Print writing versus web writing

I made this for my recent presentation about web writing. A lot of it is not new to expert webessionals like you, but to my audience on the day most of it was new. Might even have been interesting. I’m putting it here so I don’t mislay it.

Print writing	Web writing
Adverts come first	Adverts come second
The writer is the expert	The readers are expert
Each article exists in its own right, separated	Each article is part of a wider whole
Readers may respond and might get their response published	Readers expect to be able to respond, and their responses to appear instantly
Readers expect to pay	Readers expect not to pay
Articles are hard to share	Articles are trivially easy to share
Readers can’t easily respond elsewhere	They can
Prose is best	Notes are best

Noah

Noah

Originally uploaded by gilest

So here’s my new little nephew, Noah Kruglianskas Turnbull. Barney and I have just returned from a few days visiting him in Barcelona. He’s a little cutie.

Unrestricted access

I dunno about you, but I get a little twitchy about installers that expect to have “Unrestricted access” to the rest of my computer’s system.

Where have all the cheap, simple, low-cost, long-battery-life mobile computers gone?

It’s astonishing how hard it can be to find a small, simple, low-cost, long-battery-life mobile computer. I should know: I’ve been looking for one for ages.

I want something very small and simple, with just a browser and a plain text editor on board. I want to be able to go out all day and just type; then upload what I’ve written to a convenient place on the web, or file it somewhere via an email account. That’s all it needs to do.

I want a decent keyboard and a decent screen. And - most important of all - I want enough battery life for me to go out with this device all day, and not have to play hunt-the-power-socket by lunchtime.

I had such a machine a few years ago. It was a Palm III with an external keyboard. Well, it ticked some boxes: it had the battery life and was very small, but the screen was too small and the keyboard too flimsy.

Other machines from the past are nearly there. The AlphaSmart Neo or Dana Wireless, each of them with a full size keyboard and superb battery life (weeks and weeks on a set of AAs), but sadly lacking a browser. The Dana does do wifi and runs Palm OS, but as far as I can see, pretty much all Palm browsers are awful.

The top-end Psions (Series 7 and netBook) also look right: they have just the right form-factor and boast good keyboards, screens and reasonable battery life. Specialist PDAs like the Jornada 720 look appealing too, despite running Windows Mobile.

Modern machines - like the Asus eee, which I’ve been coveting for months, or the MacBook Air - are great in many respects but they can’t last a day without being plugged into a wall. I want freedom from plugs and walls, and that’s the main reason why I have resisted buying an eee.

I could buy a Psion or an Alphasmart on eBay. Both would make excellent typing machines, but both would have to be wrangled and mangled to be connected to the internets.

Perhaps I should wait a little longer. Perhaps future versions of the iPhone will let me use a Bluetooth keyboard, and install a tiny mobile version of a half-decent text editor. But then, perhaps not. And in the meantime I keep searching eBay for bargains, my finger poised over the “Bid now” button.

Laura Francis on project management

skillswap 023

Originally uploaded by Pink Pixie

Listen to Laura. She knows.

Dear Squidoo users

Getting yourselves an Twitter account and then blindly following everyone you can find is not a way of generating more traffic for your Squidoo lens.

Rather, it is a way of generating anger and hatred from normally-happy and mild-mannered Twitter users who will, as a result of your stupid spammery behaviour, then go out of their way to block your Twitter account. Some of them might even write ranty blog posts about the act of blocking. Maybe those people should calm down a bit. But then again, what the hell - maybe they should be able to have a little rant about idiots-on-the-web every once in a while.

Only once in a while, though. If we posted rants about all the idiots on the web, we’d be doing it full time. Now there’s an idea for a Squidoo lens.

The “I’m feeling lucky” presentation technique

My presentation in dev mode, as post-its on my office wall

So, like I said yesterday, I don’t do a lot of presentations. And, like I said yesterday, after finding a pretty fundamental flaw in Apple’s presentation app Keynote, I didn’t want to use it to display slides in front of a roomful of people. So I decided to do something a bit different.

Instead of creating slides, I used Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.

“Let’s ask Google to provide some slides for us,” I said to my audience. They giggled a bit.

Needless to say, I did check first. I checked that all the phrases and words I intended to do “lucky” searches on ended up at useful pages. Things like “writing for the web” and “series of tubes” and “if the news is that important, it will find me” all performed as expected.

My only goof was to do a live lucky search for “How to catch mice”, which takes you to a (relatively harmless) page at Videojug, whose list of “Related” videos included something about breast enlargement. Still, that made everyone giggle a bit too, so it wasn’t all bad and it wasn’t all goof.

Anyway, I rather like this way of presenting, and it cuts out the hassle of making slides in the first place. Next time I have to stand up and speak, I shall do it this way again.

(If you want to see the slides I made but ended up not using, they’re here but obviously won’t make much sense without my associated nattering and waving-about of arms.)

Keynote is killing me

I don’t do a lot of presentations. In fact, I don’t like presentations very much. I’ve been subjected to too many boring ones in my time, and have been guilty of delivering boring ones too.

But tomorrow I’m doing a talk in front of 50 or 60 media professionals at a conference in Bath, and I decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to put some slides together after all.

As any dedicated Mac user would, I turned to Keynote. Which was a mistake.

Because it turns out that Keynote running on a MacBook has a curious bug: it will randomly and spontaneously reboot your computer when you start playing your presentation. It’s random in the sense that you just don’t know when it will happen. Sometimes you’ll click play and the thing just plays, and you smile and relax.

But after three or four instant reboots after clicking the “Play” button on the toolbar, you start to get nervous. Your fingers get twitchy on the mouse button. You start to imagine how unprofessional it would look if you stood up in front of 50 or 60 people, fired up with enthusiasm about the things you were going to discuss, only to find that your computer promptly rebooted itself, live on a big screen in front of them all.

From what I can see, this is not a new problem. There are mentions on Apple’s discussions site of very similar things happening a year or more ago (and again as recently as today), but it looks like whatever this problem is, it still hasn’t been fixed.

Keynote is presentation software, but seems to have a bug that makes it impossible to rely on for presentations.

I’ve exported my slides to the web, and I’ve exported them as a .ppt which I can show in PowerPoint if I have to, but you know what? I’m starting to think that I might well not bother with slides at all. I might just talk, and use a browser to display web pages that illustrate my points. The last thing I want to be doing is worrying about software — presentation software, mind you — randomly rebooting my machine while I bore people.

Red Five standing by

Am I the only one excited by the current goings-on in orbit, where experiments are underway to make sure that the freighter Jules Verne can dock itself safely to the International Space Station?

You have to look at this footage of the practice manoeuvres. It’s so exciting! Jules Verne (or Automated Transfer Vehicle, to give it its proper, dull name) is a remote-controlled cargo truck built to take useful stuff to the astronauts on the Space Station. It’s controlled from Toulouse, it carries tonnes of food, water and supplies, and - AND! - it looks like an X-wing!

Look, see:

Now they must have done that on purpose.

Current work

Here’s what’s on my plate right now…

• I’ve been asked to do a session on Writing for the web in front of an audience of journalists and editors employed by Informa Healthcare; my head’s spinning with thoughts on what to say and what to leave out
• Planning to attend Bristol Barcamp 2008
• I’m trying to persuade someone to let me write something about self-replicating machines
• Need to write my PA column for next Monday - it might well be about What do they know?
• Trying to get my hand in on a travel writing gig