Writing for the Web

CBC Home Delivery

Thanks to Jeff Macintyre for tipping me off to a remarkable experiment: CBC HOME DELIVERY has been closed down since last September, but its archives are still available. And who knows—it might come back if enough people visit it and set up a demand for it.

A Forecast from 1994

Ten years ago, in a sadly short-lived magazine called Infobahn, I published an article about how the new Web might change politics. Here's what I wrote; judge for yourelf how accurate I was.

Virus Alert

Most viruses warnings are hoaxes, but this is the real thing. For details, go to Symantec Security Response - W32.Novarg.A@mm. And don't open any attachments, even if the message seems to come from a friend.

I've already been hit several times today by this virus, but it doesn't affect Macintoshes. Good luck.

Web Wimps

Canadian politics may seem hobbitesque compared to the Tolkien-scale wars now raging in the United States of Mordor, and a tour of our leaders' Websites won't build much respect for their mastery of this medium. None, obviously, can claim ownership of the One Ring, which would at least confer blessed invisibility.

Still, mistakes can be more instructive than successes. Here's an article I wrote last week, just published in The Tyee: Our Top Politicians Are Web Wimps.

Blogging for a Living?

The Online Journalism Review reports that Joshua Micah Marshall, wanting to spend ten days covering the New Hampshire primary, asked his visitors for money to cover his expenses—and they gave him so much that he's sending back refunds.

Oddly enough, this kind of funding was anticipated in a 19th-century American novel, Looking Backward 1888-2000, which imagined a Utopia in which everyone gets the same salary whatever their job, and if readers want a particular magazine they pool their funds to hire an editor and writers. Marshall and a few other bloggers are a portent of a very different kind of mass medium.

You can read the OJR article here.

Saila.com: A Good Resource

I don't visit this site as often as I should. This morning it has good links to stories about the sites of the candidates for the Canadian Conservative Party leadership, which has just been enlivened by the entry of Belinda Stronach...a personable young woman who thanks to her dad is a billionaire but who has no notable qualifications or political experience. The story also compares the sites of the other candidates.

See it at Living Can Kill You.

CBC Radio 3

As a longtime listener to CBC Radio, I've been vaguely aware of something called CBC Radio 3 that had something to do with the Web. But it took a print-media story, in this morning's Globe & Mail, to get me looking for CBC Radio 3 | Music and Modern Media.

Among the various Web populations (readers, hit & run info grabbers, viewers, talkers/bloggers) is one I don't know well: the listeners. CBC Radio 3 is clearly intended for this group. It combines text, graphics and music, with text clearly the least of these. Text items tend to be hard to read (white sans serif text on a black background) or self-consciously experimental ("Pink Parka").

Well, to me a good computer is a silent computer, but CBC Radio 3 is clearly on to something and worth repeated visits...even if I'm three decades beyond its demographics.

STUMP: media and politics

Poynter.org is a site I should visit more often. It's a great professional resource for journalists and anyone else with an interest in the media, and among its other attractions is STUMP: media and politics, a terse and insightful blog.

Political Advocacy on the Web

The Online Journalism Review has a good new article, with links, about the use of the Web by political advocacy groups. The right-wingers may not like MoveOn.org, but they're imitating it. The article is Net Changes Game of Political Advocacy for Groups on the Right and Left.

Banished Words List: 2004

Lake Superior State University enjoys annual glory in January when it releases its Banished Words List. Anyone who writes should take heed, and anyone who reads should give little credence to those who stubbornly persist in using such terms.