. But depending on the answer, you might want to consider migrating here...or migrating somewhere else. The quiz is at 3CS Social Values Survey.

In case you're wondering, I'm a Cosmopolitan Modernist. But you knew that just from looking at my photo, didn't you?

Google Bombing

Enter "miserable failure" into a Google search and then hit "I feel lucky." The result brings up a biography of George W. Bush. Now Newsday tells us this is a "Google bomb."

You can read about this new weapon of mass distraction at Miserable Failure? Google Trick Says It's Bush.

Like being on Nixon's enemies list, being Google bombed will become the prestige experience that politicos and celebrities all yearn for...even if they have to bomb themselves.

What did we do before the Web came along? Apart from getting productive work done on our clunky old computers, that is.