Search Engine Rank Inflation: A Morality TaleLiteracy Weblog) Lately I’ve been coming across some strange search engine results, that look as if someone has taken information from my web pages — perhaps even dumping a Google listing for keywoards — and used it to inflate the search engine results of pages that have nothing to…
“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…
Is this an ugly page, or what? The grey shading makes the text all but unreadable, on both my laptop’s LCD and my desktop’s CRT. (Not that I would actually register for Salon… just wanted to clear that up.) —Salon Registration: Ugly Text Similar:Blender GriffinTo celebrate yesterday’s on-time submiss…AestheticsJournalism by the Numbers (a pedagogical play…
“The Chinese government, fiercely vigilant when it comes to any manifestation of press freedom, are learning this lesson the hard way with regard to the viral condition known as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. It used to be thought that in China, the only way of confirming if a story was true was if…
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…
“A debate is a contest between adversaries, and only one can win. An essay is more like a foray into a partly mapped landscape in the company of others who are seeking the same endpoint that you are seeking–the truth, or at least a truth.” Tina Blue —Don’t Get Emotionally Attached to Your Own Opinion (Teacher,…
“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…
From the tens of millions of consumer reviews posted on retail giants like Amazon.com to the more specialized message boards of Motorcycle.com and Macaddict.com, Piersall estimated that 80 percent of all human discourse now takes the form of product reviews on the web. While some online reviewers give little more than basic pros-and-cons of a…
“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…
“Live web cam video from the dentist office.” —DentCam (Pearly Whites) Similar:Thank You, Verizon, for this Confusing ScreenA few weeks ago, I had to get a new cred…BusinessThese Fake Local News Sites Have Confused People For Years. (Buzzfeed) Found Out Who Creat… People who caught the sites plagiarizi…BusinessTechnical and Literary Writing: What’s the difference? « DekonztruktschonIn…
“Can no clock chip designer figure out that no one needs to get up at exactly 6:03? If they just allowed the alarm sequence to go forward in five minute increments, instead of one minute increments, they would improve our lives immeasurably….The complexity of other people’s screens, particularly that of new users, who leave everything…
Progress: Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don’t want, while calling each other “asshats”. —History of the Internet (The Lemon) I presume “The Lemon” is a takeoff on…
“This video was uploaded to humiliate an awkward and overweight computer geek. But the truth is, he’s not too different than many of us (were) in 10th grade. I was furious at the hypocritical comments being posted to my site … all these geeks and dorks were trashing one of their own…. I’m hoping he…
I posted this Friday to KairosNews: Several years ago, a student in one of my tech writing classes needed a bit of extra credit, so I asked her to write up a set of tips on e-mail etiquette. I’ve modified and expanded it since then, and now it’s one of the most popular pages on…
“When I wrote in one story about ‘bloody street fighting in Baghdad,’ it appeared the morning TV viewers were seeing jubilant Marines and Iraqi civilians tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein on the eastern side of the Tigris River. Some readers, believing all of Baghdad was like that, were livid. They did not grasp the…
“The hunter-gatherers whose genetic make-up we inherit devoted all their energies to getting food. Labour, danger, stress and companionship attended their provisioning. Having secured their meal through their shared hardship, it is hardly surprising if our ancestors consumed it in a common ceremony, with rejoicing, affection, and gifts to the gods. | That experience of…
“As technological utopians, they believe that everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, if technology is modelled on the American dream and the American way. And as opinion formers, they claim no formal power base, operating instead by linking exhaustively to one another.|Fortunately for them, in the hyperlinked world…
“In the study, teens who had no cell phones and whose numbers were not included in someone’s phone book could pretty much write off the possibility of speaking with any of the teens with cell phones, a group Blinkoff refers to as ‘mobiles.’ | While saying he didn’t think the cell-phone-toting teens were intentionally acting…
“It may still be a man’s world. But it is no longer, in any way, a boy’s. From his first days in school, an average boy is already developmentally two years behind the girls in reading and writing. Yet he’s often expected to learn the same things in the same way in the same amount…
“Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 ‘living’ languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer – 46 are known to have just one native speaker….By applying the same principles used to classify the risk to birds and mammals, Professor…