Your web content (and everything else you write for business) is treated as data. Therefore:

• Write headlines and page titles that describe the document or give its key message.
• Write a summary of the document straight after the headline.
• In link-text, put key information about the page people will jump to (not “Click here”).

Virtually every time you write a business or professional document, it exists in electronic form. That electronic document is electronically labelled and stored in various electronic ways—not in a metal filing cabinet. And it will be treated as data, so that other people can find the document when they search.

The internet is hyperspace, with multiple dimensions, and that’s where your document lives.

• Entire web pages are lump of data that can be re-used in many places.
• Headlines and summaries are crucial bits of data that can appear in many places.
• Other data that’s obviously re-usable: contact details, share prices, corporate information, news items, photographs, slides, information… I could go on all day.

That data can be used and found in 1,000 places simultaneously (not just on the original piece of paper). For example, it could pop up in Google search results, on other web sites, in spreadsheets and PDFs, in Google Docs, online newspapers, on FaceBook and Twitter.

Writers, these fundamental facts about modern communication mean we need to write in a particular way. Picture your words in hyerspace—or at least in a different context: they should still make sense.

Miraz Jordan quotes Chaucer’s heartfelt (and sarcastic) plea for plain language in The Clerk’s Tale, which shows that tortuous talk is nothing new.

Webstock last week had plenty of plain speaking, which may surprise strike some as an oxymoron. It’s a conference about technology, right? So we risk suffocating in jargon? Not so.

Bruce Sterling chopped up some favourite webby jargon and boiled it in oil. A platform on a web — or a web as a platform? Granular addressability? Dynamic content? C’mon! Try to visualise these oxymorons and you’ll quickly come to grief. Surfing on the glorious tsunami of Bruce Sterling’s language were some mighty thoughts about now and never. It was quite a ride.

Jasmina Tesanovic showed us the power of the Web to save lives and tell an audience of millions what would otherwise remain secret. She was happily “writing novels about mermaids” in what became Serbia when war erupted in 1999. Immediately, she became “a blogger before the word was invented”. With a smuggled computer she sent emails to friends about the war, from the heart of the war, and they were forwarded around the world. She wrote about atrocities that nobody wanted to acknowledge. She was the only writer to attend the trial of the Scorpios. She has a light and loving heart, but history happened to her. She feels morally obliged to continue writing about soul-wrenching experiences—or who will remember?

She says, “The internet saved my life”. Literally.

The Web is always much, much more than technology.

And so was Webstock 2009. But with more than 120 blogging about it at the time, plus plenty of tweets, I’ll just savour the memory and redirect you to the Webstock web site.

Take the A-List-Apart survey of web workers: it takes just a few minutes, and as you’d expect (considering who designed it) the survey is easy and intuitive. Doing this survey can also shed a little light on our own lives — how we spend them and whether it’s worth it.

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project
managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes
websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin
sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced
worldwide.

Last year’s survey involved 33,000 people. On page 12 you’ll see that 78.6 per cent of respondents said they feel excited by the field of web deveopment or web design, frequently or very frequently. Don’t you think this is extraordinary? I wonder how many work areas provide such a buzz…

Lately, comments from three Johns and a Roger have stuck in my mind… so let me share them, albeit in a garbled paraphrase.

John Clarke is famous as the immortal Fred Dagg and creator of the excruciatingly funny TV series The Games. According to a second John (Smythe), the first John said all comedians are working to achieve the got it moment: the moment when the audience gets the joke.

I’m thinking that phrase, got it, reflects a happy audience’s active, engaged, almost possessive state of mind. They don’t just receive the joke: they get a thrill from working it out themselves.

Obsessed as I am, I saw a parallel with plain English. In mundane business documents we also want people to get it and rejoice. They may not collapse on the floor laughing, but they should feel a strong sense of accomplishment.

Which reminds me of another John: Ansell’s fame is as a political campaign communications genius who (for instance) did a brilliant series of billboards for National Party in New Zealand’s last election. He’s less known as a comic poet but I love his witty rhymes. Recently the third John said something with roughly this meaning, though much more eloquently:

There’s no merit in Plain English itself — but there’s merit in what it does: it allows people to get it, in other words get the truth and make informed decisions to run their lives.

Finally, Roger Horrocks suggested the other day that Dr William Carlos Williams could have been a great web poet. He wrote simple, plain English poems that got straight to the point… or appeared to. He wrote them on a prescription pad, which provided constraints of space, as a web page does.

John Smythe: Downstage Upfront
C-for-blog: how to use the web for poetry 

This morning’s Dominion Post delivered two stories that amount to an electr(on)ic crime puddle seeping through New Zealand. First,

A thief stole three Oral B electric toothbrushes worth more than $300 from the Cuba St Farmers. He was chased into The Dominion Post building but escaped. The toothbrushes were recovered. Do you recognise this person?

A splendid photograph of the offender accompanies the report. Mouth is closed, perhaps to hide neglected teeth. The shame! Life is cruel: no doubt he only wanted to improve oral hygiene of his nearest and dearest.

And how about this riveting headline? Cybersquatter changes mind over jet website. Naughty Mr Twigge had registered www.ozjet.co.nz two days after OzJet airline announced that it would start trans-Tasman flights. Asked Ozjet for $5000, then for free flights to a theme park for a terminally ill child and his family.

A contrite Mr Twigge, of Palmerston North, said he raised money, which he then donated to charity, by buying and selling domain names.

He has now quit the practice and issued a public apology for causing offence. He now says [...] he crossed the line in terms of ethics, though the practice is legal. [...] “I’m a Christian, but I probably haven’t walked the walk. I screwed up.”

Lovely Mr Twigge, where were you when we were searching domain names for a new venture? Domain tasters without a trace of Robin Hood snatched some of our best choices the moment we noted them as possibilities. Such meanies! Eventually we just bought any domain name that looked halfway OK. We don’t want them. Nor do we want the hassle of changing ownership. Anyone for Akonga.com, taupata.com, onehourofpower.com, poneke.dom? Wait 11 months and they’re yours.

P.S. I’m sorry to say New Zealand does have real criminals and horror crimes, besides quaint peccadilloes. We don’t skite about those.

Examining the presidential candidates’ web sites is a popular sport for which each journalist invents new rules. In some cases the analysis is skewed by the writer’s politics… naturally, or where’s the fun? These articles are a tiny sample.

Dogood-design.com explores What colour psychology reveals about the presidential candidates.

Douglass Karr reveals the system and servers used by each candidate:

It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans are predominantly Microsoft with the exception of Ron Paul, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. I predict Linux will win the election.

Zev Winicur in TheContentWranger.com gets to the nitty-gritty eight paragraphs in to Beyond the issues: Understanding US presidential candidates by viewing their campaign websites.

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise Intelligence analyses the profile of visitors to the McCain, Clinton and Obama web sites. These pretty charts are a chilling reminder of how much information can be gleaned from unwitting surfers.

Rio Akasaka compares home pages for accessibility, validity and speed — not content; opinions on colour schemes sneak in.

The Norman Transcript quotes Oliver Friedrichs: candidates sites are wide open to vandalism and theft.

Chart by Douglas Karr.

Monopolies are scary. I often wonder what would happen if Google broke. No more instant search results, Google Alerts, Gmail or Google Docs. Google is more than a search facility. It’s a filing system, archive, mail manager and news clipping service, and that’s just the start.

Naturally I love them all. Sure, I try to resist using every new toy they produce, but I have finally succumbed to Google Docs. On many occasions I land up with numerous versions of the same spreadsheet. Google Docs is so cool, so simple, so desirable. You can upload a spreadsheet (or create it on the spot) and nominate who can edit that same spreadsheet, that very spreadsheet, and not whatever version-of-the-day you received by email.

Even so, I’ll resist using Google Docs for major or confidential documents. Recently I noticed one where a diverse panel was evaluating candidates. You can imagine this was sensitive material. We quickly changed it, of course. But Google is as vulnerable to hacking as FaceBook, which looked pretty darn sturdy until a few months ago. Hear the voice of doom: it’s only a matter of time before an evil force cracks Google Docs and gets access to your business data.

Now Microsoft has announced it intends to commandeer Yahoo!, hoping their combined forces will suffice to compete with Google.

Each company has persistently tried to best Google but failed. “No one can compete with Google on their own anymore,” said Jon Miller, the former chairman and chief executive of AOL, which itself is struggling to compete in online advertising. “There has to be consolidation among the major players. It has been a long time coming, and now it is here.”

If consummated, the deal would instantly redraw the competitive landscape on the Internet. And it would escalate the rivalry between Microsoft and Google, already the most intense high-stakes battle in the technology world, over who will dominate the booming online advertising business.

AUSTRALIANS with internet connection could soon have their web content automatically censored.

The restrictions are planned by the Federal Government to give greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.

So reports Lachlan Heywood in the Courier Mail. If this plan proceeds, the onus will be on the ISP to prevent users from accessing prohibited content. The Australian Communications and Media Authority will prepare a “blacklist” of unsuitable sites. Those wanting uncensored access to the web will have to contact their ISP and opt out.
This is a turnaround. The previous government had offered free internet filtering software for home computers. The default position was uncensored access.

Chairman of internet user group Electronic Frontiers Australia, Dale Clapperton, said:

China, Burma and Saudi Arabia and those type of oppressive countries are the only ones that have seriously looked at doing something like this

But now we can add Japan, one of my favourite places and surely not an “oppressive country”: it seems their government proposes censoring even cell phone calls.

Thanks to Jason Kottke who trawled the newly liberated Times Select archives! He delivers previously unavailable gems from the NYT last 150 years of content.

Among his finds is the first mention of the World Wide Web in the NYT. It also gives some context to Al Gore’s notorious claim to have invented the internet. Here are a couple of quotes from:
The Executive Computer; A Web of Networks, an Abundance of Services, by John Markoff, 28 February 1993.

The Internet is a web of networks with shared software standards, allowing users on one network to reach anywhere into a global thicket. Created by the Pentagon, the Internet was originally limited to academic and corporate researchers and government officials.

[...] Many companies both small and large have found that using the Internet is good business.

Most of the article is about the Internet. The World Wide Web is mentioned almost as an afterthought, as something which makes available physicists’ research from many locations.

I am half tempted to spend the rest of the day in the NYT files. There’s more, much more to enjoy. A report on Lincoln’s assassination. The first mention of television, in 1907. The sinking of the Titanic. And:

Tens of thousands of broken links fixed in one pass. Huzzah!

Kottke: Gems from the archive of the New York Times
Photo (c) Kirby Wright

Here’s how Chinese government officials have the freedom to blog, against all intuitive expectations. The government doesn’t ban sites: it blocks data that includes banned words.

Science Daily puts it this way.

The “Great Firewall of China,” used by the government of the People’s Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable, is actually a “panopticon” that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than a true firewall, according to researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico.

China’s eye on the internet (Science Daily)

As they say, “Many countries carry out some form of Internet censorship.”

And in the USA, the University of Arizona catalogues and studies places online where terrorists operate. That’s more than 5,000 web sites. The techniques they use are complex and fascinating and include one that amounts to fingerprinting content:

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating ‘anonymous’ content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

Scientists use the “Dark Web” to snag extremists and terrorists online (National Science Foundation)

Technorati Tags: China, censorship, Dark Web