Writing for the Web

Webwriting about avian flu

Helen Branswell of Canadian Press has published an article about the flu-blogging community. She quotes me in connection with my blog H5N1. You can read it at Canada.com.

It's been striking to watch the traffic building on H5N1. Yesterday the site got over 600 hits, and it should see even more today. It's not because the blog itself is so great, but because public interest is growing in the seriousness of avian flu. And by the way, if any visitors here are aware of non-English-language flu-related websites, please let me know.

In the Beginning...

Keepgoing.org has a long, very readable article on Suck.com, the site that really launched webwriting as a new genre. I enjoyed The Big Fish very much, especially for its evocation of the exhilarated mood of the mid-1990s, long before the bubble burst. But why did they have to display the story in great long lines that sprawl clear across the screen?

Thanks to The Tyee for the link.

International Webwriting

For the past month I've paid more attention to my new blog H5N1 than to this one. Apart from the fascination of watching events in Asia gain momentum, it's also taught me a lot about the formation and growth of a community of practice and interest. This afternoon I put some of my impressions into a post there called "Metablogging the Pandemic."

It really is a remarkable community, populated mostly by health and biotech experts, but with some good journalists and a few newbies like me who are just trying to understand the phenomenon of avian flu.

Strikingly, however, it's what we Canadians would call an "anglophone" community. Participants may be in Canada, the US, or Europe, but English is our sole language. This is not a good thing.

Happy 10th Birthday, Alertbox!

Jakob Nielsen has a great 10th-anniversary piece at Alertbox. It's instructive to look back over a decade of Web development (though sometimes frustrating to see how much more development we need).

Nielsen really started the whole field of Web usability, and we owe him a great deal. Without his research and analysis, and his proselytizing for usable, understandable websites, we'd still be making the mistakes of 1995.

Blogging the Pandemic

My article Blogging the Pandemic is now available at The Tyee, a Vancouver-based online magazine.