Writing Online

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.

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.

Darren Rowse (Problogger) recommends “Clear Blogging,” a comprehensive book on blogging by Bob Walsh. Darren writes:

While I did only skim most of it – I was quite impressed with the depth and breadth of what Bob managed to cover in the book. It’s the most comprehensive book I’ve seen on the topic of blogging and well worth the read. I’d recommend it to any new blogger wanting both theory and practical advice about everything from the setting up of a blog through to the running of one.

It’s also possible to get a free sample chapter to see whether you would want to buy the book. Just go to Amazon.com’s page for Clear Blogging, and scroll down a little less than half the page until you see the author’s note “Free sample chapter of Clear Blogging.”

Ulises Mejias has a slideshow presentation, Networked participation: Wisdom of crowds or stupidity of masses, stating:

So I’m going to be talking about the rules imposed by the network for participating in this social whole. Some people say those rules limit our individual freedoms and make us into compliant masses. Others believe that the rules of networked participation signal a new era of freedom and engagement. I won’t be able to offer any definite answers, but I hope I can at least contribute by presenting you with some thoughts on what the social world looks like when you are part of a network, and what kinds of action the rules of networked participation allow.

To see the slideshow, you’ll need the Opera browser. Otherwise, you can just read the slides.

Blogs are conversations. They listen to other blogs and add their own thoughts to the conversation. That means that you need to be reading other blogs and answering questions like these:

• What are the variety of perspectives on topics?
• What sorts of posts do others make (frequency, length, tone, …)?
• Do there seem to be some blogs mentioned more than others? Why?
• What identities do these blogs project?

Wikipedia articles require research, so should be interested in your topic and the more you know about the topic, the better. Plus, if it’s possible, tie your blog, website, and Wikipedia article together. Here are some examples:

Tom’s blog Silver Screenings could easily have a series of posts related to a Wikipedia article about a black-and-white film. As his website is on his class projects, everything he does fits there without much additional work.

The art and poetry showcased on John’s website could easily be blogged about, and perhaps an artist or poet who has influenced his work could also turn into blog posts and a Wikipedia article.

The content of some blogs and websites doesn’t translate as easily into a Wikipedia article. Taryn’s blog recently talked about a class task in which students were to compare and contrast SparkNotes with the actual book. Taryn wrote:

This forces the student to read the actual novel and critique it themselves. The professor that has tried this found that there are countless errors in SparkNotes. A student would have never figured this out if he studied the SparkNotes alone. Also it helps the students take a closer look at the piece of literature, including figuring out their own themes, motifs, and character analysis!

Wikipedia has many articles related to Taryn’s blog post, so it might be difficult to come up with something new from here. (But if you have an idea, she’d probably appreciate the suggestion.) Still, as her website is on education, one page on the website might be a collection of exercises/tasks for teaching literature which would come from what she had already blogged.

One advantage of having the “same” content across cyberspace genres (besides saving time) is that you’ll be able to reflect more easily on how they differ with respect to rhetorical conventions, audience expectations, identity, and other aspects of writing in cyberspace.

Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen), reviewing the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, applies the six attitudes of the book (Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning) to making a presentation. It seems to me that they can be applied to designing a website or maintaining a blog, too.

The latest issue of Cybermetrics, an online journal publishing  quantitative analyses of  scholarly and scientific communications on the Web, is a special issue on “What does the Web represent? From virtual ethnography to to web indicators”. All of the articles are interesting, but one in particular looks at cultural identity: Studying the Scholarly web: How disciplinary culture shapes online representations.

Over at digital-ethos is a short post, “Intellagirl on the ‘Story of Digital Identity’ Podcast“:

Paul Madsen, Conor Cahill, Richard Piccarreto and I participated in Aldo Castaneda’s Digital Identity podcast last week. Have a listen! We discussed everything from OpenID to how digital identities are formed. It was a blast and I learned a bunch from these great guys. Have a listen and I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or two as well.

Kimberly Alvarado of the Center for Professional Development at Kean University and of K. Aimee web designs had several good comments about designing and adding content to a website. I’ll recap some of them here.

On design, color is important, harmonizing background color with text color. The appropriate choice of color can make a simple design more than aesthetically pleasing. Two online tools mentioned for this purpose were the color scheme generator and the color chart of safe colors. For those wanting to learn more about color, e-books can be purchased at Color Voodoo. The choice of font style, size, and color is also important with the main criterion being readability.
On navigation, Alvarado suggested creating one page that would act as a template for all pages, so that the navigation would be predictable and consistent across pages. Plus, it saves time by not needing to re-create/re-design new pages. All that needs to be done is to add the new content.

Generally speaking, she suggested staying away from sound, although if someone has the option of turning it off, it would be okay. Ditto for videos, although they seem more appreciated than audio.

A major consideration for using audio, video, or graphics is copyright. Is the item in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons agreement? If not, you need to get permission to use these on your website. One place for free music (mentioned by Tom Pawlowski) is SoundClick. Some sites for finding photos/images are yotophoto and Flickr’s Creative Commons photos. Photos on Wikipedia will state what license governs their use (and many are under Creative Commons), and those owned by the U.S. government are in the public domain. It would be a good idea to read about “fair use” at Wikipedia for articles published on Wikipedia and in general.
With respect to content, “the best content is something you really love or love to do or have an interest in.” Some possibilities she suggested were:

• What’s it like to be a student in ENG 3080
• A personal resume website
• A personal hobby/interest/fun website

Regardless of the type of website, two questions to ask yourself are:

• Why are you creating this website?
• Who is your audience? (personal, professional, business)

These questions will provide the framework and guidance for designing your site and for selecting your content.