Writing for the Web

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse

Via The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes a fascinating account of Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse. Excerpt:

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox parc. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs. 

Xerox parc was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. 

To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. 

A visitor to parc, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. 

If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox parc—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

Forbes's new experiment in social media

Via Forbes.com, a very interesting article: Forbes Update: Our New Article Page for the Era of Social Media Is Now Live. My chief criticism: They're writing overlong sentences and paragraphs. Re-paragraphed excerpt (but read the whole thing):

Today, FORBES launched Phase 1 of an exciting new article page for the era of social media, the next step in the iterative rebuild of Forbes.com. 

It’s a key component of our unfolding strategy to put our authoritative journalism at the center of a social experience by providing reporters and writers with the publishing tools and audience data they need to connect with consumers. If you total up our FORBES staffers and contributors, we have 850 topic-specific experts using our platform to do just that. 

This new page has a history that reflects the dramatic changes in news consumption. A digital media colleague of mine, Jim Brady, saw early-stage concepts before its initial launch a few years ago. His reaction was immediate: “What you’re doing is turning Facebook inside out.” 

Jim’s description has always worked for me. If the core of Facebook is self-published community content and the sharing of links the community finds valuable, the core of FORBES is that valuable information with the community gathering around the expert who published it. 

Today’s article page release tightens the author-audience relationship and furthers our effort to build a scalable content-creation engine of individually branded journalists, authors, academics and other qualified contributors.

If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault

Thanks to Jay Rosen for linking to these sage observations from Anil Dash: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault. Excerpt (but read the whole post):

How many times have you seen a website say "We're not responsible for the content of our comments."? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. 

Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation: Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are. When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. 

If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them.

And always bear in mind the difference between a jerk and an asshole: The asshole knows what he's doing.

The top 100 really bad journalistic clichés

Via The Independent, John Rentoul offers The Banned List: Top 100. Anyone who writes for the media will cringe with guilt; I certainly did. The first ten:

1. It’s the economy, stupid. 

2. A week is a long time in politics. Or variants thereof, such as, “If a week is a long time in politics then a month seems an eternity.” 

3. What part of x don’t you understand? Although this one seems to have nearly died out already. 

4. Way beyond, or way more. 

5. Any time soon. 

6. “Events, dear boy, events.” (Except as the name of an excellent political blog, currently in abeyance.) 

7. Learning curve. 

8. Raising awareness. 

9. Celebrating diversity. 

10. In any way, shape or form.

Words we shouldn't say on the web

Via Columbia Journalism Review: Words We Shouldn't Say. Excerpt:

Last Friday New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren posted a list of “words we don’t say” to the magazine’s 6th Floor blog. The list was a leftover from former New York editor Kurt Andersen—he had left it tacked to the office bulletin board back in 1997—and contains words and phrases he felt were hackneyed, over-used, or, in Lindgren’s words, “phoney-baloney.” 

Fourteen years later, Lindgren says the list is still pretty useful as a guide to what should be cut from any decent magazine story. We agree. 

There’s “boast” (meaning have), “graced,” “flicks,” “penned”, “sport” (as a verb), “comely,” “celeb”, “New York’s finest,” “indie” (with an exception for indie rock), “duo,” “eponymous,” and a slew of others. (Should we add “slew” to the list?). And there’s a nice dart to those hoity-toity pre-Millenium types who overused the Frenchified “fin de siècle.” 

Today we’re asking what words should be added to that list. What stale and lazy words and phrases would you like your favorite news sources to kick to the curb send packing give the flick banish? And who are the worst offenders?

This post appeared on May 24; the comments are many and furious.

Iran plans "national" internet

Via the Wall Street Journal: In Censorship Move, Iran Plans Its Own, Private Internet. Excerpt:

Iran is taking steps toward an aggressive new form of censorship: a so-called national Internet that could, in effect, disconnect Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world. 

The leadership in Iran sees the project as a way to end the fight for control of the Internet, according to observers of Iranian policy inside and outside the country. 

Iran, already among the most sophisticated nations in online censoring, also promotes its national Internet as a cost-saving measure for consumers and as a way to uphold Islamic moral codes.

The Iranians seem to be blocking TypePad sites already. This would be a dramatically stupid step beyond that.

The article as luxury or byproduct

Via BuzzMachine, a very interesting post by Jeff Jarvis: The article as luxury or byproduct. Here's the intro:

A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process. 

* See the amazing Brian Stelter covering the Joplin tornado and begging his desk at The Times to turn his tweets into a story because he had neither the connectivity nor the time to do it in the field and, besides, he was too busy doing something more precious: reporting. (It’s a great post, a look at a journalist remaking his craft. Highly recommended for journalists and journalism students particularly.) 

(And aren’t you proud of me for not drawing the obvious and embarrassing comparison to Times editor Bill Keller’s Luddite trolling about Twitter even as his man in Twitter, Stelter, proves what a valuable tool it is?)

Jarvis goes on to talk about other examples such as the nonstop blogging and tweeting done by many reporters in the recent Canadian election. And it wasn't just the reporters—all kinds of ordinary folks were doing the same thing and joining the conversation at #elxn41 and #cdnpoli.

At The Tyee, we were covering the coverage, following the online campaigns with great interest.

Jarvis makes some very strong points in his post, though I wouldn't write off "the article" just yet. Until we can organize tweets and blog posts into meaningful mosaics, we're going to need writers who can concentrate on an issue long enough to make sense of it in 1500 to 3000 coherent words.

Wise advice for webwriters

Via YouTube: El portátil en casa. Vodafone. It's a little animation, with no narration in any language, and it made me sit up straighter at my keyboard. 

I've been using computers for 25 years without (so far) any serious injury—and that after over 30 years of banging away on typewriters. 

But I've also got two Aussie shepherds as my personal trainers, and they relentlessly haul me away from my desk for four or five walks a day. Without them, I'd have been a goner long ago.

Derek Miller's last post

Via his blog Penmachine, Vancouver blogger Derek K. Miller's Last Post. I am sorry to read it, but I admire his courage and his writing ability. He began it:

Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive. 

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

Getting a word in edgewise in a multitasking world

Via a tweet from Jay Rosen, a link to an article on A List Apart by Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney: Conversation is the New Attention. Maybe I'm making a point of this because when I last taught, in the spring of 2010, my students were slaves of their smartphones, and it wasn't pleasant. Excerpt:

You’re in a not-too-comfortable chair, in a large, slightly-darkened room. On stage, someone speaks into a microphone. Like your peers around you, you’ve come to hear someone speak about something you’re interested in. The speaker, in turn, has thought a lot about their subject—perhaps a lifetime’s worth. 

Looking around, you see that your neighbors aren’t entirely there. Some faces are turned downward, brightly underlit, gazes focused not on the speaker but on a glowing screen. Perhaps you, too, want to pull out your laptop or smartphone. Before long, it seems like much of the audience has their attention focused…elsewhere. 

Whether it’s a professional conference like SXSW or An Event Apart, a concert or a political speech, a college classroom or lecture hall, the dynamic between speakers and audiences is changing. Some argue they’re disconnecting. 

We've thought a lot about this problem, about how technology is changing how we pay attention and learn. We've paid special attention to professional conferences, where the lecture room dynamic can be so monotonous that some conferences actually brag that the best stuff happens in the halls. 

Speakers blame the audience’s insatiable addiction to being connected and multitasking. They ask or even demand that audiences close their laptops. They disable WiFi so people have no choice but to pay attention to the speaker. Solutions like these, however, smack of “blaming the user”—user experience design’s cardinal sin. Even though audiences are often and easily distracted, audiences are not the problem. 

Conversely, audiences blame speakers for depending on PowerPoint and mind-numbing bullet points. Yes, speakers need help. There are many great resources to help empower speakers, build their confidence, stagecraft, and interpersonal skills. Instead of adding to that body of work, we chose to examine the very format of professional conference public speaking. We call this “the public speaking technology,” meaning: (a) gathering people in a room, (b) giving the speaker(s) a microphone and a projector, and (c) allowing the audience to ask questions at the end. 

That’s the extent of what public speaking technology is today. 

In a world where every piece of information can, with a single tap on a pocket-sized glass screen, lead to more and more information, our ideas need to move faster, people need to share ideas and bounce them off of each other more spontaneously than ever, anytime, anywhere. Public speaking technology has not kept pace with the technology of everything else. 

So we asked ourselves: how can we improve the technology of public speaking?

Click through the link to get their answer.