When I find myself lost for words or even ideas… it’s time to sign off for the year. Blogging is fun, satisfying, interesting. Personal satisfaction is the main reason why people blog, according to a study whose name and web site elude me. I find that easy to believe.

But come mid-December, the joy has gone.

The sun is shining — and sun has been the missing factor in Wellington this December.

The children are still in school, meaning the shops will be kind of accessible. My gift list is short but important.

My home is in chaos, too, with the lovely painters working in the bathroom. No shower, no dishwasher. Odd job man coming any minute to fix Leak No. 18.

My heart is broken because my kitten died of FIP. I’m getting over that, but I’m a vicar’s daughter so I need every excuse I can drum up before I stop work.

Surely that’s enough excuses?

Blogging? Tips? I’m signing off for a short end-of-year break.

Photo: REINZ team accepting the Brainstrain award.

Last night, all was revealed at the WriteMark Plain English Awards 2009.

The complete list of winners: plenty of detail on plainenglishawards.org.nz.

1. Best Plain English Website: Public Sector/Non-Government Organisation
Winner: ACC

2. Best Plain English Website: Private Sector
Winner: Springload

3. People’s Choice: best Plain English Website
Winner: Ministry of Fisheries

4. People’s Choice: Brainstrain Website (The award you don’t want to win. Nominated by the public, this is the site judged to give the most New Zealanders a headache. But then again, it can lead to an instant upgrade if the boss is sufficiently embarrassed.)
Winner: Vodafone NZ

So many highlights, even for me, party-pooper from way back. Let me dish out a few virtual Contented awards.

1. Best format for an awards evening: WriteMark 2009. (No dinner, drip-fed nibbles. Sitting in a theatre. Fun. Short enough and long enough. Old museum building. And so forth.)

2. Most sidesplitting announcement warmup: Jim Mora from Afternoons, Radio New Zealand.

3. Most beloved, comical and enduring MC: Kevin Milne.

4. Plain English icon: Lynda Harris.

5. Most heroic facesave by a Brainstrain award winner ever: Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. The team showed up to accept their can of worms. They waved their revised version of the horrendous document (terms of sale for auctions) at us. They were happy and grateful. Told you the brainstrain award can be a blessing in disguise, didn’t I?

6. Quaintest virtual speech by a judge: Kristina Halvorson of BrainTraffic.com. Next time, get your body over here please Kristina!

7. Most beaten-up guest speaker exploiting his disability for laughs: David Gadsby, sorry, make that David McPhail.

8. Most appropriate entertainers: The Improvisers. Very witty MacB*th in plain English, sort of.

And of course… well everyone else was pretty cool too but heck, that’s enough.

14-18 September 2009 is plainly a great week to draw the world’s attention to plain English.

On Friday, it’s the WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards—always a brilliant occasion.

Alice and I will provide four prizes. The winners of the following four categories will get access for one staff member to our brand new Contented Diploma in Web Content:

• Best Plain English Website—Public Sector/Non-Government Organisation
• Best Plain English Website—Private Sector
• People’s Choice—best Plain English Website
• People’s Choice—‘Brainstrain’ Website

All through Plain English Week, remember this:
It’s not your fault if you don’t get it: tell the writer!

• Say the magic words, “What do you mean?”
• If you are given a confusing document to read, ask for a plain English translation.

James Robertson knows intranets as nobody else does. He and StepTwo Designs are behind the brilliant annual awards for Intranet Innovation Awards. Note the difference: this is not about naming the best intranets in every sense, but about acknowledging innovative projects, large or small, with a big impact on the intranet’s functionality, communication and collaboration, frontline delivery or business solutions.

Intranet management teams are generally isolated, and may depend on developers to show the big picture. The goals of the awards are:

1. to celebrate the great work done by intranet teams across the globe, to give them the recognition they deserve
2. to find [new] ideas, whether large or small
3. to share them with the wider community.

Winners and commended entries came from Canada, Switzerland, Australia, USA, UK and Germany.

With typical generosity, StepTwo Designs provides a 30-page executive summary of the whole report, packed with facts and screenshots. It’s exciting and it’s free. But if you are seriously involved in intranet development, you won’t begrudge the US$189.00 for the full report.

Intranet Innovations 2008

Just by the way, the summary starts with a crystal clear IP statement in plain English.

Contented Enterprises is one year old. Actual birthday is 13 September but Alice and I celebrated today by giving each other an armful of flowers and a birthday cake.

We intend to be Contented for many years to come. But we’re delighted with our progress so far. A national award, happy customers, and glory be, we have got enough cash in kitty to start on redevelopment! That’s pretty cool for a toddler. And the reason is that CONTENTED courses are meeting a need for convenient, user-friendly, inexpensive courses for large groups of content authors.

As an extra birthday treat we gave 4 lucky winners of the New Zealand Plain English Awards a surprise gift:

1. Three people from the Ministry of Education received CONTENTED courses for the Team Up campaign, which won the 2008 Plain English Champion: best project.
2. Deborah Morris is this year’s Plain English Champion: best individual. Besides getting a splendid trophy, she will do the CONTENTED courses free.

The Plain English Awards ceremony 2008 last Thursday celebrated heroes of plain English in New Zealand. Four categories are for web sites, and web content is a big factor in other categories too.

The United States Embassy in Wellington was a clear winner of the Brainstrain award for the worst web site: People’s Choice. For this category, members of the public nominate the worst web sites, and the judges pick a winner.

With all finalists in the Brainstrain web site award, the nominator was enraged by a single factor – so enraged that they entered the site for this dreaded award. In fact, the other two finalists were good web sites apart from one frustrating problem. That’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?

On the Embassy site the offending page was about fiancé(e) visas. Here’s an example of its impenetrable prose:

To apply for K-1 visa classification for an intended alien spouse, an American citizen must file a petition, Form I-129F, with the USCIS Regional Service Center having jurisdiction over the place of the petitioner’s residence in the United States. Such petitions can not be adjudicated abroad.

But the entire Embassy web site is a worthy winner, being absolutely riddled with problems. Take a look at the site and this is what you’ll see.

1. Ugliness.
2. Links to news pages on the same site open in new window: annoying and unconventional.
3. Ambassador bio starts with 168-word paragraph: overwhelming and unread on a web site.
4. Underlining of non-link phrases.
5. Breadcrumbs don’t always match the page: many apparent home pages.
6. Making Of U.S. Foreign Policy page consists of Introduction, circuitous structure, no other subheadlines.
7. “The content has moved. It can now be found here.”
8. Justified text.
9. Long pages with no subheadings.
10. Inconsistent design and navigation.
11. Menu items that would open but not close.
12. Too-small font making links almost invisible.

I mustn’t waste my whole day here. But here’s another small example of incompetent, hostile, negative web content. Believe it or not, the final word in the following quote, “this”, is a link.

Failure to turn in your I-94 (or I-94W) when you leave the U.S. could create serious problems for you when traveling to the U.S. in the future. For information on how to rectify this, please read this.

The amateurish design and writing on the US Embassy site gives a strong impression that they couldn’t care less about their readers. This is the non-verbal message I get: We’re frightfully big and important. You aren’t. So why don’t you Kiwis just go away and stop bothering us?

By the way, the official judges’ comments are much more polite than my intemperate ranting, which is strictly personal. We just stated that confusing government-speak gave its website an unfriendly and impersonal tone.

The Brainstrain prize is a rubbish bin full of sour worms. The judges are not competing for the honour of delivering these to the Embassy. However, in the best scenario, the winners say, Fair cop. We will fix this problem and do better in future.

Now, on a brighter note…

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) won the premier award of $10,000 for outstanding progress in creating a plain English culture within the organisation. That’s no mean feat with 1000 employees scattered around the world. As WriteMark leader Lynda Harris said, “We deliberately make this award extremely hard to win.”

See all winners and finalists on the WriteMark web site.

Prime News: First at 5.30: only on Sunday 14 September see the Plain English Awards video coverage. Starts around 6.26 mins.

The lineup of speakers for Webstock 2009 was announced last Tuesday night. Impressive and fun: check it out on Webstock’s gorgeous new web site!

As part of this week’s mini-Webstock, Jonathan Mosen updated us on the basics of web content that blind people can access easily. His demo of navigating content without the benefit of sight was riveting. Web Accessibility – Political Correctness, or Smart Design? was his theme.

W3C accessibility guidelines can be daunting, according to Jonathan. Some are out of date, and they’re not all equally important. If you want to know whether a web site is accessible, nothing beats observing a real blind person as they test it. You cannot replicate that expertise just by using a screen reader. So pay them for their expertise, he says.

Jonathan’s favourite web sites include these three, which are extremely easy to use without vision:

• Woolworths
• Radio New Zealand
• Spagalimis Pizza Restaurants

Other snippets from Jonathan:

• Top 3 fixes are alt tags for images, proper coding of headings, and proper use of tables
• PDFs can be accessible (turn on the accessibility flag) but processing a PDF is very slow with screen readers
• Flash can be accessible

Jonathan Mosen’s current activities

Why does gobbedygook live on and on, generation after generation?

It refuses to die a natural death. Bureaucratic style persists even though the benefits of plain English have been proven again and again. (Plain English saves money and time — what more do you want?)

Firstly, some government writers resist what they call dumbing down their information. They’d rather seem important than be clear. Assumption: if the reader can’t understand, that’s the reader’s fault.

Secondly, bad style revolves in a vicious circle. Regardless of any style guide, government employees naturally imitate documents that are wordy, obscure, and riddled with jargon and clichés.

Thirdly, when only a few staff are trained in plain English, it doesn’t take. Untrained colleagues can undo all the good work. Commitment from the CEO is essential.

And that’s why we need legislation making plain English mandatory for government communications. Killing the cockroach requires more than a quick stamp with a big boot.

But you know, it’s not all bad. Many government agencies are making a strenuous effort to communicate more clearly. For example, check the note headed Glossary bottom right on some of the NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade web pages— I think they mean it!
See Glossary notice on this MFAT page (bottom right)

What a week!
Yesterday, two days after the Presentation Zen workshop, I went to
Search Engine Boot Camp in Auckland.

I enjoyed this conference and hey, it was at the Hilton on Auckland Harbour. The views! The beef fillet!
Now, I know this blog entry looks like a boring and dutiful list of presentation topics, which you could have got straight from the Search Engine Boot Camp site. My perhaps too subtle intention is to show how the focus of search engine optimisation has changed in the last six years:

• from free to paid search results
• from one-way PR manipulation to managing unpredictable swarms of public opinion on Web 2.0
• from trying to outwit search engines to saying thanks for all the help.

It’s still the wild west out there, so it’s still a lot of fun. SEO is no place for the faint-hearted. Go Barry!

I was quite startled at the shift in audience and focus since the first time I’d presented at a Search Engine Strategies conference in Sydney 2002.

Sydney 2002: the audience was largely male, the industry was packed with cowboys, and people kept asking,

Yes I know you have to you say that but really, (nudge nudge wink wink) what dirty little trick will get my business straight to the top of search results?

What did we talk about in 2002? If I remember rightly — and why would I? — there were sessions on the differences between the major search engines and directories. (Remember Excite? Inktomi? This was before they all started swallowing each others’ tails.) Metatags for sure. Spammy things. And many topics related more to web content management than SEO.

In 2008, worlds away. Despite this being a boot camp, the audience was highly professional, and nearly half were female, I reckon. One of the bad boys had hung up his spurs, but he still had a glint in his eye, and Barry Smyth still kept things trotting along.

Only two of our topics straddled the last six years: SEM Fundamentals (Paul Webster, Google) and Copy writing for SEO (my topic, naturally). Even Researching keywords and Building search-friendly websites are topics that have necessarily changed along with tools and technologies.

Sense the larger changes, but. Several speakers dealt with aspects of paid search, including Writing Ads that convert. A Google Analytics Workshop from Rod Jacka, Panalysis showed us the wonders of some free Google webmaster tools: why try to outwit Google when Google is the optimiser’s best friend?

The impact of Web 2.0 on search engine marketing is enormous, and Boot Camp tackled the topic head on.

• Simon Young of iJump talked about using social media to promote your visibility in search results.
• Jason West of WebSalad discussed reputation management: it’s no longer a case of one-sided self-promotion, but of damage control when other people push your name to unwanted prominence in search results.
• I missed a session on optimising for Web 2.0 technologies but I bet that was interesting too.

Link Building Fundamentals (Jason West, WebSalad) is a topic that has largely outgrown its dubious past. Universal Search and Local Search (Jacqui Jones, Netconcepts) and The Best SEO Practices for Mobile & Local Search are two more talks I missed.

Check out the agenda while it’s still online. And next time there’s a Search Engine Boot Camp near you, enlist if you are half interested.

(Mon)day 1 of ALGIM 08 was terrific, and I intended to report in some detail. Tuesday, I was smitten with my new vertical mouse at first touch. Then came a naff ailment, and I slowed to snail pace. Better late than never, here are some crumbs from the conference.

• The Association of Local Government Information Management is 20 years old.
• Their benchmarking survey showed that just 25% of councils provide interactive forms, and fewer than 10% of councils automate such processes as online consents tracking.
• National treasure Jason Dawson said 98% of people do not use RSS.

To the presentations…

Trent Mankelow of Optimal Usability gave a great overview of self service usability. He said SS technology should be so intuitive that we don’t even notice it – like automatic doors. SS technology should:

• save the owner heaps
• give customer a sense of power and control
• give customer extra benefits and incentives
• match the technology to the need, e.g. either a kiosk, IVR (For share prices, press 1) or voice activation (For trading, say Trading) or egov online.

Anna Crooks of 3months.com reminded us that participation in e-government is not a given. It’s an undreamt of privilege in countries ruled by dictators and the mob, which she saw in recent travels to Libya and Nairobi. Let’s not be blase about Web 2.0 in government. “Web 2.0 has huge customer service benefits – but carries obligations and responsibilities.”

Mark Orange of Intergen spoke about the evolution of enterprise content management. It was great to see how web content management fits into the big picture. ECM is an outrageously bold concept that is now a red-hot reality and a multi-billion market. In other words, it’s a giant system of databases that replaces archives, trolleys, telegrams.

ECM is the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes. That applies to an organisation’s unstructured information wherever it exists.

Jason Dawson reported on the challenges and triumphs of local government web sites in the UK and Ireland, with plenty of screenshots. He capped that off by showing us how Northland Regional Council used its web site to cope with the floods of 2007: practical advice from one who knows.

Tauranga City Council’s Vicky Wheelton and Elizabeth Hughes showed us their radical new website, dominated by search. Results speak volumes: users of the new site have doubled since November, many hate the look but everyone finds what they want.

And I galloped through my own presentation in the allocated half hour: how appropriate, when I aim to teach the minimum number of skills to the maximum number of people.

Tip of the day from Trent Mankelow: Always bite off less than you can chew.

Image: the wondrous Evoluent Vertical Mouse 3 (evoluent.com)