Writing for the Web

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.

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. 

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.”

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.

A new direction in webwriting

Via The Blognostifier, a blog run by Weh-Ming Cho in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the ad that has transformed web writing overnight: Some long overdue Kijiji Action. Excerpt:

Do you like shoveling snow? Then stop reading this and go back to your pushups and granola because you are not someone that I want to talk to. 

Let’s face it, we live in a place that attracts snow like Magnetic Hill attracts cars, only that ain’t an illusion out there. That’s 12 inches of snow piling up and, oh, what’s that sound? Why it’s the snow plow and it’s here to let you know that it hates you and all the time you spent to shovel your driveway. Did you want to get out of your house today? Were you expecting to get to work on time? Or even this week? 

You gave it your best shot. You tried to shovel by yourself and I respect you for that. I did it, my parents did it, some of my best friends did it. But deep down inside, we all wanted to murder that neighbor with the snowblower who was finished and on his second beer while you were still trying to throw snow over a snowbank taller than you are.  

So, here we are. You could murder your neighbour, which could ensure that you won’t need to shovel a driveway for 25 to life, but there are downsides to that too. What to do?  

Here’s the deal. I have a snow blower and I want you to own it. I can tell you’re serious about this. It’s like I can almost see you: sitting there, your legs are probably crossed and your left hand is on your chin. Am I right? How’d I do that? The same way that I know that YOU ARE GOING TO BUY THIS SNOWBLOWER.

This ad breaks most of the rules of webwriting, especially concision. Never mind. The ad got over 500,000 hits, and his blog had over 100,000 hits by November 24. This evening he was interviewed by Carol Off of CBC Radio's As It Happens program, a tribute paid to a new medium by an old one.

Mr. Cho is onto something, and I plan to keep an eye on him.

The blog I've been waiting for: Unnecessary Journalism Phrases

Just ran across Unnecessary Journalism Phrases, which battles expressions like "For all intents and purposes" and "moving forward." Highly recommended.

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.

Webwriters and the Japanese disasters

I haven't been posting often here because, ironically, I've been too busy writing for the web on my blog H5N1—especially about the consequences of the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. But The Tyee has published my article "Shaky Coverage in Japan," which deals in large part with the bloggers and tweeters reporting on the multiple disasters of March 11. Excerpt:

In Japan, the story arc has been complicated: We don't know much about the Japanese or about nuclear power, so we fall back on even more stereotypes: brave samurai, stoic peasants, evil bureaucrats and ticking time bombs.

The Japanese themselves, and long-resident foreigners, are keenly aware of how the story arc misrepresents them and their present problems. And in a literate, fully wired society, they are pushing back online against the stereotypes.

Go to #JPQuake and you'll find individuals and Japanese news sources tweeting about the latest developments, including events that never reach the mainstream media. English-language Japanese media like Japan Today and NHK World provide calm, up-to-date reports

Local blogs like Gakuranman and Japan Probe also present pretty straightforward reports, as well as some sharp criticism of media bias.

In one widely read post, Michael Gakuran wrote: "Even previously respectable papers seemed to be gripped by sensationalism and unable to report the basic facts needed to keep people from worry... Something amazing was happening on Twitter, though. Those of us in Japan and able to understand Japanese noticed a stark contrast between the relatively calm Japanese media and foreign press... A team of citizen journalists had assembled and were disseminating information that was not only factually correct but balanced and peer-reviewed. A far cry from the exaggerated coverage by many professional journalists and in some cases reporting that bordered on the unethical."

via thetyee.ca