Great Headlines

"Boat Industry Takes on Water"

~ Business Gazette, August 1, 2008

"In Women's Soccer, U.S. Finds It Can't Kick the World Around Anymore"

~ Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2008

Google Announces KNOL

There is something new from the ever-inventive Google Team: a KNOL!

Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic. The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading. Know how to fix a leaky toilet, but don't want to write a blog about fixing up your house? In that case, Knol is for you.

Except for the different format, you'll get all the things you've come to expect from Blogger in Knol. Like Blogger, Knol has simple web authoring tools that make it easy to collaborate, co-author, and publish.

It has community features as well: Your readers will be able to add comments and rate your article, and, if you want, they'll be able to suggest edits that you can then either accept or reject. And, just like in Blogger, you can also choose to include ads from AdSense in your knols to perhaps make a little money.

One other important difference between Knol and Blogger is that Knol encourages you to reveal your true identity. Knols are meant to be authoritative articles, and, therefore, they have a strong focus on authors and their credentials. We feel that this focus will help ensure that authors get credit for their work, make the content more credible.

All in all, I agree with Google that Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads.

You might consider it both as a stand-alone platform and as a supplement to your existing blog or web site. So many options, so little time :-))

P.S. BLOGGERS BEWARE -- A Knol is not a shallow marketing tool since the depth and quality of the AUTHORITATIVE articles published as a Knol is truly amazing. I posted up an experiemental knol myself but frankly did not like the quality since it was my very first "knol."

It'd be interesting to see how this new Google "article platform" will fare against such established article depositories as Ezine Articles of Chris Knight.

A Great Opening Paragraph

"WHEN T. S. Eliot said that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters, he surely was not thinking of a journey to Paris on a commercial airline, at a cost of $1,400, following a two-hour wait on the tarmac, in which cocktails on overseas flights are no longer free."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/fashion/20bummer.html

It turns a well-known line by a famous poet on its head while immediately focusing our attention on a current and urgent topic -- the high cost of travel. It's tastefully disrespectful of authority, witty and pertinent. Wastes no time to get to the heart of the issue.

Magic of Giving It Away

"Last fall, one of the largest subscription websites decided to make all of its content free and abandon the subscription model. That website was NYTimes.com. After opening up their website, they saw a traffic jump almost immediately of over 2.2 million unique visitors to the site.

Following this news, Rupert Murdoch seriously considered leaving his more than one million subscribers behind and opening up WSJ.com for free as well. He didn’t, however he did open up much more of his content and has since seen a 256% increase in unique visitors this year."

~ Mequoda Daily

Black Hat Blogging

Don't you hate it when "black hat" artists grab your articles and reprint them by flattening all your live links and then, to add insult to injury, INSERT their own RANDOM affiliate word-links to the text?

I have no idea why they do it because the result is a terrible stupid piece of text with an impossible URL.

Here is an example how one of my articles was butchered in this fashion:

http://deaqzhjrymekk.blogspot.com/2008/07/3rd-big-myth-of-search-engine.html

The URL is impossible because it is randomly generated by a black hat BLOG GENERATOR software. Not only the URL but the "name" of the blogger is also randomly generated.

And the sad thing is there is practically no defense against this kind of pirating. If I flag this blog and pursue the matter it will be deleted but 10 or 30 more will crop up before they even do so. It's a no-win fight up the cyber creek.

So what do I do? I insert my own "thank you" comments with my live link thinking "if a spider follows the links on this page it just might follow mine too and get me some Google-love"... yet I also know that it is a highly unlikely outcome.

So why do these pirates keep generating these random blogs by reprinting people's articles (most of the time published on sites like Ezine Articles) ? Because they are greedy and inexperienced and they really think they can make some money out of these totally bogus blogs. All they do is pollute the Internet.

USEFUL TIP: To catch such pirated and butchered "editions" of your articles just create a Google Alert account with your name as the keyword. Every time one of your articles is published on the Internet you'll receive a Google -email. Very easy to keep track of. The results may just amaze you.

The Best Header of the Year

Icahn to Yahoo Board: Don’t Make Me Get Medieval on Your Assets

by John Paczkowski in Digital Daily (Wall Street Journal)

How Not to Design a Squeeze Page

I did not make this one up folks. This one is for real and is an excellent example of how NOT to design a squeeze page, especially one set up to sell a very expensive web-based service.

The rule is -- the more information you ask from your prospective customers upfront, the lower will be your conversion rate.

How many people do you think have signed up for this "Free software demo" by providing all the following MANDATORY information (all the fields with asterisks)?



What were they thinking?

You have to be really desperate for this software in order to provide all that MANDATORY information before allowed to watch the demo.

The kicker is, they won't tell you WHAT exactly their "service" is all about either. No. You have to give them all that information about yourself (including your FAX NUMBER) and THEN, and only then, they will allow you to have a peek at what they've got.

Good luck!

Rule of thumb: if you'd like to have a good conversion rate, ask no more than NAME and EMAIL address. That's it. Some people are so hungry for your e-mail that they even skip the name.

P.S. The cost of this service that you cannot even sample before giving up all that information is $5,000 upfront for "set up"; and then $300 recurring fee every month. So I guess they are interested only in people with really a lot of cash and a lot information to give up. I hope that strategy is working for them.

Critically Scarce"?

Can something be "scarce" but NOT "critically scarce"?

From New York Times (June 7, 2008):

"... housing was critically scarce along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina."

?

This is like saying "the house was painted green in color." Green is the color, and what's scarce is by definition "critically" so.

It's enough and more proper to say something is painted green, period; or that the housing is scarce. Full stop.

Non-Parallel Construction

Even important publications like NYT or WSJ are not immune to generating weak prose, constructed with non-parallel clauses.

Here is one from New York Times (June 7, 2008):

"The hunger strike is meant to pressure federal officials, and comes as Congress is debating an expansion of the guest worker program..."

There's nothing "wrong" with this sentence except a passive-voice clause is followed by an active-voice one.

This is how I'd edit it:

"The hunger strike aims to put pressure on the federal officials, and comes as Congress is debating an expansion of the guest worker program..."

Scheduling Posts

Now you can schedule your posts in advance if you are using Blogger.

WordPress had that functionality for quite a while.

I congratulate Blogger for the innovation for a good reason -- whenever I had WordPRess blogs they've been assaulted without mercy by comment spammers.

With Blogger, knock on wood, that has never been an issue and I'm using Blogger since year 2000. I hope one day WordPress developers will also learn how to protect their bloggers against such nuisance.

Something new -- if you're looking for an HTML editor which has a built-in advance scheduling function, try Xsite Pro 2.0. It is the only HTML editor I know (not Dreamweaver, not GoLive) which allows you to schedule your web pages in advance and publishes them according to your schedule. Indexing robots love that time-release stuff.

Technical Editing

EXAMPLE: Once the startup condition is attained, the user can launch the module.

BETTER: After starting the system, the user can launch the module.

"Energizing"

Some of the worst excesses of copy writing give the trade a bad name.

Take the following lonely adjective I noticed printed on the label of a bottle of shampoo:

"Energizing..."

Now what the heck does that mean, really?

Energizing WHAT? Does it mean I'll have more energy when I use that shampoo? Of course not.

How much more energy we're talking about? Are we talking in terms of Calories?

Etc. Etc.

Total nonsense and yet someone was paid to write that, and another to place it on the label.

When I see empty rhetoric like that masquerading for good writing, I feel like breaking my keyboard and selling used cars for a living.

MEGA MILLIONS - "Learn from History" ???

(Click the image to enlarge it.)

That's the first sentence that greets you when you visit the "Recent Drawings" page of MEGA MILLIONS LOTTERY.

LEARN FROM HISTORY? If we could do that, that would mean the lottery drawings are NOT random!

The whole point to a lottery is that all drawings are (supposed to be) RANDOM and INDEPENDENT from each other.

For anything to have a HISTORY it has to have events that are NON-RANDOM and NON-INDEPENDENT.

I'm really surprised that the Mega Million lottery officials are suggesting that we can "learn" anything from studying the "history" of these drawings.

What do they exactly mean by that, I'm really at a lost.

For a perfectly random and FAIR drawing, we should NOT be able to learn anything by studying the "history" of past drawings.

Do the lottery officials know something that we don't?

Or is it a case of a careless copy writer who has not taken probability at college and who does not know what an "independent event" means?

They need to hire a good technical writer, right away.

STC Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA

I've been at the STC (Society for Technical Communication) Technical Communication Summit and Annual Conference in Philly, PA since Sunday. A very exciting event for all technical communicators, with 1,250 in attendance from all across the USA, Europe, Japan, India, Korea, Israel, and a few other countries.

STC has organized 3 solid days of presentations on half a dozen subject tracks. There were so many workshops and seminars that I wanted to sit in but had to skip most of them since there was time enough only to attend three a day.

I'm surprised by the strength of localization and translation companies among those who rented a booth in the exhibition hall. The ones I talked to acknowledged growing competition but also seemed pleased with the direction in which their business is heading.

XML was a big focus area, as evidenced by the opening panel discussion on Sunday evening. All technical communicators need to pay attention to XML's growing footprint in corporate communications.

I've also had the opportunity in this Summit to meet many authors and educators whose work I've known for years but never had the chance to meet in person previously.

Adobe and MadCap as well as AuthorIt were among the corporations who've invested big time in this conference as main sponsors. I assume Adobe has spent a little more than the others as the Platinum Sponsor of the event. The two seminars presented by Adobe's very-qualified R.J. Jacquez were among the best that I've attended during this conference.

Other corporate participants and sponsors of note: TechSmith, DocToHelp, Ken Cook Co., CARA, and Texas Tech Univ. Distance Learning Division.

I'll continue to share the lessons and my impressions of this excellent conference in the days ahead. Perhaps I'll meet you next year down in Atlanta where the 2009 STC conference will be held.

For more info, please visit www.stc.org

STC Annual Conference

I'll be at the STC Annual Conference next week, held in Philadelphia, PA. It's going to be an exciting conference and I'll file my impressions on a daily basis right here.

One issue that I see surfacing these days is the very definition of a "technical writer" since we tech writers usually do a lot more than just "writing." We also design information and do a lot in terms of page layout, graphics, single-sourcing, and illustrations.

So the new term is "technical communicator" but the Labor Department is still resisting the redefinition.

I'm all for the "technical communicator" label since in all honesty we do a lot more than just "writing." Try creating a structured FrameMaker document and you'll know what I mean.

Writer, 98, Writes His First Novel

This is the sort of inspirational story that I love...

Writer at 98 writes his first novel and starts a memoir: "My First One Hundred years". You gotta love a guy with a sense of humor like that!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/28/DD2T10SJEI.DTL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Osmond Molarsky has been writing all his life. He's written ad copy, radio documentaries, U.S. Navy training films and a series of children's books. But it wasn't until last year that the 98-year-old Mill Valley resident wrote his first novel, a contemporary political satire called "The Noah Hour."

So far, though, no takers. "I've sent query letters to publishers," Molarsky says. "I've tried agents, and they're all looking for 'chick lit.' A lot of them say that right on their resume."

New Technical Writing Info Mail List now available

Are you interested to change careers and become a well-paid and well-respected Technical Writer?

"Technical Writing Weekend Boot Camp" classes are forming. Write your first software manual within 2 days.

I'll be teaching these classes personally. I'm looking forward to share my 10-years Fortune 500 techncial writing experience with all my students.

Class size limited to 15.

Sign up with this info list and receive both information on these classes and free tech writing tips and tutorials.

http://www.learntechnicalwriting.com

Human factor -- still important

In this day and age of mega-total-automation we tend to forget the human labor that goes into every word, every package of meaningful information.

Here is a video title from CNN Fortune website.

An accident that really happened because someone was too tired to type "An accident" correctly.

The idea is not to nitpick on human frailties but to call attention to the continuing importance of quality labor and human expertise which will be important even in the year 4008.

You can automate quality up to a certain point. But after that, there'll always be a need for well-trained people who do their jobs well.

AFI CENTER Can Use a Better Subtitle

Some titles can be correct bur imbalanced if they are constructed in an unparallel fashion.

Here is a good example: the subtitle of the splendid AFI CENTER in Silver Spring, Maryland.

This is a great movie theater and a cultural center; one of the best I've seen anywhere.

But look at its official subtitle:

"Theater and Cultural Center" !?

"[NOUN] + [ADJECTIVE] CENTER"

There are two BETTER and more balanced alternatives:

Theater and Culture Center [NOUN + NOUN]

or

Theatrical and Cultural Center [ADJECTIVE + ADJECTIVE]

Obviously, the second one is a bit funny since a BUILDING cannot "act theatrical" or "be theatrical" as an inanimate object.

So the correct copy solution here would be:

THEATER AND CULTURE CENTER

But that's all right. 99% of people will not notice the imbalance anyways.

Heparin: Bad Product Design is a Public Threat

I keep saying this for years and some people think I’m exaggerating: “Bad information and product design can main and even kill.”

Here is an amazing recent example of how badly-designed products can cause needless injuries and pain, as it happened to movie star Dennis Quaid and his wife who almost lost their newborn baby when an abnormally high dose of Heparin (a blood coagulant) was given to the poor infant.

I’m not referring to the claim that Chinese-made Heparin bottles contain contaminants.

I’m referring to the lunatic label design that, in the hectic conditions of an emergency ward, makes applying 10,000 units of Heparin instead of just 10 a very simple mistake to commit.

Just look at these bottles…

The one on the right is 10 units and the one on the left is 10,000 units!

Same size bottle. With almost same shade of blue label! Perfectly designed to commit a 1,000-fold error...

Is it a wonder that many nurses ended up injecting the wrong doze and thus inadvertently endangering lives?

Who can blame them when a critical product has this kind of totally unacceptable label design? I don’t.

To its credit, the company that manufactures Heparin has changed the packaging of these two different dozes. I understand now one of the bottles has a bright RED label. Duh!

Whoever designed these unbelievably-close blue labels should be fired and never allowed to design anything again. Period.