Writing for the Web

Forbidden Words Flagger

How have we survived this long without the Forbidden Words Flagger? It not only provides the list of Matt Groening's Forbidden Words for 2004, it also offers a bookmarklet that flags such terms on any site.

Smile When You Call Me That!

(In the heady days of the dot-com bubble, I had a great job writing columns for an e-zine now sadly defunct...but until recently, the columns were still online. Now they seem to have vanished, so I'm republishing some of them here.)

I'm still learning the names of the students in my classes this semester, and the other day I called one of them "Katie." A split second later I learned it was Kate, thank you very much.

Well, I understood her perfectly. Blessed as I am with the name Crawford, I've endured half a century of "Crawfish" from would-be wits, not to mention the well-meaning folks who put an extra "l" in "Kilian." (The profligate Irish Killians may need it, but we frugal Germans make do with just one.)

We often bristle when people mess with our names or patronize us, a reaction predicted by Kilian's First Law: People care more about communicating their identity than about communicating anything else. This is why scientists write scientific jargon, why business people write such "businesslike" prose, and why postmodern literary critics are unintelligible. Your language is a major part of your identity, so you cling to it even when you know you may baffle or outrage your readers and listeners.

We Webwriters need to get beyond that attitude. We hope to deliver good, solid jolts to our visitors, but not to drive them away. Terms that seem perfectly harmless to us may be deeply offensive to people who come to our site, and they'll rarely stick around long enough to tell us what we did wrong.

Is Bush Wired?

Once upon a time, printers issued "broadsides" as a kind of instant news bulletin—a sheet or two of paper about a single subject like a hanging or a battle. Now people are creating "broadsites" to do the same thing: rush a lot of specialized information onto a website while it's still hot news.

One such broadsite has just emerged to deal with a question no one had thought much about until last week's presidential debate: Is Bush Wired?.

Whatever the truth of the allegation, and whoever wins the US election, the broadsite is a phenomenon we'll doubtless see more of in the next few years.

FBI Shuts Down Indymedia

This actually happened last week, but I didn't get wind of it until a moment ago when I saw a story on BBC Online. I went to the source to find out why the FBI, supposedly at the request of Swiss and other authorities, seized an Indymedia server in the US: Independent Media Center.

As an occasional Web journalist, I don't know whether to be outraged at this violation of free expression, or flattered that anyone thinks a Web-based journal is that dangerous. And since Indymedia is as worldwide as the globalization it opposes, a move like this isn't much more than harassment. I hope.

Nielsen Rates the Candidates' Usability

I've fallen out of the habit of reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox posts, and I shouldn't have. After all, I'm on his mailing list, and he's always very good about notifying his subscribers about a new post. He's also the undisputed pioneer of computer-mediated communication, and his classic book Hypertext and Hypermedia was invaluable when I started teaching hypertext writing.

This afternoon I wondered what he'd been up to lately, and was rewarded with his recent analysis: Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated.

This is good stuff. I've been waiting for over a decade to see really effective political use of the Web, and the wait is clearly not yet over. But Nielsen sees some strengths as well as weaknesses in the candidates' use of email newsletters to attract and hold voter support. Online appeals may not have the impact of a TV debate, but a wise politician may find more votes than expected out there in cyberspace.

And as long as you're on his site, you might as well browse around for some of his other highly usable findings.

Salam Pax: Beyond Blogging

Salam Pax's famous blog Where is Raed? was almost my first introduction to blogging. As the Bush government was preparing for war, the Baghdad Blogger was giving us a completely new perspective on Iraq.

He may have been the only Iraqi to actually benefit from the war he so acutely described and condemned. After vanishing from the blogosphere for a few weeks near the end of the war, he emerged as a columnist with the Guardian. Now Alexandra Gill in The Globe and Mail brings us up to date. He's not blogging any more, but he's making video documentaries.