Writing for the Web

Korean TypePad Ban is Over

Last night I saw to my surprise a recently updated TypePad blog, by and for US Republican expats in Korea. I wrote to the author, who promptly replied that he'd been blogging from Korea since August with no problems.

Now a friend in Korea confirms that she can access my sites just fine. It's a great relief, but I wish the Koreans had publicly announced the fact when they lifted the ban.

For Your Exformation...

One day long ago, my grandfather and his friend Will Crawford (for whom I was named) went for a walk in the woods of rural New Jersey where they lived. On their return, my grandfather (who would later gain notoriety as the "Fernwood Flasher") exclaimed to my grandmother, "We must have seen a million rabbits in the woods!"

Uncle Bill, standing behind him, held up his hand, fingers outstretched, and silently mouthed the word: Five.

Ever since then, when someone in my family exaggerates, someone else will hold up a hand and repeat Uncle Bill's silent five.

But we don't have to repeat the whole story, because we all know it. Almost every family, every group has some similar kind of communication--a running gag, a child's baby-talk name preserved as a nickname, a word used in a special way. People in the northern California village of Booneville even developed a local dialect, Boont, back in the 1920s. After one young couple was caught in flagrante on a pile of burlap bags, the Boont word for making love was "burlappin'."

Small Cue, Big Response
Now, terms like these, once understood, become extremely effective. They seem to pack an extra emotional punch. The smaller the cue, the more powerful the response. Five upheld fingers are a devastating retort to some long-winded claim.

Whitewater Editing

When technologies and audiences change before our eyes, editing is rarely a task performed in tranquil contemplation of eternal truths, using style guides carved in stone. Instead we try to adapt our skills to new media, for audiences we scarcely know, and our only constant is the knowledge that tomorrow we'll probably have to adapt yet again. This is whitewater editing.

When it comes to adapting print text to websites, we may be tempted to recall that an "editor" was originally a sponsor of gladiatorial games in ancient Rome. So why not just hack and slash and hope for the best?

Why not? Because you won't end up with the best--just a gory mess on the floor and thousands of downturned thumbs.

It doesn't have to be that way. When they dump a mass of brochures, reports, and articles on your desk and say, "Put this on the site, would you?", you can do a better job than you think.

Bush Site Update

The block is apparently the result of attacks on the site. Read the details at BBC NEWS Technology.

More on the Bush Site Block

The reasons for the blocking of Bush's re-election site remain unknown, but you can see at least some of the affected countries at F-Secure.

Protesting the TypePad Ban

Since early this year, China and Korea have banned access to TypePad sites by computer users on their territory. This is all too typical of the "Great Firewall of China," but the Korean ban is in many ways more disturbing. China has a repressive government. Korea is a democratic nation, and Koreans are among the heaviest Internet users in the world.

The ban took effect last spring almost immediately after the murder of a Korean national who was kidnapped in Iraq. The incident provoked an understandable wave of anger and disgust. Then someone reportedly posted a video of the man's beheading—on a TypePad site.

As a result, TypePad users in Korea (both Korean nationals and foreign residents) were cut off. I gather they could post to their blogs, but couldn't actually see them. For anyone with an interest in Korean politics, culture, and education, this has been a real setback; meanwhile, anyone sick enough to want to see the murder has no lack of other Web sources, I'm sure.

I finally tracked down the name and address of the Korean ambassador to the US, and wrote him a letter of protest. Having just found the postal address of President Roh Moo-Hyun, I'll send a similar letter. This is simply an intolerable punishment of the innocent, and it's gone on too long. If you agree, I hope you'll use my letter as a model for one of your own. And make it an old-fashioned letter on paper—I suspect they'll take it more seriously. President Roh's address, by the way, is

His Excellency Roh Moo-Hyun
President of The Republic of Korea
Central Government Complex
77-6 Sejongno, Chongno-gu
Seoul, Korea

And in a bizarre echo of this problem, persons in many parts of the world find that they can't access President Bush's re-election site. I had no trouble, but boingboing.net reports on the effects of what appears to be a ban imposed by the site's own creators. Very strange.

Use Your Subhead

Maybe I'm reading too much on the Web, and it's spoiling me for regular print on paper.

I pick up a newspaper with long feature articles (the kind papers don't run enough of these days), and I skip to the bite-size items. If magazine article text isn't full of subheads and pull quotes, I skip that too.

It's not that the Web has reduced my attention span to that of a gerbil. I'm just less tolerant of text without navigation guides. If done right, even a hypertext document spread over several pages offers a synoptic overview. At a glance you can see where you are, where you can go, and what you'll find when you get there. In most newspaper and magazine articles, the headline and blurb are about all the guidance you get. (In the good old days, every chapter of a novel started with a summary of the key events to follow. Now you're lucky to get chapter breaks at all.)

Introduction to Wikipedia

A wiki is a website that anyone can add to, and Wikipedia is a volunteer-labour encyclopedia. I've been vaguely aware of it for some time, but didn't really appreciate its importance until reading Peter Tupper's new article in The Tyee: Journalism's Future May Be Wikipedia. It's a good introduction to what is already a huge subject.

Salam Pax Goes to Washington

Maybe he's not blogging these days, but Salam Pax is still a perceptive and funny observer of cities under siege. First it was Baghdad; now the Baghdad Blogger goes to Washington, and even the first day is full of entertaining and disturbing experiences.

More Forbidden Words

Further to the preceding post, by all means check Rox Populi: Forbidden Words, Phrases and Acronyms of 2005 for a useful update.

For those who object to forbidding words as a threat to freedom of speech, I suggest that these aren't speech—they're Newspeak, language in the service of reduced consciousness.