Writing for the Web

Le Web en Français

We tend to think of the Web as a medium for English, but almost every language appears on it somewhere. An excellent resource for francophones is Cortexte.

I have a TypeList of Portuguese-language blogs under "Brasileiros," but I'd be grateful to know of Web resources in other languages as well.

At Last! A Candidate We Can All Support!

Expect your spirits to lift when you visit the website of "Dickie" Pilager 2004. When you read what he stands for, you're going to want to stand up and cheer while "Happy Days Are Here Again" plays in the background.

Of course, Dickie Pilager is a fictional character, the protagonist of John Sayles's new movie Silver City. Any resemblance to real candidates is purely intentional.

Judging from this site, satire is a genre that translates easily to the Web.

Eyetrack III

We've been looking at websites for over a decade now, but we still don't fully understand how we read them. Jakob Nielsen has done some pioneering work in this field, including the discovery that we read text on screen up to 25% slower than we read text on paper.

Now the Poynter Institute has published the results of Eyetrack III, a study of user behaviour while reading Web pages. If you're serious about writing for the Web, you should study the results and consider the implications.

Political Blogs & the Politics of Blogging

Steve Clemons is a new political blogger, and a good one. In his most recent post, he ably summarizes a conference on political blogging, and provides plenty of links to relevant sites. Very much worth reading, especially if you're trying to get a sense of the influence (or lack thereof) of political blogs.

As long as you're there, scroll down and read some of his other posts.