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Recent PricePoints From documents to conversations How hard are your keywords working? Online styleguides from the Brits Join the spammers in random haiku Who consumes our information, anyway? We're all buying more content online Blogging gets the attention of PR Is your site getting out of date? |
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From documents to conversations May 28, 2004 Now even Knowledge Management mavens are getting into conversation. KM used to focus on data mining, particularly in loose unstructured
documents like emails, or a million Word documents sitting out on the
hard disks of the employees.
But once you have identified and organized all that information, what good
is it?
You have to get some conversations going, and, when most of your
experts are spread out around the world, many of those conversations
are going to be virtual.
Lynnette Freese, a program manager at Rockwell Collins, recently
redefined KM as "linking people to people and people to
information so that we can think together for better business results."
Holy collaboration!
At a recent conference put on by
Braintrust International
Freese got together with a bunch of other folks who do KM for a living—and
a few theorists from
academia.
Seth Kahan, for instance, was there.
Kahan bills himself as an organizational community specialist; he facilitates discussion
through something he calls "jumpstart storytelling," aiming
to build "constructive conversations."
Rob Cross, an Assistant Professor
at UVA's business school,
argues that social networking is the way work really gets done in an
organization.
Like Seth Godin in
Unleashing the Idea Virus, Cross creates a taxonomy of
the movers and shakers in a social network, focusing on the energizers (engaged, engaging, positive, optimistic), or as Godin
would call them, sneezers.
Increasingly, we're building the infrastructure to support these
conversations, often entirely over the network, rather than in
person.
For a summary of this aspect of the conference, see Jane Dysart's article, "Conversations and communities," in the May 2004
issue of
KM World.
Bonus: the same issue has a funny piece by Dave Weinberger, author of
the Journal of the Hyperlinked
Organization (JOHO).
He describes a
live conference where he and his buddies were using an IRC backchannel to chat, electronically, making comments about the
speakers, the conference, the air conditioning, while apparently just
sitting
there quietly, during the live presentations.
They were "Talking amongst ourselves, in the shorthand of
friends, about how to assimilate what the speaker was saying. To
someone outside our little social group, it would certainly look
disrespectful, but it was no more so than the sort of conversation
one might have after a presentation: skipping over the parts you
agreed with, focusing in quick jabs on the interesting points of
disagreement."
Weinberger admits they were making jokes, and at one point he had to
get up and leave the room, so as not to laugh out loud. Now that is a real virtual conversation.
As Weinberger says, "Put humans together and we'll figure out what we'll do with the connection.
"The less you try to tell us
about what we ought to be doing, the better, and the quicker we'll
invent something new for ourselves.
"Just be sure not to shush us."
March 20, 2004 The Google spiders are looking for your keywords. Can the arachnids figure out whether your pages really describe those topics, and, if so, how relevant your pages really are? Seth Maislin, of Focus Information Services in Massachusetts, recently delivered a phone seminar to the Society for Technical Communication, showing how to invent keywords for search engines, use those same keywords as part of your interface (as labels, and as part of your running text), and show the results of a search. He gave some good tips on ways to come up with potential keywords.
Maislin pointed out that keywords function behind the scenes to help a search engine find the content, but once the engine has found a bunch of results, keywords can be reused as helpful labels for groups of hits. He argues that we should structure our results in a relevant hierarchy, using these labels. What kind of hierarchy works best for displaying the results of a search? An interface that looks like a back-of-the-book index, Maislin argues. Why? Because context helps to define what the labels mean, clarifying distinctions through easy comparison to nearby terms. When we browse a hierarchy, we do not simply read down from the top to the bottom; we range forward and back, up or down, and we get a sense of the scope and orientation of the indexer. When keywords become labels on a results page, they can help indicate context. So Maislin strongly urges us to categorize results. Examples he cites:
Maislin is a fun, serious, and intriguing information architect, who goes by the moniker, "taxonomist." If you are considering building a set of keywords for your content, he is one of the first people you should bring in, as a consultant. Maislin's site: http://taxonomist.tripod.com
Online styleguides from the Brits February 12, 2004
I admit it. I like to read online styleguides. I particularly like the ones created by experienced British editors, because they have had to adjust their pure ideals to accommodate their quarrelsome writers, who often object to the guidelines, pointing out exceptions, making the case for slang, jargon, and fresh language. You can almost hear the debate. If you haven’t read the BBC Styleguide, you should. You get wry advice for the reporters who have to speak their articles on the air. And between the lines you can hear the reporters pushing back, fighting to get free of the constraints. Like all good styleguides, this one reflects the conversations going on inside the newsrooms…and invites comments from listeners, too. Yes, now you can discuss the recommendations with the writer, er, editor, John Allen. In the Styleguide Forum, each thread begins with a short opinion piece by Allen, after which the postings appear in reverse chronological order. The tone resembles the Letters column of the London Times. People can get very upset about the misuse of a single word. Examples of complaints about jargon
There is even a fake course, free, online, for one hour. Turns out that what you do in the course is download and read the styleguide. The secret button that leads to the styleguide says Open Guide 1. That’s clear, isn’t it? The Guardian A to Z The Guardian, a newspaper that claims it is written for writers, has put its styleguide online, but unfortunately, they have arranged it as an A-to-Z of terms (what to use, how to spell it, what the right abbreviation is). Not nearly as thoughtful as the BBC guide…but they do have professorial cartoons for most letters. Typical outburst:
Nice opening quote:
The best of the British styleguides comes from John Grimond, editor at the Economist, the most literate newsmagazine in English. Instead of a usage list, you get carefully thought out, relatively short, very articulate essays. On metaphors, for instance, Grimond says:
Here’s the entire sermonette on short words:
You might expect that a British editor would come out against most Americanisms, but he gives a funny, and balanced tour of American bunkum and inventiveness. For instance, his alert ear catches our tendency to add prepositions to verbs unnecessarily (Do not write meet with or outside of: outside America, nowadays, you just meet people. Do not figure out if you can work out. To deliver on a promise means to keep it.) But he recognizes the vitality of some of our inventions, such as spam and scam. To his British team, he says:
Other fun rants: Want to see if you are as articulate as John Grimond, the editor who put together the styleguide? Take the Style quiz.
Join the spammers in random haiku January 4, 2004
It's a thesaurus attack. But you can get revenge on the spammers by inventing your own fake names, semi-literate subject lines, and crazy body text. For the last month, major spammers have discovered that they can fool filters by throwing words randomly selected from a thesaurus into the From, Subject, and Body of their emails. The garbled text disguises the origin of the email, hides the taboo words deep in the subject line, and makes the message seem to carry legitimate, if confusing text, in addition to the spectacularly bad video of Paris Hilton bouncing around in the dark. By accident, some of the From lines have a Dickensian tone. The Wall Street Journal's spam team noted
Note the middle initial, giving the name a spurious authenticity. Here are some of my favorites from the last week or so:
Clearly, these characters are not just your ordinary Bessie and Bob, who send so many messages out. My impression is that the author is a vulgar highbrow, intellectual enough to grab words out of a thesaurus, but indifferent to the overtones, because of greed. He clearly dislikes editors, even while cooking up little Flash animations for porn sites. The subject lines have been designed to sound intriguing to an intellectual, while sneaking past filters that look for the two four-letter words beginning with f, and so on. One programmer screwed up when assembling these strings, hoping to grab my first name and put that right into the subject line, to make it more personal.
Another programmer let the secret out:
By putting together any old random word with a word from the thesaurus entry for money, he hoped to get me to open that one. But he was incompetent, or stoned, or both. The other programmers had more luck with their algorithms. Imagine what these messages would be about, if they were real.
Perhaps these programmers are just college students who scorn illiterates like us, who are going to be impressed with news from a scientific journal. But I begin to see the truth showing through, with the collage that puts together burial and hypnosis: maybe they are going to put us into a trance, and kill us, by pasting together words and images in this Dada "method." To fool the filters that filter out email containing only a graphic, these geniuses have started pasting together strings of words that sound sensible, at least to a utility program. One whole genre is made up of pairs and triads. Here are some of my favorite neologisms:
More common are strings of words separated by space characters. Most of these rambling discourses suggest that the writers need more monkeys in the mix. The text is not that suggestive. But here and there the randomizers happen on suggestive phrases:
The fancier programmers borrow proper names and scientific terms, ruining the lyricism. Others seem to rely on a word list designed for people reading English as a second language: most of the words are commonplace, and monosyllabic.
Taking advantage of all the texts posted as ebooks, a few programmers ransack whole paragraphs from books of folk sayings about first love, and ignorant men, or novels with tangled pronouns and inchoate character development. Rob had little confidence in the man's honor, but he was so eager to regain the tube that he decided to trust him. Don't send me the damned emails. But if you are struck by a pungent phrase or two, excerpt those, and send me a note showing your poetic discoveries. Subject line: Poetry. Address: ThePrices@theprices.com.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Who consumes our information, anyway?
Today’s info consumer is an omnivore with a very big appetite, according
to a new report by John Horrigan, of the Pew Internet and American Life
Project.
Roughly two-thirds of the households in America have cable TV, a cell
phone, and a home computer with an Internet connection for email and web
browsing. Half have a DVD player. And DVD recorders are about to be hot
items at Best Buy.
The majority of Americans, then, like to have a lot of info gadgets in the
house, with many different sources of information. Contrary to Richard
Saul Wurman’s hypothesis in his book, Information Anxiety, Horrigan finds
that the more info people have, the less overwhelmed they feel. Being able
to explore, manipulate, and control the flow makes people crave more info
tools, and more ways to communicate with others.
In fact, most Americans feel more attached to their electronic sources
than to newspapers and magazines. Only 19% said that it would be hard to
give up their daily newspaper, and only 11% said it would be hard to give
up magazines. Print is clearly losing its power in American homes, no
matter how influential the Wall Street Journal may be in the clubrooms of
the rich.
Horrigan identifies a “technology elite,” roughly 31% of the general
population, who are leading the country in this direction, trying out the
newest electronic gizmos, developing innovative uses for the information,
swapping ideas in imaginative ways. Despite the general population’s
appetite for information, most people trail the elites in hardware and
usage, because of a lack of time, interest, or money.
If you are selling content over the Internet, then, the technology elite
are your most eager, engaged, and active audiences. They spend the most,
too.
Horrigan distinguishes four groups within the tech elite, each with its
own interests, attitudes, and activities.
All these groups are open to the idea of paying for online content.
Already 13% of them have paid for such content, compared to 7% of the
general population.
The early adopters, within the technology elite, are the group Horrigan
calls the Young Tech Elites, and they clearly want active participation,
with plenty of audio and video, but also a lot of exchanges on discussion
boards, through email, and in chats. But all four groups expect to find a
lot of information online, and feel at ease buying on the Web.
So growth areas for web writers and editors will probably be on sites
related to music and video. Continuing moneymakers will be news and
business information, particularly on sites that offer lots of
interactivity. Print is becoming a sideline, or an after thought, still
prestigious, but increasingly irrelevant for most people--in my opinion.
The report: Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United
States is at
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/pdfs/PIP_Info_Consumption.pdf
Friday, November 21, 2003
We're all buying more
content online
People are paying more for online content than last year, with overall
spending up 10%, according to a report from
eMarketer.
How come?
What does this mean for web writers and editors?
A glimpse of the sun coming up.
Not a big boom in business right away. Most of the big content sites are,
well, surviving, but you can’t expect a hiring frenzy within the next few
months. Most of the money’s paying off old debts, eking out a few bonuses
for execs, and beefing up the servers, for the high-speed customers who
want to see out-takes of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, or Jacko
doing the perp walk.
And look where the growth is.
The biggest increases in spending for online content are in these areas:
Not a lot of writing and editing jobs in those areas, unless you have
already worked in those fields before.
The increases for content that resembles traditional journalism are up a
bit, which is mildly encouraging:
Odd twists on the data: entertainment news is off by 10.4%, and something
called research is down 13.2%.
Of course, since the beginning of the Web, folks have been paying a lot to
satisfy their greed and lust , so the upticks in financial and adult
content rise from a large base. In those areas, we’re seeing the kind of
growth we might expect in industries that are, well, mature. So there are
probably going to be a few more openings in sites that have three x’s in
their names, or dollar signs in their emails subject lines.
If you want your own report, you can get it from
eMarketer. $695 will get
you 24 pages with 32 charts. Release date: December 3.
Summary of the report:
http://www.emarketer.com/news/article.php?1002566&;trackref=edaily#article
A few more details, along with the pitch to buy:
http://www.emarketer.com/products/report.php?content_on_dec03.
Friday, November 14, 2003
Blogging gets the attention of PR
Now blogging is getting big enough to attract PR flaks. When you focus on
a particular obsession, hobby, or pet peeve, you show up in Google…and
within a few days, you start getting pitches for “incredible” stories
about “world-class enterprise-wide total solutions.”
B. L. Ochman, who hosts the I-PR list, advises PR folks how to get past
the Delete button. Her advice gives you an idea how hot blogging is, and
how clueless most PR folks are in the blogosphere.
http://customers.mediamap.com/articles_1.asp
Highlights:
Comment: Phrases like these emerge from all-day off-site meetings of the
marketing team. Putting together the most popular terms on the white
board, the group has glued together an all-purpose all-encompassing
summary of the various benefits they want to communicate. Only problem: by
the time all the details have been stripped out,t he generality stinks.
And, naturally, none of these slogans sounds like something a human being
would say.
So the PR and Marketing teams will have to work harder if they want to
influence real bloggers.
How? Oh, by getting personal, writing to the individual, sounding like a
real person.
Impossible, you say? Why, even journalists have managed it. Surely their
cousins in Public Relations can turn the trick.
Monday, November 03, 2003
Is
your site getting out of date?
Have you left out-of-date notices on your site? Pages that predict the Y2K
bug is coming? Appeals to attend a party that took place in 2002?
We all do it. In this sense, websites are artifacts showing how far we got
with a particular project before, well, pooping out. Never before have so
many incomplete drafts been made public.
They clog search engines, embarass their creators, and frustrate visitors.
But we all leave up old pages because we are focused always on the new.
Best to think of a web site as a process, not a finished product.
CNN has a funny piece on half-done, out-of-date, and abandoned web sites
at:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/11/03/deadwood.online.ap/index.html
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Tog on the magic of interface design
Rich Coulombre just sent me a link to a light
article by the BBC, about
Bruce Tognazzini, who anointed himself "the interface czar" back when we
were at Apple. He and J.D. Eisenberg did amazing feats of interface design
back on the Apple II, Apple III, and early Mac. It was always fun to go
look at his latest invention, whirling around on his screen, while
passers-by stopped to gawk over the cubicle wall.
In the BBC interview, Tog points out that interface designers are a little
like magicians, pretending that something is happening, when actually
nothing much is going on. He mentions the trashcan icon on the Apple
desktop:
"At the time, we thought it was cool," he says.
The BBC explains the facts behind the magic: "When you drag a document
into the trashcan, you are not really deleting it. All you are doing is
deleting a pointer to the document. It is still somewhere on the hard
drive. "
Tog is more amusing than the BBC, I think. See AskTog, his website:
http://www.asktog.com/
Recent topic: It's Time We Got Respect, arguing that interface designers
have only themselves to blame for their low place on the totem pole.
http://www.asktog.com/columns/057ItsTimeWeGotRespect.html
Discussion at Interaction Architects:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/interactionarchitects/
If you haven't read Tog on Interface, get a copy today. It's funny,
useful, and intriguing, with a lot of case studies showing how easy it is
to guess wrong, when you anticipate what users will think, feel, or do.
Included are outtakes from his email correspondence with developers.
Typical topics:
Amazon link to Tog on Interface.
October 8, 2003
Just put up an article on Innovation Tools, on
electronic outlining. Chuck
Frey organizes this site around mind mapping, and organizing information
during brainstorming, and planning a document.
Outlining is a lot more useful, now that we can do it electronically,
erasing, deleting, promoting, rearranging...on the fly. No more strait
jacket, like in school. Today, outlining, as a process, helps us keep
adding information to our organization as we go, without stopping at some
point, and trying to follow the structure laid out in the outline.
Outlining, I argue, is a process, not a product...and that helps us take
advantage of the software, to make our structure better and better.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Wondering what a blog is, really? Debbie Weil has put together 20
definitions of blogging at her site called WordBiz Report, at
http://www.wordbiz.com/archive/20blogdefs.shtml
Debbie adds links to good examples of each type of blog. Last definition
of a blog: Something you don't want your mother to read. Her Mom wrote
her: To my dismay I got into your blogs and I can't imagine what a smart
and capable person like you is doing engaging in this infantile and boring
activity. love, mom." See September 12, in
http://www.debbieweil.com/archives/cat_blogging_for_business.html#000049
Debbie jokes that for some people a blog is just another thing to add your
resume, citing her son, Tokyo Tim, at
http://www.tokyotim.blogspot.com/
Best tip: Seth Godin's blog. I really like Seth's book on unleashing idea
viruses. Here he is day by day:
Best gif on the site: Seth Godin's head exploding on his blog.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/head.gif
Monday, October 06, 2003
Google tells
you how many searches you've done today
The haiku poets at Google have come up with a new twist on frequent flier
miles.
Soon to go public, a new counter.
Each time you come to Google, a counter will flip up, so you can tell how
many searches you have done today. (Evidently, the counter stops at 100,
so if you search more than every 14.4 minutes, you may break the bank.)
Just being tested on a few users, this cookie-counter should spark lots of
competition for the honor of "most searching dude of the day." Chris
Sherman, at SearchEngineWatch.com, reports on an advance look, and the FAQ
(now removed, which answered the question "What do I win" with this koan:
"There is no winning. There is only self-awareness. The search is
endless."
For the story:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3087501
© Copyright 2003 Jonathan Price. |
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