Entradista

"Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” —Rachel..."

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:28:02 +0100

““Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.”
—Rachel Lovinger”

- Highlighted by Ian Betteridge in The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane

jsavary: Web content strategists are made, not born. A great...

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:57:36 +0100

jsavary:

Web content strategists are made, not born.

A great image by Richard Ingram I came across while reading an equally great post by Smashing Magazine

styledeficit bits and bobs: 'Write like you talk'

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:52:35 +0100

styledeficit bits and bobs: 'Write like you talk':

styledeficit:

This never really rung true with me. Not really. But this is a much better explanation:

“To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome…

"Nobody surfs the web anymore"

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:39:02 +0100

Steve Rosenbaum, at Confab 2011:

“Nobody surfs the web anymore. The waves are too damn big.”

He’s right. And the thing is that we’ve mostly created the waves ourselves with the deliberate intention of stopping surfing.

People don’t surf the web. They go to a few regular sites. They gather feeds together using RSS. They ping straight off to links gathered via social media (and then jump straight back to Facebook again). But they don’t surf, hopping from link to link, site to site, in the way that we used to.

Why is that?

First, because of the intoxicating power that search engines deliver to get instant answers. Type in a question – bang. Instant result!

But secondly, and I think more importantly, because the people who build sites have adopted a view of users that looks more like a railroad than a highway. We think that we can – and should – put the users on tracks to the holy destination of conversion, and anything that lets them drift away from that ultimate destination is to be avoided like the plague. They might wander off a little – but only so far as we’ll let them, before we start putting in roadblocks and placing big fat signposts down to get them back on the road.

We’ve made the waves too high to surf. We’ve trained users, like performing monkeys, to press a button and get a reward. And that’s a little sad.

You can see it in our persona work. Look at the average persona template. There’s a nice dinky bit of narrative, and then we’re straight into the goals. The user must have goals. Why else would they be online, right? Why else might they be on our site?

We talk about user journeys, but those user journeys are like train travel – the driver, us, is in control. They user is just buying a ticket (and, in most cases, isn’t even aware of it). We talk about funnels, shovelling in people at the top and getting conversions at the bottom. Grist to the mill.

As content people, with years of experience in creating stuff that people want to read, watch, and engage with, we need to be wary of talk like this. We need to remember that users – people – are human beings and not performing animals that you can prod and poke and reward into doing what you want. That personas don’t become so dictatorial that the “goals” in them (always an abstraction, and too often aligned directly to the company’s goals) don’t limit real people who come to our sites. We need to remember that sometimes, people need to surf, to feel a part of things and not just fodder for the conversion mill.

And we need to remember that the best companies, the best brands, have enough confidence in what they do that they allow a little space for their customers to be themselves. Some space to surf.

Create a Cheap Server Using the Regular Snow Leopard Install

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:17:28 +0000

Create a Cheap Server Using the Regular Snow Leopard Install:

fieldytech:

Many Mac users were wowed by Apple’s Mac mini server package when it was announced, but at $1,000, it’s still a bit too pricey for even the average person to justify shelling out the cash for a home server. Fear not true believers, we’re going to show you how to turn that old Intel Mac you’ve got lying around into a server that can duplicate many of Snow Leopard Server’s features without shelling out another penny.

Difficulty Level
Hard

What You Need
> Intel Mac
> OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (We recommend the Snow Leopard Family Pack)
> MAMP (Free)
> OpenFire (Free)
> XCode
> QuickTime Broadcaster (Free)
> Router that supports Port Forwarding (We used the Airport Extreme)

"I’ve used a few different 7-inch Android tablets and although I envied the pocketable size, they..."

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:04:28 +0000

“I’ve used a few different 7-inch Android tablets and although I envied the pocketable size, they never asserted themselves as general-purpose computers. They could run some ambitious Android apps, but every additional function bore a scarlet suffix. You could create and edit documents … sorta. You could process a folder of email … within reason. That sort of thing.”

- Lessons at CES - how your tablet can compete with iPad - Chicago Sun-Times (via Instapaper)

"Honestly. It’s a small exaggeration to say that I could board a flight to China tomorrow, be in..."

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:01:52 +0000

“Honestly. It’s a small exaggeration to say that I could board a flight to China tomorrow, be in Shenzhen by the next morning, plunk down about 1800 Yuan for a working Tegra 2-based 10.1-inch Android slate, draw my own logo on it with a white Sharpie on the flight home, and then after a quick 15-minute press conference at the airport Ramada I’d be just as credible a force in Android 3.0 tablets as most of the companies who showed off hardware at CES this year.”

- CES slate parade proves not all tablets are created equal - Chicago Sun-Times (via Instapaper)

"Don't forget..." - a set on Flickr

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:28:57 +0100

"Don't forget..." - a set on Flickr:

A genius set of images of surprising street art. One for the designers amongst you.

Question: What’s wrong with this picture? Answer: The...

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:27:26 +0100

Question: What’s wrong with this picture?

Answer: The content has become massively less important in the hierarchy of the page than everything else. The important bit – the content – has been pushed so far down the page that I have to scroll down to read even just the first paragraph.

This is why I use stuff like Reader on Safari: I’d like the content back, please.

iReader

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:03:35 +0100

iReader:

One of the finest features of Safari 5 is Reader, which allows you to get to a simple, uncluttered view of any web page just by clicking a button. It’s the instant answer to the overkill of page furniture that lots of sites seem to want to put us through (and I’m looking at you The Guardian).

Only one problem: At the moment, Chrome is my browser of choice. I like Safari, but I find Chrome just a little bit nippier at opening and rendering pages.

Enter iReader, an extension for Chrome which ~~completely rips off~~ replicates Reader, even managing to do the trick which puts together multiple pages into a single view. It’s slick, works nicely, and does the job. Recommended.

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents | Big Questions Online

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:18:10 +0100

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents | Big Questions Online:

I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. And I find myself in a lonely place in relation to many liberals, political and religious, because I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate…

(via Instapaper)

Are Wikileaks Activists Finally Realizing Their Founder Is a Megalomaniac? [Wikileaks]

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:45:32 +0100

via Gawker: valleywag

Julian Assange’s attempt to spin his creepy romancing of two Swedish women into a Pentagon smear campaign was a huge mistake. … Read More »

There is no escape from Solutions Cat

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:05:59 +0100

There is no escape from Solutions Cat

Yet another Mexican food place opens near work. Are they all...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:30:53 +0100

Yet another Mexican food place opens near work. Are they all trying to tempt me?

"Must say I am enjoying the Pronouncements of Chairman Schmidt, we have been following them ever..."

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:57:03 +0100

“Must say I am enjoying the Pronouncements of Chairman Schmidt, we have been following them ever since the Repeal of Privacy: “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” ……last year.
This is of course the same Google that refused to speak to CNET journalists for months after they published stuff about Schmidt - obtained from Google searches. And then there was the contretemps about a certain lady.”

- I have seen the Singularity, and it is run by Google - broadstuff

In some senses, I think Schmidt is right: We’re heading towards a post-privacy world. One of the pieces of thinking that has most-influenced me on this lately came from an unexpected source: “The Light of Other Days” by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C Clarke.

The book features a technology which uses wormholes in spacetime to effectively “remote view” anything, anywhere (and ultimately, any time). What it does, though, is nicely examine the social and cultural implications of this: what happens when you can be certain that you’re being watched, all the time?

Clarke and Baxter take the positive view: We stop caring what anyone thinks, and enjoy ourselves. The key thing, of course, is that everyone can watch, not just the state – so there’s a different cultural conclusion compared to Orwell’s Big Brother, where it’s the state that does the watching.

My new agenda for blogging

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:17:43 +0100

Why did I decide to shutter my old blog? Although I touched on this in my final post there, I think it’s worth exploring a little more.

What I found was that I’d become trapped in the reactive, provocative mode of writing. It’s what I think of as the “news agenda” method: You write about what’s happening now, leveraging your experience and perspective to grab attention.

I was writing with perspective – it’s hard not to write with perspective – but not with any particular knowledge or insight born of actual on the ground experience.

And the funny thing was that it felt slightly corrosive. It is a bit like a circus, with a thousand clowns and jugglers all performing at the same time, trying to grab the audience’s attention, and no ringmaster to keep everyone in line. The temptation to shout louder, to be meaner, to be more provocative for the sake of it was the bit that was inevitably corrosive. Who really wants to perform in a circus like that?

It was, in fact, corrosive not just in a human sense - but also corrosive of my interest in technology. I’ve never been a classic technology person: my background is in the humanities, in philosophy. What I’m really interested in with regard to technology is the myriad ways that human beings use it to make their lives better, whether that’s a brilliant new engine which will take you from New York to San Francisco on a single tank of petrol, a new kind of seed that resists a previously-endemic pest, or a sublimely beautiful piece of software.

And that interest extends well beyond the most common type of writing about technology, which focuses on that great late-20th Century thing, the computer. There’s more to technology than that. A new industrial process, a new method of weaving that lets you make more beautiful clothes… all of those are technology too. Yet if you read “the technology sites”, you’d never know it.

You’d think that technology was Google, and Apple, and Microsoft… the web, and devices. And that would be it.

When you find yourself writing the umpteenth article about why product X is better than product Y, or why company Y’s patents are crazy, you find yourself questioning what you’re doing it for.

I’m lucky, in that writing about technology isn’t my day job: that, these days, involves creating content strategies for brands to help them communicate to their customers. So when I write about technology, or anything else, it should be for fun.

So, I decided to shutter the old blog and do something new. The way that I’m approaching writing now is that I’m only going to write about things that are more directly involved in my experience. No commentary on what anyone else is doing: Just commentary on what *I’m* doing, and one what I know from doing. Sometimes, that will involve writing about tech, because tech is still part of my life (like it is everyone’s). But it could equally involve design, fashion, the pros and cons of feeding cats dry food, or coffee.

With technology writing in particular, I now have one aim: Use my experience of technology to help other people who may have the same interests. So, for example, I might write something on my experience of using Android for the first time as an iPhone user, because some people might find some of the stuff in that useful. But what I won’t write is a “my platform is TEH FUUUTURE” piece, because… well, what’s the point? How does that help anyone? What does it do except play the page views game?

My only advice to anyone about writing is simple: Write about what you care about. Write about what matters in your life. Never, ever, fake it - if you’re not passionate about something, if something doesn’t really matter, don’t write about it.

Journalism Warning Labels « Tom Scott Utter genius. Can...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:23:42 +0100

Journalism Warning Labels « Tom Scott

Utter genius. Can someone make this for online too?

opulencedecay: Irving Penn.

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:50:27 +0100

opulencedecay:

Irving Penn.

the secret history of ntk

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:21:31 +0100

via Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka

I know that this blog (and probably me as a person) are firmly categorised with the “where_are_they_now” nostalgia … Read More »

"Microsoft would be better off ignoring Windows 7 and instead starting with elements of the xBox and..."

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:36:45 +0100

“Microsoft would be better off ignoring Windows 7 and instead starting with elements of the xBox and Zune architectures. They have a UI, design foot print, and use case, that is far more applicable to the slate. Who knows. Maybe Microsoft is right. Maybe people really do want to run Windows, Office, and other applications on a slate…and they really do want to print stuff. Time will tell.”

- Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Windows 7 Tablets vs Apple iPad. Not about the OS (via Instapaper)