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!

Powered by ScribeFire.

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.

Powered by ScribeFire.

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?)