Writing for the Web

A Freelance Job in Vancouver

This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:

The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days.

To learn more about our company please visit The Conference Publishers.

If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.

Where to Put the Links?

Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question:

Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant links at the foot of the page or in the right-hand margin.

Another school of thought says no. You need to make it easy for readers to find the link as they read the main copy. If you place it anywhere else, many will miss it.

And here's my answer:

Wikipedia's Watchdog

The Tyee, an online magazine here in Vancouver, has an excellent article: Wikipedia's Watchdog. Excerpt:

Andrew is a tall, skinny, 18-year-old college freshman who lives with his mom and dad on Burrard Inlet's North Shore. Early in the afternoon on July 31, he settled into the swivel chair in his parents' study, turned on his computer, and began combing through the bowels of Wikipedia, the world's most popular online encyclopedia.

Andrew (when he isn't busy playing favourite games like Battlefield 2) performs an essential role in the ongoing struggle to defend Wikipedia from vandals of truth. Andrew is so committed to his mission, in fact, that he has invented digital 'robots' to help him patrol for enemy attacks. As one of more than a thousand Wikipedia administrators, he volunteers up to 20 hours a week. He and his trusty 'bots' find and zap inserted falsehoods that plague the pages of the huge, interactive site.

It's never easy preserving Wikipedia's credibility. But on that July afternoon, Andrew faced a truly formidable opponent, the godfather of "truthiness" himself, Stephen Colbert.

Nielsen on the "Usability Divide"

Here's an excerpt from Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox):

Far worse than the economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn't use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don't achieve the modern world's full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand.

Almost 40% of the population has lower literacy skills, and yet few websites follow the guidelines for writing for low-literacy users. Even government sites that target poorer citizens are usually written at a level that requires a university degree to comprehend. The British government has done some good work on simplifying much of its direct.gov.uk site information, but even it requires at least a high school education to easily read.

Lower literacy is the Web's biggest accessibility problem, but nobody cares about this massive user group.

This really is a critical problem. It's one reason why I argue for keeping readability levels as low as possible. It's not dumbing-down the text—it's opening it up to people who can use it if only they can understand it.

Nielsen's post has a link to his guideline for writing for low-literacy users. I also recommend Readability.info, which can give you several good ways to assess your text readability. You can also find a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list, down in the left-hand column.

An Intellectual Property Issue

Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along:

I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book.

One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes on a yahoo e-group website (and admitted to it), and sent links to those recipes in an e-mail to the 2,610 members of that group, thus depriving me of who knows how many sales. I only have until
Thanksgiving to sell my book, after all.

I sent an e-mail to the group and the woman saying she was violating copyright law. She wrote back apologizing and saying she removed the files from the website. But for the period of time that they were up, who knows how many people downloaded those recipes and e-mailed them to others.

I went to the FBI's website, which has a division on internet crime. It said that not all of the complaints registered with them will be investigated, as they're sent to various agencies, and that if a matter is urgent, a complainant should contact local authorities. I then called the local sheriff's office and explained the situation. They sent a deputy over. Neither the phone person nor the in-person deputy had ever heard of the term "e-book." The deputy said this was a civil matter.

Do you know of any intellectual property lawyers who would take this case on contingency?

I told Judy I don't know of such lawyers, but perhaps some of the readers here will know of an affordable and effective way to estimate and recover damages.

In Judy's shoes, I'd join the e-group, explain the predicament my customer had put me in, and ask those who'd downloaded the recipes to send me something by way of compensation. But I wouldn't build my retirement plans around the anticipated revenue.

Was I Ahead of Myself?

When my publisher asked for a third edition of my book, I suggested calling it "3.0" as if it were a piece of software. (Well, it's better than "Geeks' Edition," which was the second edition.)

Now I seem to have anticipated the Next Big Thing, according to this story in the New York Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Excerpt:

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Well, connecting data is what writing itself is all about. But I don't know if my book is going to help people navigate the World Wide Database. Still, I totally agree with this pioneer of Web 3.0:

“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”

Online Writing Resources

Matthew Ingram at the Globe and Mail has an interesting column: Google's spot is growing. And it's not just about Google's new online writing and spreadsheet tools. Ingram looks at several other services.

I tend not to be an early adopter, and while I've heard of online wiki-style writing resources, I haven't done anything with them. If you have some experiences to share (and resources to recommend), I'd love to hear about them.

Sir Tim Warns Us About Online Fraud

Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt:

The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.

His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.

But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way".

He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what."

The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.

100 million sites

CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list.

I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989.