web writing hints & tips

Here's a pretty good list of resources for writers - primarily targeted at web writers, but online writing doesn't have a monopoly on some of these bits of advice. Many of them are blogs themselves, where lively discussions go on about writing - whether you have to be able to write well to write on the web, what this thing called "writing well" actually is anyway, and so on.

Pool - dive in

The ABC and friends have launched a collaborative/creative site called Pool. It's a forum for publishing work online in a range of different media. Just text if you like, or video or still images, or whatever. You can also select from a range of Intellectual Property flavours. All rights reserved or Creative Commons, or whatever suits your requirements.

The machine is us

Thousands of others have already linked to this, and I expect many of you have already seen it, but a few recent posts on the discussion board made me think of it. Relevant in the context of blogging and our online identity as writers.

Sophie

Just came across a new technology for creating online "books". Sophie. Here's a quote from the website:

Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins.

I downloaded it and installed it and tried to view one of the demo books, but it didn't work. I guess it's still immature - but it seems like an interesting idea - and a genuine attempt to use technology to go beyond the familiar page metaphor for online texts. Multimedia design made easy. Perhaps. Eventually. Maybe some of you might like to try it out and see if it works (I'm using a mac and it may work better on Windoze).

Does thinking differently equal not thinking well?

In a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr worries that the influence of Google - and by extension the internet and the practices of "consuming" information that it facilitates - is flattening our intelligence.

The argument is seductively put, but I wonder sometimes if it might be that old problem that things that are different from the way they used to be are hard to see in a positive light.

Further discussions on this issue are here.

Deutsche Telekom's proposed e-book reader

After my comment in this week's lecture about e-book reader technology not taking off, it was interesting to note that Deutsche Telekom is talking about releasing a device on which to publish news content.

The comments on engadget are mostly pretty skeptical, but there are some who think there's more in it. If the latter is right, it looks like it could be something like that scene in Minority Report (with Tom Cruise) where the passenger in the train is holding a newspaper whose content changes dynamically as he's reading it.

Reading online: Reading, but not 'in a line'.

Something I was reading the other day seemed relevant to anyone concerned with writing for an online audience. There's a debate about the relative merits of reading online as contrasted with reading books. A series of articles in the New York times discusses this at length. One of them makes the point that:

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Writers need to be aware of this and think of it as an opportunity, or at least a challenge. Online writing needs to be extra "sticky" if we want our audience to stay for the maximum time - but at the same time, we need to see the reading experience from their point of view and provide richness of context, and not be afraid to offer links to other material that enhances our own words.

one...

...is such a lonely number, but it's the number of posts on this blog. So far. In fact, the main reason so far for publishing this blog is to provide links. So the list on the right should have all the blogs of all the students in this unit, eventually, and the 'blogroll' list should have a bunch of feeds that I accumulate through the semester that are in one way or another relevant to the content of the unit.

Depending on how loquacious I'm feeling, and how much time I get, postings will appear here more or less frequently. Don't forget that there will be much more going on at the webCT discussion board.