Writing for the Web

Worst websites of 2008

I haven't visited Web Pages That Suck in a long time, but I did so this evening. Not sure it was a good idea.

I clicked on the button for Contenders for worst web site of 2008 group 1, and no, it was not an exaggeration. I looked at the first ten, and decided not to go further.

While HavenWorks.com ranks just #3, it was the only site that made me cry out in horror.

Here we are, well into the web's second decade, and people are still creating sites like this?

Not only that, people are still providing Websites That Suck with plenty of new material.

Indonesia pushes Wordpress for blogger's identity; Canadians beat up redheads

Via the Jakarta Post: Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID.

The Department of Communication and Information has sent a formal request to blog hosting site Wordpress to cooperate in the investigation of a blogger allegedly behind a blog containing a comic of Prophet Muhammad.

Telecommunication Technology director general Cahyana Ahmadjayadi said legal processing was to continue regardless of the blog's shutdown.

"This is considered as a cybercrime," Ahmadjayadi said, as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.

"Even in its terms of services it's clear that hate speech isn't allowed," he said, adding that he is confident the identity of the blogger would eventually surface.

"If Wordpress declines to disclose the blog owner's identity, we will trace the person ourself," said Ahmadjayadi, referring in particular to the National Police's digital forensic lab.

But it's not a simple issue of repressive Indonesians versus free-spirited bloggers. What happens if such a post leads to someone's being hurt or killed?

It's just happened here in British Columbia thanks to Kick a Ginger Day, a half-witted online prank that led to some redheaded kids being assaulted by their classmates. The BC Teachers' Federation is highly angry, and I don't blame them.

Reading speed on computer screens

As I'm pulling together materials for the fourth edition of Writing for the Web, I'm finding it hard to update one important issue.

For decades, it's been a given that reading text on a computer screen is harder than reading it on paper. The effect is that we read online text 25% more slowly than text on paper.

Jakob Nielsen made that critical point back in the 1990s, and said it was a problem with screen resolution. By 2009, he predicted, resolution would be equivalent to print on paper.

But Nielsen hasn't addressed the issue recently, and when I search for other studies, I find little or nothing published since about 2003. Can anyone point me to recent studies that indicate how quickly people read onscreen, using recent computers, compared to reading text on print?

Slow blogging

Via The Canadian Journalism Project: Slooowww is a post about "slow blogging," which has been around since at least 2006 but isn't in any hurry to impose itself.

Slow blogging has its own Slow Blog and an advocate at Oxford University Press.

I sympathize with the concept. Over at H5N1, I may post ten or twelve items in a busy day. Apart from the demands on my time, I wonder how much impact any given post may have.

But it's essentially a clipping service, and seems to be valued as such. Here and on some of my other blogs, the posts come less often. But I hope each has some useful value.

The Global Language Monitor

Here's a site I've just discovered: The Global Language Monitor. It deals, among many other topics, with the language of the US presidential campaign just concluded.

For webwriters, this looks like an important site.