Dan B. replied to a recent email with a friendly note that ended by suggesting that I help readers skim my articles by using typography to flag the most important ideas. Dan is one of the computing industry’s Good Guys: brilliant, thoughtful, innovative, ethical, human. And I’m not saying this just because he gave this blog a nice plug in his own weblog. Really. But, this is not the first time Dan has stared at the endless, gray cliffs of my verbiage and begged for a handhold. I’m not relenting.

I think Dan’s advice is good. It certainly works for Dan. He puts key ideas in bold and generally keeps his entries short. Trellix – Dan’s company’s product – is well set up to help authors do so. But he and I seem to be writing weblogs for different reasons. Dan’s interest in making his writing skimmable indicates, I assume, that he sees his writing as a way of conveying information. The reader wants to take in that information as efficiently as possible and thus benefits from font variations that pull the eye towards the key points. I, unfortunately, have no information to convey. I want to draw readers in and pull them through. I suffer from author’s arrogance; Dan is far more considerate of his readers.

Or perhaps it comes down to something simpler and less interesting: Dan’s use of typography helps readers find what they want to read in depth. I happen to write in longer chunks, so I use headlines and opening paragraphs to let the reader make a go-no-go decision. Once a reader is in, my job is to entice the reader all the way to the end. Eruptions of boldface makes that job harder.

Dan isn’t suggesting that Anna Karenina could have been improved by the judicious use of bold face. The issue is the nature of weblogs. Purveyor of information? Writing that generates interest in what otherwise would go unnoticed? Or something else? There’s no one answer to this.

Believe me, If I had salient points to make, I’d make them in boldface. But my aim is not to make it easier for readers to get the information they need and get going, but to pull them through … best of all, against their will.

Note to e-merchants: If you want to make your sites “sticky,” write better.

Some links:

Dan on skimming
Dan’s site on writing well for the Web
Jakob Nielsen on writing for the Web

Oddly, the comments board for this entry has gotten filled with links to pornographic anime. I have deleted them. Weird.

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FotoPlay

“What does a turkey have to do to get pardoned around here?”
From http://dailynews.yahoo.com/

Forwarded to me by Gary “Unblinking” Stock.

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Oppose the SSSCA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act to be proposed by Senators Hollings and Stevens would mandate that computers have “policeware” built in to enforce the content industry’s stranglehold on creative works. Uninstall the policeware and face five years in jail. StopPoliceware.com has links and a petition for your signing delectation. And the EFF has some information up about it as well.

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Conference Report: High Tech Lives

Graeme Thickens reports that the high tech investment world isn’t as moribund as it’s often made out. He’s back from Red Herring’s NDA conference and has sent out his observations via an email newsletter that expands on the coverage he provides at www.conferenza.com. (You can sign up for his newsletter here.)
Among his positive observations (each of which I’ve whittled down):

$45 billion is now sitting in VC coffers waiting to be invested, just from
funds raised last year…
Security technology is suddenly mega-hot…
Nanotechnology, a growing new area of VC investment, will provide major
advancements in a whole raft of industries…

Internet usage is still doubling every year…

The portable computing device market will continue to grow rapidly…
Neurogenomics, which addresses the causes of central nervous system disorders,
is one of the hottest new drug therapy sectors in biotechnology…

Graeme’s reports mix reportage, analysis and personal observation. They’re often better than being there. Thanks, Graeme.

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NYTimes Exposes Nuclear Taliban Hoax

The NY Times on November 17 ran an article about the media’s declaration that Al Qaeda is building nuclear weapons. It turns out out that the papers on which the media report was based are in fact a parody article written in 1979. As reported in The Daily Rotten (Nov. 16) and this blog (among others).

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Send a Fax to Support Your Liberties

The American Civil Liberties Union makes it reeaaal easy to send a fax to your US representatives to oppose the creation of secret kangaroo courts. It just takes a couple of clicks.

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Links and Horizons

This is a weblog, right? So I can surface ideas half-baked at best? Ideas under development? Ideas that may not make it through their difficult teen years? Well, here goes…

The word “horizon” became important to some philosophers in the second half of the 20th century. “Horizonal this” and “the horizonality of that” are sure signs that you’re dealing with a so-called Continental philosopher. They’re also the ones talking about silence, gestures, and, occasionally, nothingness. There’s a reason for this. It’s a reaction against a traditional ontology that equates “real” with “present” – “present” in both the sense of what exists now and in the sense of being present and not absent. Reality in the traditional ontology is what’s here now, a big clump of matter.

The problem isn’t that what’s here now isn’t real; the problem is that this definition excludes too many things that either aren’t now or aren’t matter. It’s not just fluffy stuff like dreams and emotions that the traditional understanding of reality excludes, it’s also things like potential (future) and tradition (past). Continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger say that we can’t understand our experience of the world without seeing that it is imbued with a sense of future possibilities and potentialities. We can’t even understand a simple hammer without taking it as something that can be used to accomplish some project; we understand things in terms of their future, potential use to us.

Horizon becomes an important term to these Continental philosophers because – although they don’t always put it this way – the horizon is not only the limit of what we can see, it indicates that there is more beyond it. The horizon isn’t simply where the sky meets the earth; it also points beyond itself to the hidden rest of the world. (Gesturing does the same thing. So does language. Different topics.)

So, does the Web world have an horizon? Since it’s not a physical world, it well might not have a structure analogous to the horizon. But I think it does: hyperlinks. Hyperlinks point to a page beyond itself. They are a quite explicit gesture – far more explicit than the real world horizon in suggesting what lies beyond.

So, who cares? Maybe no one. But I think one – tenuous – result is the Web helps make clear (Heideggerians would say “uncover”) the true nature of the real world. The real world isn’t really a big clump of matter. It’s a context of signficance, the present illuminated by its possible futures in light of the language that comes from the past. The real world is horizonal not just where the sky meets the earth but also in every thing that is understood by reference to the context and its possibilities that are beyond the thing itself. We can ignore that fact in the real world – and traditional philosophy has made a career of ignoring it – but we can’t ignore it on the Web, for at the heart of the Web’s nature are horizonal hyperlinks.

Or something like that.

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FBI Profiles Anthraxian

According to today’s Boston Globe, based on a careful analysis of the letters’ content and handwriting style:

FBI behavior scientists have said they believe the person sending the letters is a reclusive adult male with a tendency to hold grudges.

Stop the presses! This just in: FBI announces its analysis of the writer’s handwriting indicates that he does not have hooks for hands. Repeat: No hooks for hands.

Also, there’s evidence that the writer was probably subject to the law of gravity at the time he wrote it. More details as they develop…

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The Colonoscopy Channel – America Rulz!

Gaspar Torriero writes from Italy in response to my saying “showing people what I’d written but not revised made me feel as good as getting a rectal exam in a Macy’s store window.” (Nov. 15). (Count on Rageboy to have picked up on this particular image of mine. Sigh.) Gaspar writes:

You may will not believe this, but on Swiss television this Friday,
during the evening live medicine show, a guy from the public had a
colonoscopy in front of the cameras.
He seemed to enjoy the attention, being interviewed and all. Very nice
live video of his rectum and colon.

It is with great pride that I inform you that America is once again providing the world with the leadership it so desperately needs. A few months ago, Katie Couric, the cute-as-a-button co-anchor of the leading morning news talk show, broadcast her own colonoscopy. Her husband died of cancer, so this both Informed the Public and may have been some type of weird, psychological expiation.

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Zombie Songs

How many Harry Potter reviews are we going to read that are based on some pun about “Wild about Harry”? And how many reviews of “Legally Blonde” twisted “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in one way or another? I have nothing against writers (including headline writers) taking the easy way out. In fact, I’m all in favor of it. But – and here’s the point – no one has heard the songs these puns are based on in fifty years or more. The songs live on now only in punning headlines.

Mini-Bogus Contest: Send me headlines that refer to zombie songs. I’ll run the list here and in my newsletter. The prize: A lovely bunch o’ coconuts.

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