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.

USA Today has updated their website to include quite a few new features, including social sharing ones (via TechCrunch). More and more, newspapers and other mainstream services are moving away from their print origins and taking on a Web 2.0 identity.

If the New York Times is any indication, newspapers will eventually stop the printing presses and go fully online. From an article by Richard Koman (Silicon Valley Watcher),

NYT pub Arthur Sulzberger suggests that the debate over how far online newspapers must go is over in an interview with Haaretz.com. He sees his job as shepherding the times onto the Internet while maintaining profit margins – and “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”

It seems “real” world publishing is integrating fully into a “virtual” world.

As we are now looking at blogs, blog genres, and blog criteria a good paper to frame our investigation is Danah Boyd’s paper, “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium,” published in reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture. From the conclusion:

Early definitions of blogs focused on the structure and content of the output, often using metaphors to connect the emergent with the understood. This approach introduced analytic biases that complicated people’s ability to follow the evolution of blogging and how the practice and values of bloggers shaped the output. By shifting focus to the practice, it is possible to see how blogs are not a genre of communication, but a medium through which communication occurs. This reframing offers a framework in which to analyze how blogging has helped blur accepted distinctions such as between orality and textuality, corporeality and spatiality, private and public.

Key points to keep in mind are that to understand blogging, we must look not only at the product but also at the practices and culture that produces the blog, and how blogging crosses boundaries.

Danah Boyd is a doctoral candidate at Berkeley who researches online communities. She has quite a few papers

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, has a fascinating, 4 1/2 minute video (Web 2.0 … The Web is Us/ing Us) on the influence of digital text, and thus, the web, on us, and vice versa (via jill/txt). In particular, the separation of content from form (i.e., the code, such as html and xml) has enabled easy web authoring, blogging, wikis, and other online writing tools. The video shows how it isn’t just information that is linked on the web, but people as they collaborate and link to one another. What does that mean with respect with differentiating between “real” and “virtual” reality, online and offline identity, authorship and copyright, …?

Copyblogger has posted “The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging.” They are:

1. The Law of Value
2. The Law of Headlines and Hooks
3. The Law of “How to”
4. The Law of the List
5. The Law of the Story

Not considering whether these “laws” or immutable or limited to just five, how would you compare them to print writing? Similar? Different? Some are similar, some different? In what ways?

Earlier I mentioned Jon Udell’s post on the influence of technology on writing. Now, the Read/WriteWeb is looking at how mainstream media are increasing their use of web 2.0 services. From their table, one can see how major newspapers are using not only RSS feeds but also digg and del.icio.us, and to a lesser extent, newsvine. It will be interesting to see how online and offline genres will continue to interact and influence one another.

In addition to media, it seems that business in generally is embracing web 2.0 technology. In the DMNewsBlog, Giselle Abramovich reports on research showing that companies are adopting social media.

A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth survey found that the fastest growing Inc. 500 companies adopt blogging, podcasting and other social media as business tools and a majority of companies consider social media to play significant strategic role.

Soon, we’ll be talking about virtual reality. One popular virtual environment is Second Life. David Dewit (Athens News) writes about it, “Virtual-reality software creates parallel campus, enhances education“, and how it’s being used in an upper-division rhetoric and composition course at Ohio University taught by Paul Shovlin:

But [Shovlin's] interest is really in the effects of the environment itself. He said he wanted his students to think critically about the appearance and impressions they were giving off, demonstrating to them that if his avatar looked like Darth Vader, they wouldn’t take him seriously.

“Rhetoric is the art of persuasion,” he said. “A certain appearance in virtual reality can affect ethos and credibility.”

Shovlin said that at the end of his course he wanted students to become critical agents, to take care of themselves in the virtual environment of Second Life and translate that to other environments.

“That’s what I think literacy is,” he said, “adapting and being successful in different environments in terms of our communication.”

“Writing in Cyberspace” has similar interests. As we blog, build websites, and write online, we need to consider how online environments impact our writing as compared to print environments, to think critically about those differences, and transfer and “translate” our writing into new environments.

One point to keep in mind throughout the semester is how the technology we use affects our writing, whether on a static website, blog, or something else. Jon Udell writes about the “unintended consequences of syndication“. He had created a widget on his blog to post his recent del.icio.us bookmarks, and it changed how he bookmarked:

If you do decide to explicitly publish your bookmarks in a sidebar widget on your blog, it may change the way you bookmark. It did for me, anyway. The balance shifted away from purely personal information management and toward the kind of editorial sensibility that governs the blog. It was around this time that private bookmarks became available in del.icio.us, and that’s been helpful. If I’m researching something and I just want to collect a list of resources labeled with some obscure tag meaningful only to me, there’s no need to flow that stuff onto my blog page. Conversely, if I want to draw attention to something in a public way, I can. It sounds great in principle, but in practice I think the friction involved in making that choice on a per-item basis made me less likely to bookmark either publicly or privately.

Have you noticed whether any of the technology we’re using has influenced your writing?

Jean Yves Chainon (The Editor’s Weblog via Scott Krumpler at Kairosnews) writes that Google is influencing how newspaper reporters are writing. How?

The Times of London is training journalists in making their articles show up at the top of Google’s unpaid search results. “You make sure key phrases and topic words are embedded in the top paragraph and headlines,” says Zach Leonard, the Times’ digital-media publisher.

Newspapers are also buying search words on Google Inc. to make sure that their articles appear among the first hits – for example the Daily Telegraph bough [sic] the phrase “North Korea Nuclear Test” last October. As a result, users who typed in that phrase saw an ad for the Telegraph pop up on the corner of their screen.

As Scott notes, “This isn’t exactly news … [but] editors are far more willing to blur the line between editorial and advertising than they once were.” In addition, the line between cyberspace writing and print writing may become blurred, too, especially as much is made over the difference between online and offline writing.