Writing Online

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.

Alan Sipress (Washington Post) writes that the Patent Office will employ the Internet Wikipedia-like to review patents:

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

Frank Gruber, senior product manager at AOL, has a “Web 2.0 online identity video” (via Digital-Ethos) in which he posits,

We’re all having an identity crisis. Am I really how I present myself on Myspace? Are you?

And he offers other interesting thoughts and questions.