Writing Online

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

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.

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.