Writing Online

Siva Vaidhyanathan has a good article, Generational Myth, exposing the myths concerning the digital generation in The Chronicle Review.

College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don’t like is the price of books.

This Reuters article notes that one in five bosses check job applicants’ online presence to make hiring decisions.

The survey found that 34 percent of the managers who do screen candidates on the Internet found content that made them drop the candidate from any short list.

Bronwyn Jones at A List Apart has an interesting article that applies design principles to online writing and states:

It’s one thing to write copy that fits on a website. It’s quite another to write copy that fits in with a website. You wouldn’t try to force an incongruous visual element into a carefully considered design. Same goes for written content. Even if you’ve wisely designed a site around the content it delivers, written copy may fit neatly physically but still ring false to the intended audience.

NASA is collaborating with others in Second Life.

Snelson and other space activists have set up virtual shop on (and above) Space CoLab Island, adjacent to the International Spaceflight Museum. The island, which serves as Second Life’s nexus for NASA and allied space groups, boasts a high-tech headquarters building, a mountaintop meeting room and amphitheater, and three levels of “skypods” floating directly above the mountain. …
NASA is serious about using Second Life as a frontier for collaboration and technology, said Jessy Cowan-Sharp (a.k.a. DragonFire Kelly) of Ames Research Center. “If you look at the functionality of Second Life, it’s really just a set of tools that you can do whatever you want with,” she told MSNBC.com. “There’s so much more going on with Second Life than games.”

Jill Walker writes about someone stealing her URL. Her URL is jill/text.net and an extremist middle-eastern blog called Samson Blinded has started using jill/txt.org. Why would someone use the first part of her domain name? She responds,

This is clearly a site that, finding conventional means [for advertising] blocked, has chosen to use unconventional means to reach an audience. Putting copies of their blog on domains that are very close to established but completely unrelated blogs is apparently one of their strategies.

Robert Hof speculates on “What the Internet will be like in the future.”

For all the visual appeal of avatars and slick 3D graphics, they could prove to be mere trappings of a bigger change in how people use the Internet — one only hinted at by the current crush of so-called Web 2.0 companies.

Above all, virtual worlds hold the potential to transform social interaction online: In contrast to the Web, where there’s almost no assumption of a human heartbeat behind the Web page, virtual worlds are inherently social settings. “You go up to an avatar and you know there’s a real person on the other end,” says Joe Miller, vice-president for platform and technology development at Second Life creator Linden Lab.

Jason Beaird at Sitepoint reviews the first chapter of the book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design.”

Kim Cameron, Architect of Identity and Access in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, has a blog called Identity Weblog. It’s technical but offers an inside look from the architecture of identity on the Internet.

Alex Iskold at The Read/Write Web has a good summary of the history and the future of RSS.

Lorelle VanFossen is guest blogging on Problogger, stating,

Blogging is about writing. Many claim that content is king. If content is king, then the army that protects and defends the king is the written word.

She has a list of 30 nuts-and-bolts points on writing better posts.