Writing for the Web

Housecleaning

Going through some of the links here has been a chastening experience. Having paid little attention to my original blog for a year or more, many of the links are now cobweb sites, or they've moved.

I'm going to clean out the dead sites and find more good sites dealing with effective writing on the Web. If you're running a site that ought to be here, or you know of one, please let me know. Any language—French, German, Swedish, Korean, Chinese. By this time next week, I'd like to have this blog fully updated.

Meanwhile, the third edition of Writing for the Web is moving along. I'm going to need a lot of new URLs for good personal and corporate sites, and of course blogs.

European bloggers influencing business and media

Via the Guardian Unlimited: Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers.

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company.

Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net - through messageboards, websites and blogs - are helping change the national conversation, say researchers.

"We're seeing this growing," said Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research and author of the report. "The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters."

A Rant About Online Text

Over at H5N1, the blog that's eaten me alive, I've just posted something that webwriters may find interesting: The Guardian reacts is a rant about how badly some print-based media display text when they move it to the online medium.

Having vented my spleen about this, I feel much better now.