In a concise 27 pages, Skellie asks and answers the following question:

The Question

How can I get visitors, subscribers, comments, inbound links, and people saying good things about what I do?

The Answer

Evaluate every action, every possible change, and every existing feature of your blog or website, and ask: Is it gripping? Can the reader resonate with it? Does it make it easy (and rewarding) to interact? And most importantly: is it easy (or rewarding) to talk about? That’s all you need to know. Do these things, and you’ll get everything you want.

The remainder of the e-book is devoted to each of these four elements: Gripping, resonating, interacting and talking. Each section includes concrete suggestions for things to try on your website or blog and strategies for evaluating a site you may already have.

The Simple Web philosophy suggests that we simplify our websites by doing and adding things only if they help us to achieve our goals. Skellie suggests that we qualify every action or element of our sites as either +1 or -1. It either grips or distracts, resonates or bores, interacts or preaches, talks or is apathetic. There is little or no neutral ground.

The belief in zero, in certain things being neither one nor the other, and therefore acceptable, causes us to waste time and visitor attention on actions and elements that simply don’t contribute to the growth of your site.

Try evaluating your current site, or the one you are about to build, in this light and you may find it becoming much smaller, simpler and more effective.

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Cross-posted on webdancers.com.

Email is a peculiar form of communication. We get so much of it that it’s easy to treat it all as junk to be gotten rid of. Of course, the email that we send to others is valuable and should be read and acted upon. Here are seven suggestions for effective email communication, whether you are the sender or the recipient. [Note that these suggestions are for business correspondence. Feel free to ignore them for email to your friends and family, who will love you no matter what.]

1. Use a credible email address.

Like it or not, some people will make judgments about your credibility based on your email address, particularly when you are corresponding as a business. Consider these examples from Modern Nerd:

mrbigshot@freemail.com
What’s that, my good man? You’re a marketing director with a passion for helping iPhone developers breach new and exciting markets, build strong corporate images, and explore and project consistent brand values? And you’ve got a Hotmail address?

johnsmith1988@i-am-not-a-number.com
Look, John, I know that picking usernames has been a lifelong drag, but don’t just tag a number on the end. Especially not your birth year. You’re better than that.

anyone@aol.com
I’ve spent 10 years trying to ditch my asinine prejudice against AOL users, but I still struggle to take aol.com addresses seriously. If you’re an AOL user and you feel hurt by this, I can only apologise and say that I’m trying to grow out of it.

cuddlebunny@pass-me-a-bucket.com
I have a glowing red button on my desk for cutesy addresses like these. Nothing dramatic. It just deletes them.

2. Write short emails

Like most things online, people don’t read emails closely, they skim them. I know that when I open up a long email (anything that I have to scroll through), I immediately ask myself, “can I put this aside and read it later?” I place a high value on concise and direct writing and am much more likely to respond to emails that use it.

If you can’t shorten the text of your email, break it into multiple paragraphs. Large blocks of text are hard to read on a computer monitor and it’s easy to lose the thread of the conversation. Remember your high school english: each new thought or idea should start a new paragraph.

3. Limit your email to a single subject

Closely related to #2, give your recipient a chance to digest and respond to the subject of your message before moving along to a new one. Since many people also use their inbox as a todo list, separating your subjects helps them to organize their work flow and anything we can do to help them with that makes good communication more likely.

4. Make clear requests

Almost all business emails contain something that we’d like the recipient to do. It might be answering a question, taking a specific action or forwarding information to someone else. If the request is buried in the middle of the text or, even worse, thrown in as an aside (“if you get a chance, you might send this on to Bill”), it’s much less likely to be acted on. A good technique is to summarize at the end of the email, using a numbered or bulleted list, the actions you would like the recipient to take. If you want them to let you know when they have taken those actions, list that too.

5. Honor requests from others

Here, I have to rant a little. When you ignore a direct request in an email, it affects your trustworthiness and reputation. At least for me it does. Ignoring a request says to me that either a) you didn’t hear me or b) that you didn’t value my request enough to respond to it. Either way, it’s a huge roadblock to effective communication.

I know everyone’s busy and has lots of requests that they have to attend to and I’m not suggesting that every request must be handled immediately. I am suggesting that every one has to be acknowledged, if only to say “I’ll get back to you on that” (provided that you do).

6. Acknowledge receipt of emails

Sometimes spam filters get a little carried away and emails fall into a big black hole in the ether. In almost all cases, the only way for the sender to know that an email has been received is by getting an email back from the recipient. Let your sender know that you’ve gotten their email (maybe even thank them for it), even if you aren’t able to respond to it right away. People expect a business to respond within 24 hours and will start to feel ignored beyond that.

7. Don’t write for yourself, write for your reader

This is another way of saying, consider your audience. Make sure that you include the things they need to know to make sense of your correspondence.

• Make use of text links to provide them with background information (these also help keep your email short).
• Stay away from jargon, unless you’re writing to someone who knows the jargon, in which case it can be a useful shorthand.
• Use inline or attached images sparingly and only where they can help illustrate your points.
• Use emoticons (sparingly) if you’re worried that your tone might be misinterpreted.
• Put yourself in the reader’s place as ask yourself, “what would I need to know in order to understand this?”

Finally, be nice and remember that everything you send over the Internet might someday be made public.

Photo by Rupert Ganzer.
Cross posted on webdancers.com.

After recently redesigning the website for my company, webdancers, I’ve now added a blog and newsletter. The focus of this blog will be on information of interest to my clients and potential clients: Management of online presence, social media and online tools. There will be some overlap with posts published here but I will try and keep the identities of the two blogs somewhat separate.

Please go check out the new blog at http://www.webdancers.com/blog and while you’re there, sign up for the newsletter. It looks like I’m going to spending more time writing…

Page before Readability

Page after Readability

Readability is extremely easy to install and use. Follow the steps on their installation page (watch the video first, if you like) to place their bookmarklet on your browser’s toolbar. Then, whenever you’re on a page that you want to really read – not just skim – click the bookmarklet and Readability de-clutters the page. It can even remove the distraction of inline text links, by moving them all to footnotes at the bottom of the content. When you’re done, click the “Reload Original Page” button and the page is restored to its original state.

The developer of Readability, Richard Ziade, was interviewed recently on Rebooting the News, where he explained that developing the technology to correctly identify the featured content on a page and remove everything else was much more difficult than it looks. He started the project in his spare time to meet his own need to reduce the level of distraction that he knew was interfering with his online reading comprehension. The whole program is well worth listening to.

Rebooting the News

Our special guest is the developer of the Readability plug-in, Richard Ziade. He’s a partner in arc90, a strategic consulting and software development firm. Recently, his product was in the news because Apple’s Safari browser incorporated it, as Dave explained in a post at scripting.com. (It would be a good idea to read that post before listening.)

It’s a great tool and I’ve been using it a lot but here’s a question that needs to be asked of readers: If you get to control the viewing experience and choose to ignore the ads and other bumpf (and who wouldn’t?), what responsibility do you have to replace the revenue that those ads bring in for the publisher? And conversely, if the readers are voting with their feet and turning off the ads, how can publishers change their content and revenue models, in order to attract readers who are willing to support them? These are questions that all media companies have been grappling with and programs like Readability (and the new Safari 5 browser, which has similar functionality built in) simply shines a brighter light on how our online consumption has changed the media landscape.

No "http://" required

My web browser of choice these days is Google Chrome, from the “Developer channel”. There are two other channels for Chrome: Beta and Stable. The browser versions delivered through the latter channels are more “ready for prime time” and less prone to changing their behavior on a regular basis.  On April 8th, the Google Chrome Releases blog reported this innocuous change on the Dev channel:

Changes to the Omnibox (e.g. the bookmark star has moved, icon changes, etc.)

The Omnibox is Chrome’s name for the address bar, where the URL (address) of the current page is displayed and where you can type in a new one. The Omnibox however, has much greater ambitions than simply being a box where you can enter a URL. Here’s what the developers at The Chromium Projects have to say about it:

The purpose of Chromium’s omnibox is to merge both location and search fields while offering the user some highly relevant suggestions and / or early results.

The omnibox should focus on augmenting the user’s commands – all of the tools it provides should be oriented around making the user’s input ‘better’, and sending them to a destination.

The change made to the Omnibox was simple, yet controversial: Hide the “http://” (known technically as the protocol scheme) from the beginning of the URL. It has not been necessary to type this part of the URL for some time (though most people don’t know this), so, reasoned Chrome’s developers, why show it at all?

The reaction from the rest of the developer community was swift and nearly unanimous: this is a Really Bad Idea. The Chromium Issue Tracker contains such comments as:

- This is a bad change and should be reverted. This is Google using market share to force a change that doesn’t comply with relevant standards.

- We probably all agree that “http://” is an unfortunately nasty part of URLs, right up there with “www”, ”.com” and all the other pesky line noise. Even Tim Berners-Lee apologized for the “//”. However, I don’t think the address bar is the right place to address this issue.

- The protocol specification is not optional. It’s a part of the URI. A URL bar that doesn’t show the actual URI is not very good at what it does.

-Also, www.google.com/ looks plain silly and unbalanced compared to http://www.google.com/. If you’re so into “prettifying” the URL for inane reasons (it’s redundant!), then get rid of that lingering / at the end.

-I’m going back to Firefox if this hits Chrome as a feature.

The response from the Chrome team was terse but clear. After four days, the issue was closed to further comments and its status was changed to “Won’t Fix”.

In choosing to pursue their vision for the Omnibox, the Chrome developers have taken on the burden of making the user experience better, even while making changes that break from the norm. Early in the issue discussion, Chrome developer pkasting wrote:

However, Chromium UI design is not a democracy and is not based on users’ votes, so “I don’t like this” carries very little weight. Concrete use cases that are actually broken are much more valuable — and have already caused us to file the bugs noted above. The fact that we haven’t elected to revert this change doesn’t mean your feedback has been “disregarded”, it means we’re not convinced a revert is justified– especially when it has been in the product for a couple of days.

The question I ask myself when it comes to issues like this is, will this change make my life easier and does it do so by removing choices that I would rather keep? I stopped typing “http://” a long time ago, because I knew I could. I understand why I might want to use it and the other protocol schemes that might be used in its place but the times when I actually do so are very few and far between.

I think that the impulse to simplify should be encouraged and that this is a small step in that direction. The implementation is very likely to change (and improve) before the general public on the Chrome Stable channel sees this feature but I applaud the Google Chrome team for sticking to their own mandate for this small piece of the user interface.

So I received an automated call this afternoon. A male voice asked if I would take a minute to answer a few very important questions.

I said, “yes”.

The first question was whether I believed that “marriage should be allowed between only one man and only one woman”?

I cringed at the infelicitous phrasing and noted that the two placements of the word “only” within the phrase governed by the preposition “between” meant that the “onlys” modified just the following two words and not the whole prepositional phrase. So an accurate paraphrase of the question would be:

“Do you believe a marriage should be allowed if it involves only one man and only one woman?”

Well, of course I do. So does everyone I know. And as for marriages between some-number-other-than-one man and some-number-other-than-one woman (say a group thing marrying seven men to four women) — well this question solicits no opinion.

Ever vigilant to defend the chastity of my Lady of English Grammar, I suggested to the voice that the question did not accurately solicit the information it wished to obtain.

It informed me that unless I answered “yes” “no” or “repeat the question” it would hang up.

I asked to hear it again, just to make sure. It was as I remembered.

So I answered the question as asked, pretty sure that the owners of the voice would gleefully interpret my “yes” as meaning something that I don’t believe at all.

And I was right, of course. The voice, showing more indignation concerning what it went on to say than pleasure at receiving the answer it hoped for, asked if I knew that Republican Tom Campbell actually supports same-sex marriage.

I can’t say that I really knew that; but I was not surprised as I’ve always respected Campbell’s independence of mind and basic decency. So I lied and said that I did know that. You’re way ahead of me by now; I don’t have to tell you that it soon got down to asking me for money to help defeat Campbell. At this point I had a pang of regret that there was no human brain at the other end of the line to which I could express my opinion of Proposition 8 and those who fanatically support it.

The only question I’m left with is: Do the people paying for this fundraising intentionally misuse basic English in order to deceive the respondent? Or must we revoke their high school diplomas and all subsequently obtained certificates and degrees?

Rick

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

I was looking for a new angle on humanizing technology, when along came a fascinating post from Read/Write Web, with much food for thought. Here’s the back-story:

Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments.

The trouble was, it wasn’t because of the post’s content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term “Facebook login.” As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the “new Facebook,” a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login.

In other words, due to some misdirection from Google, a significant number of people thought that they should be able to log in to Facebook from a Read/Write Web blog post and were most unhappy that they had a hard time doing so.

Rather than (or in addition to) having a good laugh at these folk’s expense, writer Joile O’Dell asks some very good questions about the average person’s experience online.

How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us? And who says either group – nerds or users – is “normal,” anyway?

Those of us who build the applications that people see and use online have a really hard time seeing our work through their eyes. And, truth be told, we don’t always want to, ’cause it’s less fun.

You and your geek friends != middle aged moms. And your users are often statistically more likely to be middle-aged moms.

And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They’ve chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I’ll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too.

Now while it’s true that most middle-aged moms aren’t geeks, neither are they dumb. I recently spent several days in an office full of mostly middle-aged women, helping them transition from a Microsoft Exchange/Outlook email system to Google Apps. Some were more tech savvy than others but they were all  more than willing to learn a new set of unfamiliar tools in order to help them do their jobs better. (It helps that they are doing incredibly valuable work at the Area 12 Agency on Aging.)

Many of the comments in response to the Read/Write Web post were of the “who cares, they’re a lost cause” variety, a view I’ve sometimes held myself. However, as the Internet spreads through society, there is an increasing middle ground between technology geeks and the terminally clueless. When the technology meets a need, most of these middle grounders are willing and able to make the stretch and learn something new.

In a perfect world, tech products would be intuitive and fun to learn and use. In today’s world, the Internet is hard and I can’t think of an application that’s not at least occasionally infuriating. The best hope I can offer is that some applications are getting easier to use, at the same time that many consumers are getting smarter about using them. At some point, they’re going to meet in the middle. In the meantime, we need to focus on finding tools that actually do a job that needs doing and not worry too much about the rest.

Error message by delade.

Beaver News

There has been a lot of talk lately about the quality of information available online. The debate has centered around “content farms”, such as Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL (oops, sorry, Aol.). Kicking off this round was Michael Arrington, who wrote in a post titled The End of Hand Crafted Content:

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page….

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis thinks that decrying the lowering of information standards online rather misses the point.

They may be right. But then again, the internet has always been filled with crap. So the challenge has always been how you find the cream. That’s where opportunities lie. That’s what Google saw. The new question is whether Google can keep ahead of the content farms and continually find new and better ways to find better stuff. I’ll bet on Google over crap-creators. But they better get cracking.

I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter)…. As search becomes more personal and no longer universal, SEO as a dark art and as the fertilizer for content farms will diminish and the social graph — our own circles of authority — will become more important in search as well. So I have faith that there are solutions to stem any rising tide of crap.

The rise of hyper-local media taps directly into Jarvis’ third ring of discovery: humans.  In these systems, there are a couple of routes by which content (e.g. a blog post, podcast or video) might be generated. Either someone takes it upon themselves to produce something of interest to them, in which case they have a vested interest in its quality, or content is produced upon request and there is a visible relationship between the producer and consumer. In either scenario, high quality, individualized content can be the result and in a local community of readers, it can be easily discovered.

Doc Searls, in his brilliantly titled post, The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated (us oldsters get the reference), also suggests that we are not the slaves to media manipulation that some fear. He doubts that “fast food content” is going to shut down quality writing, any more than McDonald’s stifles serious chefs.

Nothing with real real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it. Humans are the ones with hands. Not intermediaries. Not AOL, or TechCrunch, or HuffPo, or Google or the New York Freaking Times. The Net is the means to our ends, not The Media, whether they be new disruptors or old disruptees. The Net and the Web liberate individuals. They welcome intermediators, but they do not require them. Even in cases were we start with intermediation — and get to use really good ones — what matters most is what each of us as individuals bring to the Net’s table. Not the freight system that helps us bring it there, no matter how established or disruptive that system is.

The intermediaries who hope to manipulate our online habits are smart, powerful and well funded. However at this point in time, they rely on massive amounts of generalized data (statistics) for their models to work. The smaller the group, the less well targeted it can be. So, by building personal networks and using sites that cater to our communities (either geographical or ideological), we strengthen the web and feed the demand for high quality, relevant and personal information.

Update: ReadWriteWeb has posted Jay Rosen’s interview with Richard Rosenblatt, the founder and CEO of Demand Media. Read it here.

Image by WickedSunshine.com (NSFW)

Harvey Chess

These are hard questions and I don’t yet know the answers to them in my own case. I also realize that I’m unlikely to be able to answer them by simply sitting down and thinking real hard. It will take working with others in our community to develop an understanding of what we hope to achieve. It’s a daunting task but one that I look forward to pursuing.

The Scottish Executive, in 2001, defined adult literacy as, “The ability to read and write and use numeracy to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners.”

Pete Ashton writes on his blog ASH-10:

Digital literacy means being able to take digital stuff [and] make new things with it, just as literacy means taking words and making new sentences with them. Literacy is about understanding the rules of a thing so that they can be worked within or broken as applicable. It’s about making the world our own. This is why we teach reading and writing to children, not so that they can fill out forms or write tedious reports, but that they might question and understand the world in which they live in.

So, what should people know in order to be digitally literate? If we’re going to teach it like a class, what is the curriculum? Most importantly, how can we move away from rote learning of “computer skills” towards understanding the “rules of the thing”.

There are no courses like this in my local community college catalog but here are a few I’d like to see:

Web Browsers – History and Development

For many people, the World Wide Web and the Internet are synonymous. The web browser is the software through which we experience the web. In this course, we will learn the purpose of the web browser and its function in the online experience. We will also explore its history, from the early days of Mosaic (the first Internet-connected software to display images inline with text), through the rise of Internet Explorer and Netscape, to today’s modern Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Cloud Computing and the Rise of Online Applications

And once the programs have moved to the cloud, why not move the computers there too? Cloud computing also encompasses the outsourcing of hardware, eliminating the need for a closet full of servers.

The Hyperlink

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies – David Weinberger

The term hyperlink was coined in 1965 by Ted Nelson, the founder of Project Xanadu, at Harvard University. Nelson hoped to facilitate non-sequential writing, in which the reader could choose their own path through a document. Project Xanadu was largely abandoned by 1989, when the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, a system of interlinked pages, housed on the Internet and navigated using hyperlinks.

The hyperlink is a radically different way of connecting people to information. In this course, we examine the effects of organizing information in a non-hierarchical system.

Evaluating Online Information

True or false?

SECURITY ALERT: $32,000 worth of UPS uniforms have been purchased over the last 30 days by person(s) unknown. Law enforcement is working on the case however no suspect(s) have been indentified (sic). Subjects may try to gain access by wearing one of these uniforms. If anyone has suspicions about a UPS delivery (i.e., no truck but driver, no UPS identification, etc., contact UPS to verify employment).

Assessing the accuracy of information found online is not always easy. This course draws on the journalistic tradition of verifying sources and establishing their trustworthiness. By considering factors such as verifiability, transparency, relevance, bias, clarity and validity, we can evaluate which online sources to believe and which to ignore.

Online Writing

It seems like everyone online suffers from ADOBSO (Attention Deficit Ooh…Bright Shiny Object), so how do we write in a way that captures their interest? This course looks at online comprehension studies to find effective writing styles. We will also practice writing for various online venues including blogs, web pages, Wikipedia, forums, emails and Twitter.

Syndication and Federation

Release your content into the wild using syndication. Share functionality with other online services using federation. This course examines the current state of machine-to-machine communication on the Internet and how users and site operators can leverage these connections. Technologies covered include RSS, oAuth, Facebook Connect, Friend Connect and Google Wave.

Wordle by Doug Belshaw.