Gnodal Journal

*driving another nail into the case*

“Writing for the Web” at useit.com reads in part: “Much is known about how to write help text, online documentation, and other technical writing, and a good deal of the advice from these fields does transfer to writing for the Web. The main difference is that Web readers are much less motivated than readers of online docs since they can’t know whether the site is relevant to their goals (in contrast, the docs are always relevant to using a product, even when the writing stinks).”
Yaa … in a world of hype and brochures, we browse, skim, surf … a situation where attention deficit is appropriate? So, then, when the material is properly scoped, …

Here’s some explication from Sun Microsystems‘ WebWriting Guidelines:
* 79% of users scan the page instead of reading word-for-word
* Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper

The intro reads “You can double the usability of your web site by following these guidelines: for two sample sites studied in Sun’s Science Office, we improved measured usability by 159% and 124% by rewriting the content according to the guidelines.” and points out that “Web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent”

When I was a kid I read not only the dictionary, but encyclopedias too. My drill sargeant was not impressed to find my copy A. J. Ayers’s “Language, Truth and Logic” among the few personal belongings allowed me in my footlocker. So … let’s just say I don’t routinely expect to find myself in with the ruling paradigm or majority opinion.
That being so, it’s a treat, while drilling down through something concerning transparent inference and the nature of community documents, to come across something as outspoken as this: European Society for Developmental Psychology “Searching for research literature – Although the WWW is often written about as if it was a database of original sources (like a library), there is actually rather little in the way of complete “texts” to be found. There is a lot of information on the internet – but not a lot of ideas. Not a lot of expository text.” [emph. added] I would actually disagree with the opinion, but find it heartening that I’m correct concerning the illusion: whether the wealth of brochures we’re dealing with comes from corporate spin doctors or well intentioned free (as in speech) crusaders, brochures is what they remain. Hence the goad behind my “Miss Peebles” project.

In the Who said he died? department:

Eric Raymond is back and blogging at “Armed and Dangerous” where he writes, “No, I have not vanished from the earth: The book is nearly wrapped up and I may be able to start blogging again shortly. In the meantime, note that my website has moved. It is now at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

“The Ecosystem Returns” reads in part, “After a long hiatus, the Blogosphere Ecosystem has returned to The Truth Laid Bare. You can find it right here, in all its glorious silliness. This time around, I did it right: it’s fully automated, executing once a day in the early morning using PHP scripts and storing all the results in a MySQL database.”

The similar announcement at WebBlog MetaData Initiative reminded me to think about adding weblog page attributes to my own blogs.

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Of passing interest:
Not only does blogads have an interesting set of blogs that are selling ads, but they run an interesting blog themselves.

blogroots (with blogpopuli) and blogstreet, “Blog Neighborhood, Top Blogs, Search, RSS and Utilities”

I stumbled acros Rock, Paper, Stone: The Biz Stone Guide to Independent Publishing from last spring … a dandy article, and I hear Biz Stone‘s “Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content” is good too. [You noticed that it isn`t a link? Well, a) I think the title sux, and b) it pissed me off that I can`’t afford it. (Yes, I really do think the title sux … that wouldn’t stop me from buying a good text though.)]

Testing NewsCrawler Blog interface … so far so good!

InfoWorld: Many Large Corporations Avoid Using Scripting Languages for What They Do Best Slashdot pointed out that Chad Dickerson spent an entire column discussing the fact that some major corporations discourage the use of scripting languages like Perl and Python to solve problems to which they are uniquely suited. According to the article: Although it has often been subtle, there is a level of quiet discomfort between the ?scripting? versus ?programming? factions in some corporate development environments in which I have participated.”

You’re using unregistered version of Newz Crawler v1.4. Please register.

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Composed with Newz Crawler 1.4 http://www.newzcrawler.com/

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Composed with Newz Crawler 1.4 http://www.newzcrawler.com/

In The Village Voice Nation, Nat Hentoff’s “Ashcroft Out of Control” reads in part:

“Until now, in our law, an American could only lose his or her citizenship by declaring a clear intent to abandon it. But—and read this carefully from the new bill—”the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct.” (Emphasis added). Who will do the ‘inferring’?” [likewise, emph. added h_b]

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone …

My recent loss of internet connection and my temporary resumption forebodes what is to come unless I connect with the “punchline” of the “economic conversation” pretty damned quickly.

But, to make hay while the sun shines … transparent inference has seduced me entirely. (The last time I was swept away so completely was when a cognitive psychology project got me into historiography. [Can there be universally communicable meaning without absolutes?]) … so, returning to the challenge of indexing document sets, I’m nibbling away at pages such as these:
XML and Search: SearchTools Report … Lou Rosenfeld’s “XML: Text & Context” (accompanied by “Data Does Not Equal Information” is nice, but boy … Feb ’99 … I’ll be hunting down fresh versions of this material. Similarly with “XML and Semantic Transparency” by Robin Cover, which dates from late ’98.

Full Stop
Due to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (read: the Dell LatitudeXPi 166MHz laptop I got from my last contract 5 years ago gave up the ghost when I tried to re-install Win95 *sigh*) I no longer have connectivity … raw deal after 3 decades of CMC (read: no box and no connection = no development). But being on disability sucks in any number of ways, and this isn’t the worst of it.

Expect to see me posting about my new discourse system [working title: Miss Peebles] real soon now. In the meantime, peek at these two sites, and ponder how we create knowledge, exchange knowledge, and what happens if corporate entities dictate those processes.

• Nupedia is an free, ever-expanding, open content general encyclopedia … public peer-reviewed … created by volunteer scholars the world over.
• Wikipedia is an international, open content, collaboratively developed encyclopedia. As of January 2003, it covers a vast spectrum of subjects and has over 106,000 articles in English as well as about 37,000 articles in other languages.

How WikiPedia and NuPedia relate.