Writing for the Web

Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web

This Guardian article makes it worthwhile to revive my first blog: Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web. Excerpt:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global action plan to save the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other malign forces that threaten to plunge the world into a “digital dystopia”.  

The Contract for the Web requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity.  

“I think people’s fear of bad things happening on the internet is becoming, justifiably, greater and greater,” Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, told the Guardian. “If we leave the web as it is, there’s a very large number of things that will go wrong. We could end up with a digital dystopia if we don’t turn things around. It’s not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now.”  

The contract, which has been worked on by 80 organisations for more than a year, outlines nine central principles to safeguard the web – three each for governments, companies and individuals. 

The document, published by Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation, has the backing of more than 150 organisations, from Microsoft, Google and Facebook to the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the time of writing, neither Amazon nor Twitter had endorsed the principles.  

Those who back the contract must show they are implementing the principles and working on solutions to the tougher problems, or face being removed from the list of endorsers. If the stipulation is properly enforced, some may not last long. A report from Amnesty International accuses Google and Facebook of “enabling human rights harm at a population scale”. The report comes weeks after Google was found to have acquired the personal health records of 50 million Americans without their consent.

The contract’s principles require governments to do all they can to ensure that everyone who wants to can connect to the web and have their privacy respected. People should have access to whatever personal data is held on them and have the right to object or withdraw from having that data processed.  

Further principles oblige companies to make internet access affordable and calls on them to develop web services for people with disabilities and those who speak minority languages. To build trust online, companies are compelled to simplify privacy settings by providing control panels where people can access their data and manage their privacy options in one place. 

Another principle requires companies to diversify their workforces, consult broad communities before and after they release new products, and assess the risk of their technology spreading misinformation or harming people’s behaviour or personal wellbeing. 

Three more principles call on individuals to create rich and relevant content to make the web a valuable place, build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome, and finally, to fight for the web, so it remains open to everyone, everywhere. 

“The forces taking the web in the wrong direction have always been very strong,” Berners-Lee said. “Whether you’re a company or a government, controlling the web is a way to make huge profits, or a way of ensuring you remain in power. The people are arguably the most important part of this, because it’s only the people who will be motivated to hold the other two to account.”

Do we write differently on a screen?

Via The New Yorker, an article that merits blowing the cobwebs off this site: Do We Write Differently on a Screen? Excerpt:

I wrote my first story in a university library, in Boston. It was 1978, and I was bored to death with structuralism and post-structuralism. I wrote with a cheap ballpoint pen in the exercise book that I used for lecture notes. I noticed at once that the time passed differently when writing a story. It wasn’t quicker or slower, simply absent. You moved into a dream space. You didn’t know whether it was early or late. 

When I finished, I typed up the story on a small manual typewriter. I have to thank America for teaching me how to type fast, with all fingers and never looking at the keys. In England, you gave your weekly essay assignments to professors handwritten. In the States, they had to be typed. Walking back through the campus, late on spring evenings, you could hear a clatter of typewriters from open windows. I bought a book called “Teach Yourself Typewriting.”  

When a story was typed, you let it rest, then reread it and made handwritten corrections. Then reread it again. Then again. Then typed it up again, hopefully without mistakes. A lot of paper was thrown away. A lot of Wite-Out was used. You were a craftsman, producing pieces of paper with neat black signs. After making photocopies, you sent the story, by post, to a magazine, and it came back, months later, with a rejection and perhaps some suggestions how to improve it. You rewrote and retyped and re-sent. 

It was many years before I had a story published. Meantime, I moved back to the U.K., then, with my Italian wife, to Verona, where I began to translate. Here, typing skills were invaluable. You rode your moped into town in the morning, picked up a piece of work—perhaps a description of a marble-quarrying machine—rode home and had to translate it onto camera-ready paper for evening delivery and immediate printing. There was no time for rough drafts. You read each sentence, thought it through, produced an English version in your head, and typed it out perfect the first time. It was a fantastic discipline. And hugely stressful.  

In the early eighties, we bought an electric typewriter that could memorize about half a page before printing it out. To read the page, you had to scroll it from right to left, on a single line of display, between keyboard and print roller. It cost the equivalent of a thousand euros in today’s money and wasn’t satisfactory. 

A year or two later, we spent double that for a machine that could memorize a fantastic four pages on an audiocassette and offered a yellowish monochrome screen where you could read as many as fifteen lines at once. That was the machine on which I translated Roberto Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.” On more than one occasion, the audiocassette jammed and four pages of work were lost.

How the web became unreadable

A long-overdue polemic by Kevin Marks in Backchannel: How the Web Became Unreadable. Excerpt:

It’s been getting harder for me to read things on my phone and my laptop. I’ve caught myself squinting and holding the screen closer to my face. I’ve worried that my eyesight is starting to go. 

These hurdles have made me grumpier over time, but what pushed me over the edge was when Google’s App Engine console — a page that, as a developer, I use daily — changed its text from legible to illegible. Text that was once crisp and dark was suddenly lightened to a pallid gray. Though age has indeed taken its toll on my eyesight, it turns out that I was suffering from a design trend. 

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background, making type harder to read. Apple is guilty. Google is, too. So is Twitter. 

Typography may not seem like a crucial design element, but it is. One of the reasons the web has become the default way that we access information is that it makes that information broadly available to everyone. “The power of the Web is in its universality,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web consortium. “Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” 

But if the web is relayed through text that’s difficult to read, it curtails that open access by excluding large swaths of people, such as the elderly, the visually impaired, or those retrieving websites through low-quality screens. And, as we rely on computers not only to retrieve information but also to access and build services that are crucial to our lives, making sure that everyone can see what’s happening becomes increasingly important. 

We should be able to build a baseline structure of text in a way that works for most users, regardless of their eyesight. So, as a physicist by training, I started looking for something measurable.

It wasn’t hard to isolate the biggest obstacle to legible text: contrast, the difference between the foreground and background colors on a page. In 2008, the Web Accessibility Initiative, a group that works to produce guidelines for web developers, introduced a widely accepted ratio for creating easy-to-read webpages. 

To translate contrast, it uses a numerical model. If the text and background of a website are the same color, the ratio is 1:1. For black text on white background (or vice versa), the ratio is 21:1. The Initiative set 4.5:1 as the minimum ratio for clear type, while recommending a contrast of at least 7:1, to aid readers with impaired vision. The recommendation was designed as a suggested minimum contrast to designate the boundaries of legibility. Still, designers tend to treat it as as a starting point.

For example: Apple’s typography guidelines suggest that developers aim for a 7:1 contrast ratio. But what ratio, you might ask, is the text used to state the guideline? It’s 5.5:1.

Google’s guidelines suggest an identical preferred ratio of 7:1. But then they recommend 54 percent opacity for display and caption type, a style guideline that translates to a ratio of 4.6:1. 

The typography choices of companies like Apple and Google set the default design of the web. And these two drivers of design are already dancing on the boundaries of legibility.

How to be a better online reader

Via The New Yorker, an excellent article by Maria Konnikova: How to Be a Better Online Reader. Excerpt:

Certainly, as we turn to online reading, the physiology of the reading process itself shifts; we don’t read the same way online as we do on paper. Anne Mangen, a professor at the National Centre for Reading Education and Research at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, points out that reading is always an interaction between a person and a technology, be it a computer or an e-reader or even a bound book. 

Reading “involves factors not usually acknowledged,” she told me. “The ergonomics, the haptics of the device itself. The tangibility of paper versus the intangibility of something digital.” The contrast of pixels, the layout of the words, the concept of scrolling versus turning a page, the physicality of a book versus the ephemerality of a screen, the ability to hyperlink and move from source to source within seconds online—all these variables translate into a different reading experience. 

The screen, for one, seems to encourage more skimming behavior: when we scroll, we tend to read more quickly (and less deeply) than when we move sequentially from page to page. Online, the tendency is compounded as a way of coping with an overload of information. There are so many possible sources, so many pages, so many alternatives to any article or book or document that we read more quickly to compensate. 

When Ziming Liu, a professor at San Jose State University whose research centers on digital reading and the use of e-books, conducted a review of studies that compared print and digital reading experiences, supplementing their conclusions with his own research, he found that several things had changed. On screen, people tended to browse and scan, to look for keywords, and to read in a less linear, more selective fashion. On the page, they tended to concentrate more on following the text. 

Skimming, Liu concluded, had become the new reading: the more we read online, the more likely we were to move quickly, without stopping to ponder any one thought. 

The online world, too, tends to exhaust our resources more quickly than the page. We become tired from the constant need to filter out hyperlinks and possible distractions. And our eyes themselves may grow fatigued from the constantly shifting screens, layouts, colors, and contrasts, an effect that holds for e-readers as well as computers. 

Mary Dyson, a psychologist at the University of Reading who studies how we perceive and interact with typography and design online and in print, has found that the layout of a text can have a significant effect on the reading experience. We read more quickly when lines are longer, but only to a point. When lines are too long, it becomes taxing to move your eyes from the end of one to the start of the next. We read more efficiently when text is arranged in a single column rather than multiple columns or sections. The font, color, and size of text can all act in tandem to make our reading experience easier or more difficult. 

And while these variables surely exist on paper just as they do on-screen, the range of formats and layouts online is far greater than it is in print. Online, you can find yourself transitioning to entirely new layouts from moment to moment, and, each time you do so, your eyes and your reading approach need to adjust. Each adjustment, in turn, takes mental and physical energy. 

The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a text.

This article itself is clearly designed to be read on the crisp white pages of the magazine, not on its website: sentences are long, paragraphs are long (I've broken them up), and while it's in a single column, the width demonstrates precisely the difficulty of reading over-long lines.

Still, this article deserves careful attention if you write for the web—even if you have to print it out to ensure you really read it.

An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web

Via The Guardian: An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web. Excerpt:

The inventor of the world wide web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide. 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the "open, neutral" system. 

Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the world wide web, the computer scientist said: "We need a global constitution – a bill of rights." 

Berners-Lee's Magna Carta plan is to be taken up as part of an initiative called "the web we want", which calls on people to generate a digital bill of rights in each country – a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government officials and corporations. 

"Unless we have an open, neutral internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities and diversity of culture. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it." 

Berners-Lee has been an outspoken critic of the American and British spy agencies' surveillance of citizens following the revelations by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the light of what has emerged, he said, people were looking for an overhaul of how the security services were managed. 

His views also echo across the technology industry, where there is particular anger about the efforts by the NSA and Britain's GCHQ to undermine encryption and security tools – something many cybersecurity experts say has been counterproductive and undermined everyone's security. 

Principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity would be explored in the Magna Carta scheme. "These issues have crept up on us," Berners-Lee said. "Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years."

The typefaces of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Via the blog Typeset in the Future: 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening paragraph:

2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece – seems an appropriate place to start a blog about typography in sci-fi. Amongst other delights, it offers a zero-gravity toilet, emergency resuscitations, exploding bolts, and product placement aplenty. It’s also the Ur Example of Eurostile Bold Extended’s regular appearance in spacecraft user interfaces.

This is a witty and very knowledgeable analysis that taught me a lot about a great movie and about typefaces.

How fast is your internet?

Via Net Index: Household Download Index. the introduction:

Based on millions of recent test results from Speedtest.net, this index compares and ranks consumer download speeds around the globe. The value is the rolling mean throughput in Mbps over the past 30 days where the mean distance between the client and the server is less than 300 miles.

And we learn that Hong Kong, at 70.16 Mbps, whips the rest of us to shreds.Canada ranks #36 at 18.96 Mbps, barely ahead of Malta and Slovakia, and trailing Uruguay (19.34). The US: #30 at 20.33, but even tiny Andorra (#17) beats the Americans with 29.82. This does not bode well.

Against 'Long-Form Journalism'

Via The Atlantic, James Bennet raises good points for webwriters of all kinds, not just journalists: Against 'Long-Form Journalism'. Excerpt:

And, in the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. For when you don’t have to print words on pages and then bundle the pages together and stick postage stamps on the result, you slip some of the constraints that have enforced excellence (and provided polite excuses for editors to trim fat) since Johannes Gutenberg began printing books. You no longer have to make that agonizing choice of the best example from among three or four—you can freely use them all. More adjectives? Why not? 

As a writer, I used to complain that my editors would cut out all my great color, just to make the story fit; as an editor, I now realize that, yes, they had to make my stories fit, and, no, that color wasn’t so great. The editors were working to preserve the stuff that would make the story go, to make sure the story earned every incremental word, in service to the reader. Long-form, on the Web, is in danger of meaning “a lot of words.”

China: Two million 'internet opinion analysts' employed to monitor China's vast online population

Via South China Morning Post: Two million 'internet opinion analysts' employed to monitor China's vast online population. Excerpt:

Some two million people are employed by the Chinese government at all levels, as well as businesses, to monitor public opinion on Chinese social media, according to a report in Thursday’s Beijing News. 

By trawling through blogs, microblog posts and social networks, these "Internet opinion analysts," most of them government employees, dissect public opinion on local issues and try to identify accusations of corruption and poor governance. They keep local leadership, from county to province, informed on a daily basis via text messages and written reports. 

The Beijing-based newspaper took advantage of a seminar for these monitors, held in the capital in mid-October by the People’s Daily Online Public Opinion Monitoring Centre, a think tank-like unit of the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, to meet these usually anonymous local government staffers known as “online public opinion analysts”. 

Even though the industry has been around for at least six years, the Ministry of Human Resources only listed their duties earlier this month as an official profession certified by the ministry’s China Employment Training Technical Instruction Centre.  

Since 2008, the People’s Daily’s think tank has advised local governments to quicken the pace of issuing public statements and reacting to online debate and viral political statements. In 2011, it called on officials to react within the “four golden hours” after an incident, such a train crash or a riot, to provide information and prevent allegations of cover-ups. 

One such analyst the Beijing News interviewed heads the public opinion monitoring office of a county in Henan province. Every day, the man with the pseudonym Yuan Ming would search his county’s name on Google and Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of the international search engine. Special software bought by the county at a cost of three million yuan alerts his office to trending topics on social media, according to the report.

Look at the bright side: If you're blogging or tweeting in China, you're assured of added traffic and a readership that really cares what you say.

‘Free My Internet’: Hundreds march in Singapore against website licensing regime

Via RT News: ‘Free My Internet’: Hundreds march in Singapore against website licensing regime. Excerpt:

In Singapore, up to 2,000 activists led by local bloggers staged a rally against recently introduced licensing rules for news websites, including breaches of “racial or religious harmony”, which protesters see as an attack on freedom of expression. 

A crowd with posters denouncing “internet censorship” gathered on Saturday in Speakers’ Corner at Hong Lim Park to demand the withdrawal of the policy. The peaceful demonstration in the Southeast Asian city-state was organized by a group of bloggers called “Free My Internet.” 

The message of the gathering - “the government must trust us, and stop treating us like babies,” said Choo Zheng Xi, the group’s spokesperson. “It is an international embarrassment when governments around the world are working to deregulate the Internet, and Singapore, one of the wealthiest nations per capita, is going in the opposite direction," the activist told AFP. 

Under the rules that came into force in June, news websites must obtain annual licenses if they have over 50,000 unique visitors from Singapore every month and publish at least one weekly article on the island’s news over a period of two months.

To get the license, they must pay about $39,500 [US$31,623]. Also, licensed sources will be subjected to government control and will have to remove banned content – such as articles that undermine “racial or religious harmony” – within 24 hours after they get a notification from Singapore’s media regulator.

Composition 101: A. Lincoln, Instructor

Via The Columbia Journalism Review: Composition 101: A. Lincoln, Instructor. After using the impending Oscars as a news peg, Kevin Coyne writes:

Writing is thinking, and if you don’t think clearly about what you want to say, what story you want to tell, you will never write clearly about it. Clarity - of thought, of purpose, of expression - is the cardinal virtue of good writing, and it shines abundantly through everything Lincoln says and does in the movie. Writing is not just what happens at a desk. It happens everywhere and always, whenever your mind encounters a thought it wants to wrap words around. 

I have a mantra in class: “Readers do no work.” If you’re James Joyce or Toni Morrison or any other writer lavishly blessed with the gifts of linguistic prestidigitation, you can presume that your readers signed up for the ride, expecting that some heavy lifting might be required of them. 

Most of us, though - and all of us in the realms of nonfiction and journalism - cannot presume that. It is for us to do the work first, so that none is required of our readers. Clear thinking leads to clear writing, which leads, most importantly, to clear understanding.

My own classroom mantra through 40 years of teaching was: "The writer's job is to make the reader's job effortless." Coyne's is briefer.

What Twitter really looks like

Via The Atlantic.com, Megan Garber shows us What Twitter Really Looks Like. Excerpt:

I just watched the West Coast wake up. On Twitter.  

I did it by watching the lights come on on Tweetping, which visualizes Twitter activity in real time, on a global scale. When I looked at the site earlier this morning, the left half of North America was largely dark. I returned a little later, though, and watched -- in real time -- the lights slowly turn on, burst after burst after burst, as West Coasters started their Mondays. And, more specifically, as they started tweeting about them.

Reaching the site may require some patience; I suspect it's getting a lot more traffic since Garber posted her story. But it's very much worth the trouble. 

How to verify information from tweets: Check it out

Via The Buttry Diary, Steve Buttry tells us How to verify information from tweets: Check it out. This is a very helpful guide for anyone doing journalism or advocacy online. Excerpt:

Journalists should treat information we gather on social media the same way we treat information gathered any other way, or an assurance from Mom that she loves you: Check it out. 

My #twutorial series hasn’t been updated since late October, but I always planned to do a post on verifying information gathered in social media. Given the errors some journalists made in reporting on the Sandy Hook massacre and in the original reporting on Manti Te’o's fake girlfriend, this feels like a good time to stress accuracy and verification. 

The most simple and important advice I can give is that Twitter is like any other information source — documents, anonymous tips, news releases, press conferences, interviews, databases — it can provide valuable information or deliberate lies or innocent errors. Your job is to verify the information that looks useful. As with all the other information you gather, you can verify lots of different ways, and no single technique works for everything.

2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web

Thanks to Jay Rosen for tweeting the link to this amazing item. Via McGarr Solicitors, an Irish law firm: 2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web. Excerpt:

This is not a joke. 

I have started with that clarification, because as you read this you will find yourself asking “Is this some kind of a joke?” I thought I would be helpful and put the answer right up at the start, so you can refer back to it as often as you require. 

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. 

They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed. 

These assertions were not merely academic positions. The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts. These are the prices for linking they were supplied with: 

1 – 5 €300.00 

6 – 10 €500.00 

11 – 15 €700.00 

16 – 25 €950.00 

26 – 50 €1,350.00 

50 + Negotiable 

They were quite clear in their demands. They told Women’s Aid “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website.”

Why are so many news sites still so unreadable? A few of the best and worst

Via PandoDaily.com, Hamish McKenzie writes: Why are so many news sites still so unreadable? A few of the best and worst. This is a long-overdue protest. Excerpt:

A few years ago, the resolution on our monitors wasn’t good enough to make big text look great, unflickery, and unpixellated on screen. And so, many news and magazines merely transposed their way of thinking from their offline worlds into the online environment: they built websites that published their words in small font, expecting readers to interact with their copy the way they had always done with their newspapers and magazines. 

If the text was too small, they could move closer to their screens. The smart ones could increase the font size in their browsers, even if that would mess up the formatting of the rest of the site. It was as if news organizations were still stuck in the age of the typewriter. 

That way of thinking is out of date. We are now living in an age of Retina displays and high-resolution desktop monitors. These days, the flicker of our monitors is barely detectable, there’s less reflection and glare, and it’s a strain to see any pixellation in the text even when we’re so close to the screen we could kiss it. 

Despite these developments, however, there is a surprising number of newspaper, magazine, and blog hold-outs, who just don’t want to let go of the small-font days. 

Maybe it’s just a sign that I’m getting old and need spectacles, but I have grown impatient with the websites that refuse to adapt to this new age of big-fonted beauty.

Click through to see his list of sinners, plus a few saints. I generally agree with his assessments. In fairness, I should mention that I re-paragraphed this excerpt: though Hamish uses a nice big font, his paragraphs still run a little long. But that in turn is making me consider my own 10-point Trebuchet.

"Snow Fall": Another opinion

Via PandoDaily.com: Snow Fall: Finally an articulation for the digerati of what a big, expensive newsroom can do. Excerpt:

The future of journalism is about speed, volume, rough and tumble and– like the tech world– “good enough” iteration. Even blogs like ours that produce comparatively less, with editing and illustration and reporting still move at a rapid pace compared to the old media world. 

Every story we do could have been made better with a huge old media machine behind it. But typically that improvement would be marginal, and most readers wouldn’t notice or care. That’s why blogs work. Readers would rather have the information clearly and quickly, than read the fruits of seven editors arguing over a nut graph. 

But that is in no way what this is. More than 11 staffers worked on this piece and it took more than six months. When we talk about the New York Times and the Washington Post having newsrooms of hundreds and hundreds of people, it’s usually in the context of it being an albatross. 

But this is what you can produce when you do. And yeah, maybe we’re all paying attention because it was the New York Times that did it. But that brand, reach and distribution is part of the power of an expensive legacy newsroom as well. 

This isn’t the future of journalism. It’s a legacy– and still troubled– brand like the New York Times taking off the gloves, no longer pretending it can compete with nimble blogs and throwing one hell of a punch at all of those lean newsrooms around the country. This is what a several hundred person staff and a massive brand name can do, bitches! 

If this was the future of journalism, there would be no future of journalism. Because almost no one can afford it anymore, and many of the ones who can are too scared for their survival to try. It’s like Google fiber or the self-driving car, but in journalism. It’s showing off as much as it is good work.

"Snow Fall": Is this the new long form of webwriting?

I have just read, watched, and listened to John Branch's Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek published by The New York Times. Anyone who writes long text for the web needs to become familiar with it, and to study how it was put together.

The text is core, and brilliantly suited to the medium: short sentences, short paragraphs, displayed in short lines.

Inset in the margin are photos and videos of the people involved. The narrative is broken into six segments, each set off with a dramatic graphic. Animated maps trace the paths of the skiers and snowboarders down the mountain, and the path taken by the avalanche.

The result is a powerful multimedia narrative. More importantly, it's a benchmark: This is how such narratives can be created with our present technology, and with enough resources to exploit that technology. Not all stories can be told this way, or need to be. But some stories will be enormously enhanced by the techniques used in "Snow Fall."

Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre

You really need to have grown up when Sartre was in full cry to appreciate it, but this New Yorker piece is still pretty funny: Jean-Paul Sartre's Blog. The first post:

Saturday, 11 July, 1959: 2:07 A.M. 

I am awake and alone at 2 A.M. 

There must be a God. There cannot be a God. 

I will start a blog.

Medicine in the Media 2012

Thanks to Maryn McKenna for tweeting the link to this. Via Tumblr, Scott Hensley of NPR's Shots blog offers a 24-page presentation on writing for the web, delivered at Medicine in the Media 2012. While he focuses on medical reporting, much of what he says applies to webwriting in general.

Website pagination: Stories should load into a single page every time

Via Slate.com, an argument by Farhad Manjoo: Website pagination: Stories should load into a single page every time. I concur. Excerpt:

Slate’s editorial guidelines call for articles to be split into multiple pages once they hit the 1,000-word mark, so I have to keep this brief: Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop. 

Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end. 

Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. The practice has become so ubiquitous that it’s numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the Web has always been, and how it should be. 

Neither is true: The Web’s earliest news sites didn’t paginate, and the practice grew up only over the past decade, in response to pressure from the ad industry. It doesn’t have to be this way—some of the Web’s most forward-thinking and successful publications, including BuzzFeed and the Verge, have eschewed pagination, and they’re better off for it. 

So would we all be: Pageview juicing is a myopic strategy. In the long run, unfriendly design isn’t going to help websites win new adherents, and winning new readers is the whole point of being a website. 

I bet that if all news sites switched to single-page articles—and BuzzFeed-style scrolling galleries instead of multipage slideshows—they’d experience short-term pain followed by long-term gain. Their articles would get shared more widely and, thus, win more loyal, regular visitors for the publication. 

In fact, pagination is so horrible that I suspect eradicating it from the Web might also lead to bigger breakthroughs—it would almost certainly solve the Iran nuclear crisis and eliminate the fiscal cliff—but I don’t want to make any promises.

Nielsen on HD computer screens and their typographical implications

Back in July, Jakob Nielsen posted a good item in his Alertbox about Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens. Before he actually got into the discussion about fonts, he wrote:

Not only are computer screens getting bigger, they're also finally getting better — which might be more important. In June 2012, Apple introduced the first mainstream computer with a high-definition screen: the MacBook Pro with a resolution of 2880×1800 on a 15-inch display. This screen delivers a pixel density of 220 PPI (pixels per inch, corresponding to the DPI — dots per inch — that measure laser printer quality.) 

Apple uses the propaganda term "Retina display" for screen qualities above approximately 200 PPI, under the theory that this is as much as the human eye can resolve. Of course, this is not true: we need around 900 PPI for a screen so good that adding pixels wouldn't make it look any better. 

Although Apple's screen quality isn't perfect, it's dramatically better than anything on offer from other computer vendors. It's a disgrace that the PC industry hasn't recognizably improved screen quality over the last decade — despite the fact that we have known for decades that 300 PPI screens offer dramatically faster reading speed than low-density monitors.

By all means read his whole post. I'm bringing up the subject now because last week I bought myself a MacBook Pro 15"—and it's been a revelation. No doubt 300 PPI would be even better, but until it comes along I'm more than content.

Composing text on screen has become a pleasure, and reading is too—whether or not I'm reading any faster. Most strikingly, this machine has made me realize how god-awful tiring it's been, for years, to read and write on a low-res screen. 

So we finally have something like the resolution that Nielsen has been demanding for decades. As HD screens become the norm, they're going to oblige web designers and writers to reconsider content and display issues: Can we write longer sentences in longer paragraphs? I suspect we can and will. Should we prefer serif to sans serif? Nielsen thinks it's now a personal call, based on branding or the "mood" of a given type style. I agree.

Twitter study: Hashtags and URLs can double engagement

Via Poynter: Twitter study: Hashtags and URLs can double engagement. Excerpt:

Twitter’s research into how journalists can best grow their followings uses data to confirm what you’ve probably been told at a dozen social media seminars: Be a firehose of information about your beat, use hashtags and @ mentions as much as you can, and share what you’re reading. 

Twitter will announce the findings, which follow a six-month study of 150 journalists and news organizations, at the Online News Association’s conference in San Francisco Thursday. The company’s Mark Luckie and Erica Anderson briefed us via phone beforehand. 

One surprising finding, Anderson said, was that accounts using old-style retweets grew followers more slowly than those who retweet using Twitter’s built-in button. She cited BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray as a particularly adept user of this feature. 

Here’s a little more detail on the study’s recommendations. 

“Tweet Your Beat” 

Be a source of info for people who follow what you cover — sounds obvious, right? But posting a “concentrated number of tweets in a short time span,” what Luckie calls “tweet burstiness”  — live tweeting an event, for instance — can increase your engagement 50 percent more than your expected baseline. Sara Ganim’s Twitter feed during the Jerry Sandusky trial is a great example of this, Anderson said. 

Use hashtags 

Those can double engagement for individuals, the study found, pumping their tweets into a conversation that might be taking place outside your immediate circles. Fox News and The Washington Post do this well, they said. 

Cite sources 

Mentioning people you’re citing by Twitter handle can help in the same way. “Brands that tweet 20% fewer URLs and 100% more @mentions grow followers 17% more than expected,” Luckie says in his presentation.

How news organizations are taking advantage of the latest iPad’s features

Via Poynter, a long, informative piece: How news organizations are taking advantage of the latest iPad’s features. This brings up two crucial issues for webwriters: Text has printlike clarity and readability on a Retina Display screen, but sites not updated look worse than ever. Excerpt:

Non-updated text is distracting and hard to read on the new iPad. It’s a bit like watching standard definition content on a high-definition TV. Just as standard definition TV looks worse on a high-definition TV than it does on a standard definition one, the same effect happens on the iPad. It’s not that apps need to be updated to look even better on the new iPad; it’s that if they aren’t updated, they’re very hard to look at. 

I’ve found that apps that haven’t been updated are not worth using. The text is so hard to read and distracting that it ruins the reading and news consumption experience. It’s hard to imagine someone who enjoys the typography of print getting into such a pixelated reading experience. 

Some magazines are more known for their visual flair than The Economist. Vanity Fair is now taking advantage of the higher resolution display to feature higher resolution photos that show off more detail. Many users and app developers had concerns, however, that the new iPad would lead to magazine issues that were too big. 

Vanity Fair, Wired and others had large file sizes, sometimes 500 MB or more. The smallest iPad has about 13.5 GB of usable storage space. At 500 MBs an issue, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for many issues or other apps or movies. And that was 500 MB per issue on a device that needs to push four times less pixels than the new iPad. 

Vanity Fair recently switched to a bundled PDF format from a PNG format, which has allowed the magazine to use higher resolution art assets while also reducing the file size of their issues. Its May issue weighed in at 135 MB. 

Art Director Chris Mueller said in an email that Vanity Fair also rethought some of the apps’ usability. Issues now feature less scrolling content. The Table of Contents page is several individual pages instead of one big, long scroll. 

“We’re adapting and working through other quirks as they come up, but overall the huge improvement to the appearance of type and images on the tablet is worth the effort,” Mueller said of the changes made to the Vanity Fair app for the new iPad. 

The Washington Post is another iPad app in transition. The text looks great, but photos are low resolution. Joey Marburger, designer for mobile and new digital products at the Post, said in an email that higher resolution photos are on the way. He cautioned that a balance needs to be struck between high resolution photos and download speed. 

He said that offline storage is another issue that iPad news app makers need to take into account. (iPads hold a small fraction of what desktops and laptops can hold.)

Nielsen: iPad text resolution improves usability

I've been wondering what Jakob Nielsen would say about the new iPad, and now I know. Via Nielsen Norman Group: iPad 3 Changing Use Patterns. Click through for the complete post and links. Excerpt:

The new iPad 3's crisper screen will lead to increased tablet use, particularly when reading content. 

•iPad 3 is the first broad-market computer with a good display, meaning that it's currently the only computer that makes it reasonably pleasant to read text. In other words, people with both a desktop computer and an iPad 3 will tend to prefer reading from the tablet, even though the desktop is otherwise more powerful. (Users will stick with their desktop computer for tasks that involve more intense interaction.) 

•Also, as we know from all previous research, when the usability of something goes up, users do it more. More pleasant reading = more reading. I stand by the analysis in my previous newsletter that the user interface design guidelines remain the same as those discovered when testing the iPad 1 and 2. 

However, the expectation to see more use of tablets, now that they are more pleasant to use, does have implications for design strategy: a broader set of companies should now invest in designing tablet versions of their websites or mobile apps.

Webwriting with addictive technology

The Tyee has published my article Bad Apple. Excerpt:

Teaching in Capilano College's Mac-based Infotech program even before the web, I could see that we write and read differently on the computer screen. The medium really is the message online, and the message is jolts. 

Jolts are the little sensory rewards the computer gives us. They come when we turn on the machine and it bongs at us. Jolts come with every alert, every new window, every avian squawk and porcine grunt in Angry Birds. Jolts come with every email and text message. Isaacson [in his biography of Steve Jobs] doesn't use the word, but his description of Apple packaging shows that jolts of pleasure are designed right into the boxes that your Mac and iPhone come in. 

Jolts also come in the form of verbal abuse, which inspired the email and forum flame wars of the 1990s, the ongoing hysteria of today's political blogs, and the punchlines of Twitter. 

Like lab rats with electrodes wired into their brains' pleasure centers, we learn what gives us the strongest online jolts, and we keep doing it. We forget that the lab rats preferred to push their jolt button until they starved to death, but in our few lucid moments we realize that we're well and truly addicted to the jolts that Apple gives us. 

Hence our rapt anticipation of the next jolt machine: the iPhone 5, the iPad 3, or something completely novel that Steve knew we'd want before we ourselves did. (In one of my 1980s SF novels, I imagined something like the iPad, but assumed it wouldn't arrive until circa 2080.)