Dowd Spawns Bush Media Myth

“Last week, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd misrepresented a Bush statement to imply that he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is ‘not a problem anymore,’ and the distorted quotation has since been repeated by MSNBC ‘Buchanan and Press’ co-host Bill Press, CNN’s Miles O’Brien and others, including numerous foreign press outlets. At a…

Unplug That Projector!

“I’m 40 years old, I make my living as a consultant, and I’ve never created a presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint. Clients occasionally look at me as if I’m from Mars when I show up without slides. I’ve found PowerPoint presentations to be superficial ways of delivering information. They are not actual presentations; they are, in…

Web 'Shaman' Fights His Demons

“[F]or the Web to flourish it needs to remain open, nonproprietary, innovative, free and inclusive. “‘Oh my God, the entire world is inside my laptop,’” Berners-Lee shrieked in pretend shock toward the end of his speech while pointing to the need to develop new ways to organize and access data. “He also tried to assure…

What If You Built a Blog and No One Came?

“I’m following best practices for e-mail campaigns. I’m producing interesting (I think), well-designed newsletters. I’m including viral marketing within my newsletters, hoping to encourage pass-along. The Weblog landing page is pretty well designed and easy to use. I think the content is compelling. Why wasn’t my traffic growing at the same rate as my coworkers’?…

Take the Fat out of Your Writing

“So how do you determine whether your writing is clear? Simple: let someone else read it—preferably someone from your target audience. Don’t rely on your own intuition. Because you know what you meant to say, you’ll likely be blind to any ambiguity that has crept in. What you meant to say doesn’t matter—all that matters…

The Blog Clog Myth

Neil McIntosh separates the tiny mite of truth from the wishful thinking that led Andrew Orlowski to announce that Google would solve the blogging noise “problem” by removing weblogs from its main search tab. —The Blog Clog Myth (Guardian) Yet another example of the difference between journalism and academic research. Journalists, in their noble and important…

It's Stupid to Be Smart

“When my children were in junior high, students who maintained a 4.0 average all year were rewarded at the end of the year with a ‘4.0 pizza party’: they got out of one hour of class to go outside and eat a slice of pizza and drink a can of soda….No parades, no full-color photos…

Printwash

“Blogs are one big fat op-ed section for the news organizations out there. Thanks to the ethics of linkage (crediting sources — a polite grace learned from orthodox journalism and years of compiling footnotes and bibliographies for term papers in high school and college) and of Google’s PageRank algorithms, the blogosphere is a vast watershed…