In July, 2002, I was blogging about military close reading, weblogs in journalism, UX evangelism, Walker on links and power, Lileks on a realistic WWII game, and QUERTY vs Dvorak keyboards.

Dennis G. Jerz | Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism, Seton Hill University | jerz.setonhill.edu LogoIn July, 2002, I was blogging about

  • Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines
    A great headline for an LA Times story about interrogation and document analysis during the military campaign in Afghanistan.
  • Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom Journalism was still a print-first medium at the time, and local TV reporters were regularly falling for Internet hoaxes without basic fact-checking.
  • Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better UX evangelism by Don Norman. He and Jakob Nielsen were instrumental in helping me translate my self-taught HTML skills and my English Lit PhD training into my first tenure-track job in technical writing,
  • Links and Power
    Jill Walker’s excellent formulation was foremost in my mind as I taught writing for the web two decades ago. Recently I was just thinking about how chat-based search will change the economy of web links, even more disruptively than social media algorithms)
  • Good Definition of a “Realistic” War Game
    James Lileks describes a WWII Normandy simulation that sells only 45,000 copies “and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed to the beach,” while the other copies frag your computer.
  • The QWERTY Myth
    I took a typing class in high school specifically because I wanted to be a faster typist. Imagine if I had put that time into mastering a different, more efficient keyboard. The Economists explores the arguments of the Dvorak keyboard evangelizers and the QWERTY purists.

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