Online for the Holidays

My in-laws, who hail from Korea, visited us during the holidays and continued to comment upon how reliant their children were upon the internet. My father-in-law noted that there was no need to call upon elders for advice, since all knowledge came from "the computer" these days. Despite their skepticism, my mother-in-law was made a believer in The Pioneer Woman Cooks, especially because her comprehension of writing in English is limited and this site has easy graphics to follow (limited reading of text necessary to follow the recipes).

Here are a few other ways that my holidays were helped by the internet.

Gift-buying - I relied on online shopping for many purchases (since at 9 months pregnant, my tolerance for shopping malls is at a premium :) and waited for those prized e-mails to circulate about Free Shipping and 25% off.

Entertainment - How else would I have known the times for the IMAX shows than if I had checked online. You don't expect me to (gasp!) call the theatre for showtimes, do you?

Dining - We chose a brunch that would please my veggie in-laws by checking Yelp.com. So many of our dining choices are made based on these reviews from unpaid volunteer reviewers. We also made our reservation through OpenTable.com and earned some points toward a gift certificate.

Transportation - We had to check the MBTA's website to see if trains were running on usual schedules during the holidays.

Health - when my brother-in-law's dog started acting strangely, we checked online to see if the pup's symptoms could be diagnosed from home. Here's an idea for those still looking to make their big bucks on the internet - there didn't appear to be a WebMD for pets that contained a central database of health info. Something to consider....


How many sites did you consult with respect to the holidays?

Ron Paul's "Long Tail"

Happy Holidays all! Again, while home for the holidays I found another relevant article in Newsweek. This one focuses on how the development of the "long tail" has aided lesser-known presidential candidates in their quest to "get the word out"when 20 years ago they would have been virtual unknowns.

Dark Knight Before Christmas

Merry Christmas, all!


Here's a fun Youtube clip of
Batman learning to be a little bit more cheery during this season (with action figures!)


Happy Holidays and see you in the new year!


-- Hana

Zoetrope and the Zeitgeist

Is the Web about to become the new venue for screenwriters? More than a few striking Writer's Guild members are entertaining the idea
of their possibly brighter future online. I wished to address this issue when I was discussing the Well during the last class.

Never mind the slim pickings on TV these days. The screenwriters contributing to the pre.vue.144 conference at the Well are already planning posssible futures without Hollywood Industry executives. According to this article in The Los Angeles Times, many Writer's Guild members are now working with Web venture capitalists to present their content online.

Will this give a major boost to independent film makers? Is the whole industry going indie? We'll see. Web Video start-up companies are already forming to create what may be the new film industry standard: Web-based video production and distribution.

Did Google's $1.65 billion purchase of You Tube foreshadow this event? Time will tell. In any case the Well screenwriters in the pre.vue.144 conference appear to be taking enlightened self-interest to the next level. In discussing how they will cope with an uncertain future, they provide a unique perspective that news producers might miss.

Conference pre.vue.144 speaks directly to the purpose of the Well too. On the "Learn about the Well" page, we are told that, "for members," The Well "is a way to come up with the next interesting thing and a way to live." The spirit of solidarity within the pre.vue.144 seems to reflect this, providing fellow screenwriters ideas on how to roll with the changes.

I don't imagine that I would ever visit Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Virtual Studios website and find the same vitality. The nine year-old site's name is quite visionary though. Coppola founded Zoetrope as a way to both encourage and mine new talent, offering online writing workshops and prize money for the best screenplays.

Coppola does promote his own products here, mainly Zoetrope All-Story Magazine and the Coppola wineries. Though I'd rather pay my twenty bucks per month to The Well and view the banner-free Salon Premium site whenever I choose, Zoetrope Virtual Studios exemplifies a good use participatory media, whether it speaks to Coppola's enlightened self-interest or ours.

The roster of members with archived screenplays, photos, novellas and short stories is enormous.
Looking at the site, however, I don't sense that levelling that distinguishes the Well, where members may freely communicate with highly-seasoned writers from the Hollywood studio trenches.

The member dialogs posted on Zoetrope are helpful and often polite, yet, unlike The Well, we don't see many comments hyperlinked to other sites outside of the community. Perhaps such connections are made through Z mail, Zoetrope's internal e-mail application. The Coppolas appear to be focused more on their craft than its buzz.

How do screenwriters manage their careers in uncertain times? In The Well, we find them sharing this knowledge with whomever chooses to enter the pre.vue.144 conference. Not a bad watering hole for a citizen journalist trying to get the inside scoop on writer's strike woes.

In this respect, The Well has an intimate presence in cyberspace that Zoetrope lacks. A missed opportunity for Zoetrope? Not necessarily. Zoetrope was set up to educate screenwriters in their craft. The Well writing conferences are less clearly defined, serving as networking platforms .

Both sites serve their purposes. Somebody should mention Zoetrope's fatal usability flaw, however. Coppola creates a huge advertising space for himself on the homepage, narrowing the already tiny text within the left side's vertical navigation. We get a clear sense that, though we're viewing a community website, we're asked to be ever-mindful of the Coppola brand.

Planet Cancer

I think this site is a great example of the best of online community (when Katherine was talking about PlanetOut last night, I instantly thought of this one). Certainly a place where the users could really benefit from the support of others in the same boat!

An Old School Virtual Community Succumbs to Web 2.0

Hi there. I thought it rather ironic that Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox site would ping my Blackberry after class last night. I had just touted the virtues of The Well, a website that shuns the complex, application-rich user interfaces so common to Web 2.0 community sites. As I read the summary of Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, I thought, "finally, the meme has spread itself to my corner":

Ajax, rich internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely the most profitable.

So what profits a site the most? Nielsen says that sometimes we need only to tweak the content of our web copy to keep people coming back.

As I check the statistics of my own community site's analytics program, I begin to laugh. I'm only one who has clicked
on all of those fancy Web 2.0 widgets I added to my homepage.

The Well, on the other hand, carefully surveyed its members before adding any Web 2.0 functionality to the site. Apparently, the results are in. Though I didn't hand in my own survey on time, I was pleased to see that the "Writer's Guild of America" conference now has an RSS feed.

How ironic! Though I was whining to Katherine about The Well's lack of searchabilty last night, I've seeded my newsreader with Well Conference feeds this morning. How nice that my favorite site knows its audience!

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My Slideshow - WARNING MUSIC PLAYS

I forgot to warn anyone who looks at it - music plays automatically so if you're at work, turn off your speakers!

My Slideshow

I tried using flip book (thanks for posting that!) to make my slideshow. It will eventuallay be much longer than 8 photos, but here is what I have so far.


Oops, its embedding link won't work on this blog - I'll try a link instead.

http://www.flip.com/people/flipbooks/342978

Evolution of Dance

I wasn't surprised to see that the most played YouTube video ever was the Evolution of Dance.



I was unsurprised for the following reasons:

1.) This piece is very entertaining and it held my interest because it conjured so many images of junior high dances.
2.) It was posted well over a year ago, when YouTube seemed to peak in popularity.
3.) The entertainer covers music by artists of all different generations, races which is obviously more appealing to a broader audience.

What I am surprised about is how this video seems to break all the rules of mixed media usage. We can gain little info. about "Comedian Justin Laipply" other than that he is a talented dancer and not camera-shy. The video is quite long, too --a full six minutes. Usually this kind of length is unacceptable when posting to a high traffic site, but obviously tens of millions of people have followed the link from their e-mail forwards to watch dance evolve.

Any other examples you can think of where media laws are broken, to the success of the producers (or break-out comedians)?

This is pretty hard...

This slideshow assignment is harder than I thought it would be. Are you guys using personal photos or just random pics that you find on the internet? Are you relating it to your final project?

Maybe I'm not imaginative enough, I feel like everything I try to put together is the corniest thing of the century......

Slideshow: Travel + Leisure

Sorry this is late, but I found a few really nice slideshows on the Travel + Leisure website. One I really liked is the "10 Great Places to Spend the Holidays" slideshow. I think it's an appropriate use of the slideshow medium, and I like that it gives you useful links in the text.

And, if you're looking at the first slide and wishing you were in Bali right now, check out their #3 pick: Boston!

Slideshow: "We Chose To Go To The Moon..."

I've always been interested in the early days of space exploration -- my father worked on some of the programming for one of the early Mars probes, and he instilled in me a fascination for NASA and space exploration in general. So when I found this slideshow, with some highlights of the first orbital and lunar missions, I just had to share.


Sadly, I can't seem to directly link to it -- it's a javascript pop-up window. But if you'll point your browsers here, scroll about three-quarters of the way down and look in the right-hand column for the image above and the title "We chose to go to the moon", you'll find it.

At first it seems to be your standard pop-up slideshow, but I liked the optional feature at the bottom -- playing a short audio clip, where a narrator gave some more background to the image. True, the guy's a little dry, but I didn't know that you could *do* that with slideshows! It was neat, and took up far too much time listening to it.

Also -- since this class is "Writing and *Editing* for the Web" -- spot the huge whoopsie in this slideshow. G'wan.

Enjoy!

Another Slideshow: Hillary Clinton's milestones

While reading the New York Times, I came across yet another great slideshow, probably the best I've found!
Milestones: Hillary Rodham Clinton

The slideshow accompanied the article "Clinton Talks of Scars While Keeping Guard Up" and shows an "interactive timeline" of Mrs. Clinton's life and career.

You can press the arrows buttons or the blue bands in the timeline to navigate. In some cases you only see dates and brief text, but for more significant periods you also get photos and links to relevant articles. This slideshow really took advantage of technology to showcase information in a concise, inviting, user-friendly way. Very effective!

--Hana

The Police Vs. Vanilla Ice

Famous Band, No-Frills Web Copy

I half-expected Sting, the Police frontman and former English teacher, to accept nothing less than clear, concise web copy within the pages of his band's website.

The site's copy writers would seem to take Jakob Nielsen's advice, giving us smaller rabbits to eat in our information forages . On this homepage I can very quickly find concert dates and recordings. When I examine the entire canvas of thepolice.com, both its navigational and textual elements work together. Separate headings, dedicated to separate subjects, with simple sentences, link us to the larger stories beyond the links. I rarely plod through any chunky prose on this site

The homepage is not completely dry, including a few feature stories dedicated to the band's extracurricular life. Even here though, tight sentences and un-essayistic prose are the norm. Hardly "voicey", the text simply conveys the who, what, when,why and where. The quote at the top of the homepage indicates Sting's disregard for fame and the unpretentious copy below seems to reflect that.

A Perfect Example of What Shouldn't Be Done

I never really liked the rapper Vanilla Ice, and his homepage hardly convinces me to convert to his fanclub. The first story on this first page is dedicated to The Vanilla Ice House Party, that marvelous event, where everyone will be present, except the Ice Man himself, it seems. Mr Ice's copywriters have buried his "Full Hour Show" far below the run-on sentences above, using inconsistent clauses, weak verbs and questionable grammar.

Shortly after getting lost within these awful structures, I realized that Vanilla Ice's Website is only a glorified blog. These are not articles I am reading on Vanillaice.com. They are merely postings. I can't imagine that all aging rappers suffer the same treatment, yet neither am I surprised.

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On both hands...

I've been looking into project management web applications for work, so that's what's on my mind. It is useful to compare like websites, as a lot of other people have been posting, because they have the same target audience (presumably).

The good: Basecamp. It's actually really well-known for how simple and easy to use it is, for how much it does. The language is friendly and inviting, making "project management" fun and less intimidating for non-executives. No paragraphs are very long, but most impressively, even the snippets of text, like instructions, are engaging. On a purely product review side, I will say that it doesn't have some features I consider key, like having due dates or progress markers on to-do items (I signed up for the free trial project).

The not so good: Zoho Projects. This is one case where I feel like having the login box so prominent is a deterrent for new users, because there isn't enough introductory content to get visitors oriented. Consider how fun and playful the logo is supposed to be, the text is deathly boring. It comes across as the middle manager trying to improve staff morale by letting employees wear more colorful ties. I logged in as a demo user, and logged out pretty quickly.

Both are just one product among a suite. Basecamp is made by 37signals, which also runs a popular blog call Signal vs Noise, while Zoho Projects is made by, well, Zoho.

Slideshows: Science & Art

Here are three pretty good multimedia slideshows, but none of them automatically play or give you that option.

The best slideshow I've found so far is "New Images of Iapetus", in terms of the relationship between text and photos. Both elements are essential, and unlike most slideshows which are just photo galleries, this one teaches you a lot too (about Saturn's third moon, Iapetus--now you can go impress your friends in Trivial Pursuit.)

This slideshow on Impressionist art was a close second, but was short on information and in length (6 slides). However, this is not surprising since its purpose was to accompany an article and explore the question: "Did visual limitations affect the style of some Impressionist painters?"


Finally, National Geographic had a bunch of nice photo gallery slideshows, but it was not easy to access them all at once. New York Times' site conveniently lets you see all the available slideshows in one area. Here's a neat National Geographic photo slideshow on climate. Unfortunately, it doesn't take you to a new screen, so it's a bit distracting to click through with all the other images on the site.

-- Hana

A bad site

My nomination for a bad site is alloy.com, allegedly one can buy stuff from this site but the page is so busy and cluttered good luck figuring out how. And I hate spinning moving crap, like the crest ad on the homepage, and I can't see any of them but my pop up blocker was going nuts shooting down pop ups.

A Good Site

Since it is the season to shop, I nominate jcrew.com as a well designed site, very clean and simple with links to absolutely everything you need to do from the homepage. Its simplicity and lack of clutter, flash and noise is really refreshing.

The good, the bad, the questionable...

For our homework assignment this week, I figured it'd be best to take a look at companies who are supposed to be great at writing - the ones that make a living doing this kind of stuff. I found a good example of clear, straightforward homepage writing at Regan Communications' website.

And then I found something that disappointed me just a little. Rubenstein Public Relations' homepage left a lot to be desired. I understand from the name alone that they are a PR firm, but I think the hompage writing could've been beefed up. I wanted to know more than just "Hi, we publicize stuff."

And here's a homepage that I thought took a unique approach and spoke directly to its readers. I really like the tone of Arnold Worldwide's homepage writing, but it doesn't tell me that they are an advertising agency servicing well-known, international clients. But I have to give them points for creativity. And it is easy enough to figure out what they do by clicking around just a bit.

Thoughts?

-Erin

Some Military Action Slideshow/Video?

Hi all,

I actually changed my mind and I am going to keep my FLIP Africa Project as my chosen slideshow....surprisingly enough I wasn't impressed with too much else...

However, I did find this video which I think could be considered a slideshow because it has some still photos in it and it also has some animation. Don't ask how I found myself on a Marine site!

http://www.militarytimes.com/multimedia/video/rpg_surgery/

There are some other cool interactive features on this site if you guys want to take a look around....

Have a good weekend!

A wide range of international affairs

This topic is broad, and so is the quality of writing. Because I deal with international security (both the topic and the journal, International Security) on a daily basis, I decided to find the good and bad websites among my competitors.

There are so many different journals that deal with international affairs that it's hard to search them all. I will grudginly say that my favorite is Foreign Affairs---grudgingly because it's our biggest competitor. Its homepage is done very well. At the top, it includes one feature article and one feature item. Below this, it includes very, very short descriptions of each article (generally in one sentence) that hook the reader. This impressed me, because I have to write these types of blurbs for our articles, and I cannot do it in one sentence! The homepage is not cluttered with descriptions of the journal itself, or the staff, or authors. It lists the authors of each article, but doesn't include lengthy (and I find annoying) bio info. Below this, it describes current events, also succinctly. Plenty of info in a small amount of words. Well done, in my opinion. (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/)

And for the bad: I was not a fan of the Journal of International Affairs website (http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/). This homepage gives no information about what the journal publishes. Instead of describing current articles (which seems to be necessary if a journal wishes to attract readers to its pages), the homepage gives a generic description of what the journal publishes ("a leading foreign affairs periodical") and explains in general terms who the contributors are. One must click further (http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/current.html) to find what I think is the relevant information for a homepage. Here, the only writing I found was bio info only, nothing on what the articles were about. This is not going to persuade me to read the article. On top of that, the bio info. differed in length (most of it was too long for a website---I had to scroll far just to view all the articles in the issue).

This is a good journal and publishes very prominent authors/scholars in the field, but the writing on the website does not live up to the writing in the journal. The writing on foreignaffairs.org, however, does.

Why Upstate New York Doesn't Need to Get Online...

How they do it across the pond...

When I thought about good web writing, BBC News immediately sprang to mind. I had a look at it again, this time, I hope, with a clear, non-Anglophile mind. I realized that I always turn to BBC for my news not only because I find it to be the most reliable news source, but that it lays out my news in a clear, concise way that I have no trouble diving into no matter how busy I am. The teasers for the articles are intriguing short sentence summaries that peak my interest and always reel me in whether I have the time to be on the site or not!

How they do it in upstate NY

I knew upstate New York wouldn't fail me in it's backwardness, even on the web. I found a site for a museum near my hometown which I found to be far too wordy on the web. If you are ever in New Lebanon, New York, visit the Mt. Lebanon Shaker Museum and Library but if you're on the web don't visit their site.

Mexican Food and Culture

Greetings all,
The warm spices and flavor of Mexican food provide comfort at my family dinner table, especially when the temperatures dip below zero. http://www.saveur.com/web-exclusive/the-flavors-of-old-mexico-55016.html. The slide show of food photographs moves slow enough so it is not a distraction while reading about Mexican culture.

New Orleans slide show

I know the New York Times isn't the end all be all of the best on the internet, but a number of the slide shows they produced over the course of covering New Orleans after Katrina have stuck in my mind over the many months since.

A photographer relays his experience in the area during and after Katrina in New Orleans Revisited. (Click on the Return Trip tab. I can't seem to link to it directly.) His photographs and audio account give a more robust portrait of New Orleans "after the storm" than you typically get from a news outlet. He shows the destruction, but also captures a bit of the culture that makes the city unique. At the end of the show you see and hear the Treme Brass Band. They are playing the wedding I'm attending this weekend down there, and I expect to be parading behind them at some point in the next 72 hours. I hope you all are jealous!

If you have time, the Then and Now slide show on the tab in the top-left corner is also quite good.

Only 15 Days til Summer Solstice

That's right: Summer Solstice.
Hear me out. The days start lengthening again in December and it's not the cold, it's the dark, that turns Boston indoors, inward, and inimical to just about anything fun that involves stepping outside. Okay, so it is in part the cold but really much more the lack of sunlight on my pineal gland turning me into a troglodyte. The Solstice namers got it backwards: light re-flooding the world is a summery thing. Summer Solstice begins on December 21 when the balance of light in the day begins again to exceed darkness and that sorry day when dark begins to out shadow light, June 21, portends the winter and should be named accordingly. Maybe they weren't from this area?
The bright spot at this time of December is that seed catalogues begin arriving in my mailbox and I can start plotting what type of garlic I'll grow this year and how many different kinds of sunflowers. Invariably, I grow no garlic (though maybe this will be the year) and few sunflowers but I can plot. And dream - not only of more light, but of warmth from a breeze that is not my Glenwood gas stove.
Gayla Trail provides ample compost for this plotting. Great ideas, consistency, and above all a strong voice with solid writing make it clear why she has a big audience and lots of advertisers.
Aside from gardening my other interests run to nothing in particular. Lovely writing and beautiful images about everything and nothing.
I offer these as examples of writing worth reading.

FLIP

Hi!

This is not my submission for the homework assignment, but I just came across this site that lets you create your own slideshows or online "flipbooks":
Flip

Look at this one, it is really cute:
Africa Project

The slideshow moves kind of quickly, but I really like the idea of making a personal slideshow with more than just pics. I feel like this isn't a good choice for the assignment though because the individual slideshows aren't actually owned and created by the siteowners.

I'll be back!

Multimedia Slideshow

Fullfilling my part of the HW assignment:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/12/04/theater/20071204_FARNS_SLIDESHOW_index.html
This is a slideshow from the NY Times. I liked the looks of it and how they tell a story. The text is easy to read, nicely written, and the photos are beautiful, especially on their travel section.

The Good, The Bad

Per our assignment, I sleuthed out some websites whose copy provided some food for thought, quite literally. During this season, I like to peruse the catalogues of specialty food item purveyors. Although the hard catalogues that I receive in the snail mail usually entice me first, I typically log on to their websites and make an electronic purchase through their sites. Thus, I proceeded to approach their websites and examine them for good web writing, usability.

The Good
Zingerman's. I'm biased here since I adore ol' Zing and would order from them even if their website copy was written in pig latin. However, I think Zingerman's does a fairly good job of describing their goods (they have to describe them especially well because their site does not contain photos - just illustrations). The individual product descriptions are thorough - maybe a little too lyrical for the impatient web reader - but they do include extensive ingredient lists which can be helpful for those with diet concerns. Some of the product descriptions even tell stories, i.e. of how the products are made: citrus pressed oils from marina colonna. I also like that their categories are clearly labeled, with a one-line description of each, such as when I land on these thresholds for full-flavored gifts and cheeses.

The Not-so-Good
Harry and David's catalogues are well-known for their visual spectacle and the fruit display pictures that look like oil pastel still-lifes. But have you ever read the ad copy on their websites? 1-800-CORNY!

Let me just offer you the description of their chocolate truffles with my own comments in italics:
Rich chocolates like ours cause pleasure (Oh really? Glad they don't cause antipathy or discomfort!) and involve the emotions in much the same way as falling in love: They simply make you feel good. (Gag me.) Deeply fragrant (Glad they're not malodorous! Nothing worse than a truffle that stinks!), wholly satisfying, these are the kind of truffles that connoisseurs spend a small fortune hoping to discover in the world's finest shops and confectionaries. We could save them a lot of time and effort. Our gourmet assortment includes Cherry, Almond, Coffee, Raspberry, Double Chocolate and Dark Chocolate. An affordable luxury, in an elegant gift box. (This description does mention that there are 1 lb. of truffles. Wouldn't it be helpful if they could tell you other gift ideas I might like in case this description made me feel like yacking?)

Outreach Center

I’ve been working on a freelance project for the last 3 or 4 weeks, and the site finally went live over the weekend. I was trying to think of a way to post this in a way that’s relevant to this blog, but was coming up short, especially on the writing front. I mostly did the HTML and CSS coding, with only a little input on the design and no influence whatsoever on the content. There are definitely things that still need work, but the launch date we were held to was 12/1, and we felt it was "good enough" to hold its own as is. You can find the old design, which looked like it was from 1998 (but believe it or not, is actually just from 2006), on archive.org.

Katherine fortuitously gave me an in during lecture today—all of the very large, colorful background photos are from iStockphoto.com!

So here it is, the redesigned site for the Outreach Center.

(I’m not going to say what they do. You tell me: how well does the tagline work?)

The "long tail" and blogs

I found an interesting article about the impact of the long tail on the blogosphere.
The article says:

"The long tail of the blogosphere is huge and so any individual blog is not easily discovered. That is, the chance that a random Internet surfer will find a blog that is part of the long tail is nearly zero."

So unlike amazon or google which draw a huge amount of users to their site, blogs, like individual websites, have a small chance of beeing seen by long tail users.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogosphere_long_tail.php

Grey boxes

Jason Santa Maria is an A-list web/graphic designer. One of his landmark blog posts is about how he begins a new site design — essentially his wireframing process! He starts with a sketchbook (“the way you should with any design work”) and ends with a Photoshop mockup. But the key thing is an additional step of grey boxes using Adobe Illustrator. This allows him to lay out design structure without getting distracted by technical limitations or the color and pixel-pushing details.

When I first read this article, I had no experience with Illustrator, so while I understood the design principles, I didn’t understand the flexibility that working with vector graphics provides. Last summer I took a graphic design course where we did get into learning Illustrator, and now I can definitely see how it’s easier to use Illustrator over Photoshop for this purpose. On the other hand, it’s the process, not the software, that really counts. Anyway, his description is much more interesting than my summary of his description. Be sure to check out the full-size versions of his sketchbook scans and screenshots, by clicking on the thumbnails.

Grey Box Methodology

Turn Off the Fan Tag Line

I humbly throw out the first suggestion for our blog tag line: Developing clear web voices despite the white noise

Perhaps a little wordy, but I tried to play off the blog title while communicating a purpose.

Vote yes in the comments or suggest an alternate. Maybe we can pick one in tomorrow's class.

Turning books into Kindling: Amazon's digital book adventure

At home for the Thanksgiving holiday, I plucked the latest Newsweek off of my mother's coffee table and sat down to reacquaint myself with the news of the world. Apparently, the book, in all of its page-turning, tree-killing glory, is about to go up in smoke. I found Steve Levy's cover story on Amazon's Kindle, The Future of Reading a thought-provoking read, that touches on much of what we've discussed in class. I still can't decide if I'd want to curl up on the couch with the new Kindle instead of that stack of Bill Bryson books I've been waiting months to savour in my precious time away from the computer screen, but it's a development with consequences I find easy to imagine. Will we someday find ourselves anticipating real-time edits from the author of the novel in our hands? Is the Kindle the new book? Or are we so tired of looking at screens all day long, we'll give up recreational reading all-together unless its on large-print, bound and artfully covered stack of pages? Will we someday dissect all of this in a class called "Writing and Editing for the Kindle?"

As I ponder all of this, and what it means for the future of my reading, writing and editing, Levy's interpretation of a rant by Microsoft's Bill Hill runs through my mind: "We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world...'do you really believe that we'll be doing that in 50 years?'"

I wonder. Any thoughts?

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Further explanation of Boing Boing

Hello classmates, I came across this review of Boing Boing TV on slate.com: What the heck is Boing Boing TV?

The reviewer reports the blog authors are still trying to find their voices in the video segments. Of possible interest to the class, the first few sentences of the article give a thorough explanation of all that Boing Boing has to offer...

Boing Boing, the world's "most favorited" blog, according to Technorati's vastly hideous phrase, is a hybrid of tech-culture newsletter and DIY lifestyle magazine. Its posts speak of copyright skirmishes and art-prankster attacks, of retro-kitsch bric-a-brac and futuristic gizmos, of comic books and academic journals. While an ideal Boing Boing post would concern an academic journal article about retro-futurist comic books, the site offers a little bit of everything for the cosmopolitan geek.

Dreams

I just wanted to share that I literally spent all of last night dreaming about wireframes. Unfortunately, I woke up with the exact same ideas as when I went to sleep....and the ideas are not original...

And did anyone else's Steve Krug book break into small pieces? My binding is literally broken and in small piles of papers throughout my room. Thank god it wasn't a book about print product usuability!

Sorry for the rant.

Have a good day!

Humor in Redesign

In case you do not obsessively read Dooce.com as I do, I will excerpt a few thoughts of Dooce's on the site's recent redesign.

On feedback from users

"...there was this one email that was very passionate in its hatred of this change, and she was all DIE! DIE! DIE! and then there at the bottom was her signature followed by a quote from Jesus."

On using a different content management system

"The amount and quality of work that they did was indispensable, cannot recommend them enough, and mostly I just want to thank them for all the support they gave Jon because without them he would have gone completely bald."

On the adrenaline of launching the redesign

"He briefly got up from this desk to kiss me goodbye when I noticed two giant sweat stains underneath his arms, and I was all, are you running on a treadmill while coding my website? Isn't that complicated? And he's all, yes I'm running on a treadmill, WITH MY BRAIN."

On opening up the floodgates of comments

"Soon we'll find out because I'm going to open up comments on this post to get your feedback, and I just totally winced writing that. Please be gentle for I am a delicate flower."

Reflections on a Messy Redesign

I've had this project hanging over my head for the last few (several?) months—the kind that gets so drawn out that everyone involved sort of tries to wish it away. I kind of got a pit in my stomach tonight during class, because it’s a website redesign and everything that Katherine talked about was so on par with why this project has become so convoluted (though, I have to believe, still salvageable).

I volunteered to write the copy for a small nonprofit’s website. The other three people involved are a web designer (who is my former boss), an IT person (who I’d never met), and the organization’s executive director. What happened, I think, is that we all defined our own roles without much consideration to the larger project, and we also assumed that one of us was taking on a project management role. But we never addressed that.

The designer and I had worked closely on our former organization’s website last year—a decent sized center at Harvard. We used a design consulting firm and went through brainstorming, wireframes, mockups, usability testing, and months of planning. It was a good site. So it’s not like we are totally naive about how to redesign a website. But, to be honest, we’re also not being paid for this current site redesign. So, she assumed that she would just design the layout and send the specs to the IT guy who would build out the pages and I would write copy that would be placed into these pages.

No one took it on themselves to decide what the content would be. The architecture and navigation was based off of a first draft of the web principles. I was given a list of topics, like “About Us” and “Volunteer Information” to write copy for. I kept asking for a site map, the designer kept asking for content, and we still don’t know who is actually populating the pages. We all looked to the organization’s executive director, who had wrangled us all in, to be the project manager. But she’s never been involved with any sort of new site or redesign. She knows what she wants the website to be from her executive perspective, but there is no one to manage the actual site development.

So now we’re at that point right that Katherine warned us of tonight. We had this emergency conference call last week (the first time we had all met—even over the phone) to figure out where all the copy was supposed to go, why some of the proposed content was/wasn’t relevant, and what we all expected of ourselves and one another. Oh, and we ended up changing the navigation—but that’s still not finalized. And the executive director wants to launch it the first week in December.

It’s been an invaluable learning experience for me from a project management perspective—it’s just too bad it had to become such a mess. Although I’ve been working in web publishing for a few years now, I feel like I’m still getting my feet wet. Has anyone else had an experience like this? Or have you come across the types of roadblocks that Katherine was talking about in class?

Web metric measurement

Another New York Times article, this time on the dispute between advertisers and site owners on the number of visitors and page views. Given how much money is involved in online advertising ($20 billion this year), there’s a lot at stake with these numbers. Unfortunately, there are lots of factors in the discrepancies from both sides, but no real solutions in sight.

How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting

Take My Word for It

You have to love the end-of-the-fiscal year for your company which coincides nicely with holiday madness. As if trying to score free shipping from all of your favorite online stores was not enough to occupy full-time job status. But then your workplace imposes upon you year-end reviews, objective setting sessions, an endless Microsoft Outlook calendar worth of meeting requests to accept...

and on top of all of that malarkey, your team decides that now is an auspicious time to OVERHAUL THE WEBSITE?!?

Despite my resistance to this ill-timed venture, I am doing my best to draft up my wish list for new site capabilities and aesthetics. But here's my beef: The rest of my team members want to focus on site functionality. We have an e-commerce component to our site and it's stuck in a bygone age - it practically wears pantaloons and carries a credit at the apothecary. It does need to be addressed. But what if the framework of our site is such that customers cannot even FIND their way to the e-commerce part. What then?!

Here is my question to you usability gurus - Have you ever had to wage a battle about the aesthetics versus functionality of site design, and believed that aesthetics should actually be addressed first? I guess this is the old fashion versus function question. Our site is functional, but because it is so ugly and poorly organized, it just cannot function. And somehow, I'm the only one who feels this way....

The NY Times on Search Engine Optimization

I've been thinking a lot about this column from the NY Times Public Editor last August - When Bad News Follows You - about how inaccurate news stories will keep turning up in google searches and damage reputations.

It's interesting that the Times' Editor highlights their SEO strategy as the biggest part of the problem, its not just that the inaccurate story never dies, the NY Times has also worked hard to make sure that is the first thing anyone sees if they google someone.

The article lists several potential solutions, discarding most of them as impractical or unlikely to work, ranging from programming the archives to "forget" stories that have later been corrected or questioned to rereporting all stories.

One of the most practical fixes turned up in a subsequent Letter to the Editor:

The Web is actually a blessing for those whose names are intentionally or
unintentionally besmirched. It offers an elegantly simple solution to the
problem of lingering bad news: ape the taglines of the offending items and, so
to speak, counter-blog.

While another letter points out:

There's a simple solution: The Times should stop using the technique.
Stripped of the rhetoric, The Times is basically saying that harming folks' reputations is a bit of collateral damage that inevitably occurs as the paper tries to make more money. I don't find that a very compelling argument, and I don't think you should, either.

So many links, so little time

I can has cheezburger? I no does geddit. But that doesn't matter. There are apparently millions
who do and millions more to be made from them. One person's frivolous waste of time is another's
creative engagement.

So bring 'em on: the devotees and
the furries;
the intelligent designers and
designing intelligence;
the "other" side and
this one(?);
the think or thwimmers" and
the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Voices that have long been silenced are shouting to be heard and all that's
necessary for connection is a computer and internet service. Oh, and there's the small issue of electricity,
taken for granted by all in the blogosphere but that's a link for a different post.

Still, though I'm delighted to be privy to the clamour, the snob in me sneers.
How did they find each other before the internet?
And, could I just get an expert, please.

The anti-credentialist in me
doesn't believe in experts but there are just times when I'd like to be informed by research culled by people who have made a
particular issue their life's work. Michael Pollan's one but even better regarding the Farm Bill is
the American Farmland Trust.

Who will you vote for 2008?

Hey guys,

This site was mentioned during one of the presentations and I JUST HAD TO find out who the internet people think I should vote for......Mike Gravel? I don't know him, and I probably never will because his website is Lame-ity Lame Lame!

Anyway, here is the quiz site:
http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html

Boston.com Makeover

I'm wondering what everyone thinks of the recent changes to boston.com. Do you think it looks more or less cluttered? What do you think of the header?

I'm a frequent reader of boston.com, and I was initially a little strangely upset by the changes, but I think they actually make the site more user-friendly, easier to navigate, and just simpler overall.

Thoughts?

-Erin

The Ethicurean

Okay, I admit it, I have an ulterior motive in mentioning this blog, which I just found today. (If you are at all interested in the politics of food you should read Michael Pollan's Op-Ed in the NYTimes.) But mainly I wanted to post about it because it's an example of a well laid-out and thought-through blog. Lots of ways to browse, etc. Also the title and tagline are both clever and extremely clear.

More on Campaign Sites

Here's the NPR piece on Chris Dodd's web team I mentioned last night. And after Anke and Erin's presentations, I was curious about which sites are getting the most traffic. Turns out Fred Thompson is the Republican frontrunner in terms of web traffic (he just overtook Ron Paul), and Barack Obama is leading the Democrats. This doesn't line up with the opinion polls, so I'd guess either the two of them are doing particularly well with a web-savvy audience, or they're doing a good job driving people to their sites.

Brijit cuts magazine pile down

Brijit is a new site where freelancers rate and write 100-word abstracts of articles from close to 100 magazines. The idea is that Brijit sorts through the chaff in your favorite publication for you. I read about it in an article in the Washington Post, which incidentally is one of Brijit’s “sources.”

The site is quite new and doesn’t have as extensive content as I’d need for it to be my one-stop shop for news and features. Also, I don’t need reviews of all the articles out there, just the ones I was going to read anyway. There’s a Brijit Recommends section, but I don't know who the editors are and if I agree with them. What if Brijit had a page where I can check the New York Times’ most emailed list and get the ratings just on those?

I use an RSS reader to aggregate the sites I’ll return to regularly, but it does have the disadvantage of not exposing me to other sites I could be interested in. Digg documents the popularity of the masses, but because of that, it’s unlikely any article more than 1,500 words will rise to the top. However, I don’t necessarily see Brijit filling that happy medium.

Brijit is not for me—I’ve given up even trying to keep up on a wide range of publications. If you wish you had the time to peruse all the good magazines out there but know you can’t feasibly do it, Brijit could help you get (just) what you’re looking for.

Second Life & Web 2.0

Hi all,

This article about Second Life is a year old, but I came across it and it's a very interesting and entertaining read. Laugh as we may, it's fulfilling an obvious human need for community and intimacy in the age of the net:

Leading a Double Life
10/25/06, Boston Globe

Parts that relate to our class:

• interactivity
• content "created almost entirely by users"
• spontaneity & "stepping-into-Wonderland quality" of the platform
• companies joining in to create buzz or sell their image/products
• Harvard and other universities using it to engage distance-ed students more (!)

I'll see if I can find more recent articles on this later.
Oh, and btw, this is Hana.

Layer Tennis Match

Remember our reading about the difference between a blog entry and a news story? One of the key differences being that a blog allows for more of an "in flux" telling of a story, with constant updates, modifications, and even flat-out apologies for erroneous information, whereas news articles need to be fairly airtight before going to print.

I was thinking about other ways that the internet allows for this in flux storyline, and here is an example of how art and entertainment intersect in an ongoing form.

Layer Tennis Match invites two graphic artists (or two small teams of artists) to post "volleys" of different iterations of a design onto this public website. The artists swap the file back and forth, parse and embellish the work for fifteen minutes, and then post their volley to the site. The volleying is broadcast live and each volley is commented on by a guest writer. The matches last for ten volleys then a winner is declared.

I enjoyed this latest edition of the tennis match, which features a clever take on the game of tennis itself.

Happy Halloween!

Well, if we're going to blog, let's blog. How did everyone in the class spend their Halloweens?

I just got back from Salem, where the best word to describe the situation would be "madhouse". There was a festival going on in the streets -- the roads were blocked off, people of every age and size were crammed into costumes of all descriptions, there was drinking, shouting, music blaring from several DJs, and -- no joke -- a Ferris wheel down by the docks.

I opted for something a little quieter, though -- a "Haunted Footsteps" walking tour of the city, led by a woman with a lantern who told spooky stories about the ghosts that haunt some of the older and more run-down buildings. The tour took us away from the party for the most part, which was a good thing, but I wish I had made time to go on it this past weekend, when there weren't drunken costumed revelers on every corner. It would have been much spookier with just the crowd, the lantern, and the darkness...

She told some great stories, including the one about the ghost of the police captain who put the "witches" to death back in 1692, a little girl who died in a fire almost 200 years ago but still searches for her mother, the ghost that tried to tell Nathaniel Hawthorne something five days in a row, the bodies that were discovered underneath Salem's abandoned prison in 1992, and the Curse of Giles Corey. It was a bit on the historical side, but good stuff nonetheless.

On the way out of town I saw the riot police marching up the street in formation, just letting the town know who was boss. Yikes.

Now I'm going to go curl up and watch some of my favorite Simpsons Halloween Specials. Hope everyone else had a great night -- I can't wait to hear your stories of mischief and hauntings!

Pritesh Dagur and the Fine Art of Social Networking

Here lies an Indian Rangoli, the impermanent sprinkling of pigmented dust, of various sources. Pritesh Dagur, the artist, is also a Chemist in Materials Sciences at The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. She has written a new entry for the rangoli section of Wikipedia, which you may find at

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/rangoli#description.

Pritesh and her associates at Wikipedia describe the Rangoli-making process and its cultural context far better than I. She has been spreading samples her joyful art and knowledge through Internet social networks and community websites for a few years. When I participated in her friends network, she amazed me, always quickly answering most of my rangoli questions thoughtfully, articulately and thoroughly. One might assume that she has developed a steady cast of followers this way.

To view this and other priceless works by Pritesh, please visit her Rangoli site and enjoy the back catalog of her beautiful work:

http://picasaweb.google.com/pritzd/RangolisIVeMade/photo#51

Links to Group Blogs

As the group blog presenter, I submit for your consideration a list of multi-author blogs. I annotated each with a purpose (at least its purpose in my mind). Add your favorites in the comments.

Amuse and impress friends with your knowledge of what's happening on the internet... boingboing

Troll for handcraft inspiration...
whipup

Increase your personal effectiveness and efficiency...
Lifehacker

Spy on the industrial product design world...
Core77 Design Blog

Check out the blog on which your instructor occasionally posts...
Huffington Post Blog

Be a greener consumer...
Treehugger

Be a more discerning consumer...
The Consumerist

My dilemma

Blogging to the class blog during the class on blogging:

Postmodern and ironic, or just rude?

Let the debate begin!

A List Apart: Writing

As a web designer, A List Apart (“for people who make websites”) is a godsend for me. It's an online magazine that's been around for years and is edited by some of the leaders of the web industry.

ALA covers all the topics that anyone building a website will encounter — design, code techniques, usability, business, and most importantly for our purposes, content. Technological breakthroughs get outdated, and design trends come and go, but good (web) writing is still good (web) writing.

So put the kettle on and find your favorite blanket to wrap up in. The Red Sox have won, and A List Apart’s archive of writing articles is your new reason to stay indoors and up into the night.

http://alistapart.com/topics/content/writing/

David Weinberger, discussing "Everything is Miscellaneous"

Here's A light-hearted look at the way the Web has changed how we access information.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43DZEy_J694

The next seven wonders...

Hi all,

I'm wondering who else, if anyone, is doing a presentation on presidential candidate websites next week. I'm working on that topic, and I just wanted to make sure we don't have an overlap of sites. Thanks!

Also, here's a pretty cool tidbit I found on the Poynter Institute's site, about nominating the "Seven Wonders of the Journalism World": http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=117&aid=130568&utm_source=sevenwonders&utm_medium=web

I'm not suprised that the blog is up there at the top of the list!

Creating Passionate Users

I stumbled upon this article/blog this morning at work and it looks like it has some really good advice for web writers: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/01/crash_course_in.html. At work we are creating new online courses for http://www.educationtogo.com/ and they are making us take an online "Boot Camp" that will help our authors and DEs write effective courses online. They listed the above article in the Supplementary materials. I think it's helpful to think of all web viewers as "students" to some extent since everyone is gaining some kind of knowledge from whatever they are reading about.

Anyway, wish me luck in Boot Camp!

More Google

I saw this today and it reminded me of Katherine saying that "Google is taking over everything". Enjoy.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/what-gphone/

SEO link

Looks like in the reading's for this week, the 'SEO Beginner's Guide' link is not working.
I found this site instead, which is pretty good:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/bg1

First Post

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