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.

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.

Canadian-Iranian blogger sentenced to 19 years in prison

Via The Globe and Mail: Canadian-Iranian blogger sentenced to 19 years in prison. Excerpt:

An Iranian court sentenced the founder of one of the first Farsi-language blogs, credited with sparking the boom in Iranian reform bloggers, to more than 19 years in prison for his writings, a website reported Tuesday. 

Iranian-Canadian Hossein Derakhshan, 35, was a controversial figure among Iran's blogging community. Writing his blog from Canada, he was initially a critic of Iran's clerical leadership, and in 2006 he visited Israel — Iran's archenemy — saying he wanted to act as a bridge between the two countries' peoples. 

But he later became a vocal supporter of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praising him for standing up to the West and criticizing regime opponents. 

Mr. Derakhshan then visited Iran in 2008 and was arrested. Over the next two years, he was often held without communication with family or lawyers, according to rights groups. 

Mashreghnews.ir, which is close to Iran's presidential office, reported Tuesday that Mr. Derakhshan was convicted on charges of co-operation with hostile countries — a reference to the Israel visit — spreading propaganda against the ruling establishment, promotion of counterrevolutionary groups and insulting Islamic thought and religious figures. 

The court sentenced him to 19 1/2 years in prison, the report said, adding that Mr. Derakhshan can appeal. It was unclear if he would benefit from time served. 

Mr. Derakhshan helped ignite blogging in Iran by posting simple instructions online on how to create sites in Farsi in 2001. 

The flourishing of blogs by Iranians at home and abroad that resulted gave the country's reform movement an online platform that has helped it survive heavy crackdowns at home — though authorities tried to block many, including Mr. Derakhshan's.

The Globe also has an editorial about this sorry affair.

An issue for webwriters

At Poynter Online, Roy Peter Clark has a thoughtful and provocative essay on his Writing Tools blog. It's a detailed analysis of the online suicide note left by Joseph Stack before he flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin. Here's a small part of what Clark says:

It must be said that the author of this rant could spell, punctuate, and adhere to the basics of Standard English. But while the grammar and syntax may hold together, what strikes me as remarkable is the author's diction. What I find is an emptiness, an absence of original language, an almost total dependence upon clichés and half-clichés, propaganda from the right and the left, slogans and empty phrases we have read and heard so many times before. 

George Orwell wrote about the abuse of language and politics, most famously in his essay "Politics and the English Language." Orwell was not analyzing, I realize, the writing of a crazed man bearing a hundred grudges, but his essential thesis may be relevant to this case.

I take issue with Clark's comment on Orwell—who was, in my opinion, indeed analyzing the writings of many crazed men bearing a hundred grudges.

But I agree that Stack's note is indeed a sorry collage of clichés and catchphrases, and it's both ironic and sad that the poor man couldn't get beyond them. If he had, perhaps he could have thought through his situation more clearly and resolved it less violently.

The note, as Clark observes, sounds like a million blog posts; go to memeorandum and you'll find an up-to-date compendium of them, all expressed with passionate sincerity.

And that raises an issue for all webwriters, whether we're writing commercial copy or personal blogs: How can we avoid the online version of Newspeak?

Newspeak, you'll recall, was a language specifically and successfully designed to shut down consciousness. Instead, you could simply quack the current party line without thinking at all. If you were really good at it, you'd get the accolade of being a "doubleplusgood duckspeaker."

The consciousness of the typical web surfer is not often fully engaged with the content of a site: We skim and scan, looking for visual and semantic jolts. We're impatient with long, sequential reasoning. And it's physically uncomfortable to try to read long, sequential text online.

So we cheer up when we read prefabricated text with familiar expressions, especially if it delivers jolts in the addictive way that salted peanuts deliver sodium chloride. 

Webwriters can easily deliver doubleplusgood ducktext—especially if they've been reading mostly such text for the last few years. In effect, the writer is semiconscious and so is the reader. That may even be the best way to talk and think about some really crappy product, service, or idea.

Better to rouse oneself to full consciousness, struggle to find the precise word or phrase, and use it to wake up one's readers. They may not thank us for it, like some of Clark's commenters, but in general it seems to me better to be pissed off and wide awake than to be pissed off in your sleep...and then to wake up between cold, wet sheets.

Online headlines should entice readers

Via The Editor's Desk, the blog of Andy Bechtel at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill: Guest post: Online headlines should entice readers. The guest is Daniel Bethea, a journalism student. Excerpt:

The headline is typically the first thing that a person reads, but a recent study shows just how important online headline writing is. The study found that 44 percent of Google News readers only read the headlines and did not actually follow the link to the publications’ Web sites. 

What does this tell us about headline writing for the Web? First, online headlines should be more informative than a typical print edition headline. Names should be included. The print edition may say “mayor,” but the online headline should say the mayor’s name. Figures can also enhance a Web headline. Instead of writing “millions,” write the actual number.

I'll think about these precepts when I'm posting items on The Hook, the politics blog of The Tyee. But I'd hesitate to make the heads really long—our headlines are big and bold, and three or four lines of headline text, no matter how informative, would be hard to read.

Reader reluctance to click through to the full story is a continuing problem for web writers and editors. I try to overcome it with an intriguing lede, and sometimes I guess I succeed...if only because the item gets a lot of comments.

But I also see on my blog H5N1 that the average length of a visit to the site is under 2 minutes, though I post numerous items every day and some of them are pretty long. Even at the height of the swine flu pandemic, visit length was no more than 2 minutes. Some of my flu-blogging colleagues write long, complex posts and get much more traffic than I do—but visit length isn't any longer than it is for me.

So clearly many web readers are content with the spritz of information they get from the headline alone.