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Before I get down to some biz-ness, I decided to take a look at Daring Fireball, one of my (new though it’s not a new blog) regular reads.  In the “colophon” section, we learn a little more about the site’s author and such, and this little bit about web standards:

Web standards are important, and Daring Fireball adheres to them. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s HTML markup should validate as either HTML 5 or XHTML 4.01 Transitional, its layout is constructed using valid CSS, and its syndicated feed is valid Atom.

If Daring Fireball looks goofy in your browser, you’re likely using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.

Heh.  Perhaps I’ll come back to this in 444.

One of the many many things I need to worry about in the next couple of weeks is getting my summer section of English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web up and running. It’s increasingly difficult for me to decide what “counts” as “writing” for the “world wide web,” but generally, I have stayed pretty literal with exercises that focus on coding, blogging, and wiki-ing. Last year, we read a number of things about citizen journalism, and, since we locally have a front row seat to the demise of print newspapers (the Ann Arbor News is calling it quits after 174 years), I might include even more on journalism and the ‘net.

All a long prelude to a very good commentary by Dan Froomkin, “Why ‘playing it safe’ is killing American newspapers.” Besides talking about the money issues, Froomkin says smart stuff like this:

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)

Oh, and this is via what looks like a nice site, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

Via boing-boing, I learned about Us Now, which is a documentary film/project “about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.” I don’t really have time to watch it right now, but I can imagine this being something worthwhile for English 444 this summer and maybe 328/516 in the near future.

I was talking to a friend of mine this morning who has worked as a newspaper reporter for a long LONG time now, this after hearing a story on NPR this morning about how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going to make a run of it publishing only online:

• I think the story has been, ironically enough, somewhat mis-reported. True, fewer people are reading paper/printed newspapers. But when I talk to people who actually know about newspapers, what they tell me is that the loss of revenue that is just crushing them is classifieds. So it isn’t things like Google News or online versions of the newspapers that are doing them in; it’s things like Craig’s List and Monster.com This might seem like an overly nuanced take on this, but all the reported news I’ve heard has been about how the demise of newspapers has been the result of them giving away its content, when really, these other services invented a better mousetrap
• On the one hand, newspapers are folding because they aren’t making any/enough money. “We can’t make money at this anymore.” Well, maybe newspapers need to figure out a better business plan or they need to acknowledge they are no longer relevant because of the technology. On the other hand, this is bad because the press as the “fourth estate” stuff. “But we need to protect democracy!” Well, maybe newspapers need to reorganize as not-for-profit entities more akin to public radio/TV, or as foundations like the Pew Trusts. But the only way that newspapers can stay both profitable and a force for democracy is to travel back in time.

Update: If anyone is interested in the opinions of other “experts” (actually, I am in this case), check out this post from Clay Shirky and this one from Steve Johnson. Both are also excerpted in this NYTimes op-ed piece. All good 444 stuff.

I’m always suggesting to students making web sites– even simple web sites– that they draw them out first on a piece of paper.  Via Johndan, comes this link, where there are examples from famous web 2.0 sites where they did exactly that.

I’m cleaning up my email this morning, and thought this might be a good place to put a link to Concentrate, which is a local start-up/blog/web site aimed at promoting various businesses and enterprises. There isn’t much there yet, though one thing it makes me think about for teaching the Writing for the World Wide Web course is search engine optimization. There’s an article here about an area company that does this stuff, and as I put the schedule for this course together this week, it makes me think that maybe I ought to see if one of these folks would like to participate in the online discussion a bit during the course.

This might or might not be “something:”

The Dumpster (2006: Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg) is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another.

Via my Reader feed and danah’s blog apophenia.

A few links I came across in various ways the last couple of days before I get on to the conference business of the day, which is a trip to the beach:

• Mike Rose’s Blog.
• This article about podcasting turning into publishing. One of the points I think I want to make in my book project (oh yeah, that pesky book project… almost forgot about that…) is that one of the logical transitions/signs of success of a blog is the blog’s author gets some kind of book deal. So this makes sense to me.
• The design code rap:
  
• EveryZing. I haven’t played with this yet, but apparently, it’s an effort at creating a search engine that can look at multimedia for information. I heard about this at a presentation yesterday by Deborah Vess, who talked about…
• … this, Apple + iPods @ GCSU, which is about a pretty large and interesting Podcasting/videocasting initiative at Georgia College and State University.

I think I would prefer to actually be leaving for the airport today, but when I booked this trip, I didn’t know exactly when the conference presentations were going to happen and I didn’t realize that there’s almost nothing on the program Friday. So as long as I’m here, I think I’ll find out what St. Augustine is like.

It’s that time of the semester, and I’m trying to slap together a presentation for the conference I’m going to next week. So here’s a bunch of links that I had meant to write more about earlier but I’m just going to mention now. Some of this might be handy for teaching at some point:

• “A guide to writing better emails.” Nothing earth-shattering here, but good advice nonetheless.
• The curious and odd ProfEssays site. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I think it is interesting and odd and strange that this paper mill’s web site has as much information as it has about plagiarism.
• A review of a book called Proust and the Squid. Sounds like a cool book. Here’s the first paragraph from the review:
  

  For most people, reading is a taken for granted skill. The purpose of Proust and the Squid is to reveal the magic and mystery of reading and its pathologies. This everyday activity is not natural, and is a recent development from an evolutionary perspective. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain, but something a lot more enigmatic, an acquired way of using existing structures and connections. New imaging technology shows startling differences between dyslexics and others, differences that illuminate the journey to literacy as never before. It is only 6000 years since humans trained their brains to read, and during that time they have improved on the process to such a staggering degree that the modern child takes 2000 days to achieve a degree of literacy that took 2000 years to develop. The dark cloud on the horizon is another human invention of staggering genius: digitalization. This most economic of information systems was made possible by the very thing it now threatens: the ability to read.

• “How to start writing quality articles for blogs and article marketing.” This is a little too much in the “get rich quick with your blog writing” category of things for me, but still some interesting advice in this little piece. Might be good for Writing for the WWW.
• This link and this link go to popular press stories about a study some folks did about why people read blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look at all the details yet, but it looks interesting for all kinds of different reasons, and it looks like what they are arguing is that blog reading is practiced as “a habit,” and that there is a fuzzy line between blog writing and reading. All of which falls in line with my BAWS project. This might also make for good WWWW reading.
• Finally, WEbook, which I just stumbled across. It looks like a collaborative book writing site. I dunno, maybe that’s one way to get the ol’ scholarly work done, throw it out there on this site and see if other people will do the writing for me.

From the NYT, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” Basically, some of these professional bloggers are working to a point where they are hurting themselves:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Well, I think you can substitute “blogging” with occupations/pursuits/situations like “graduate school” or “working in a chicken processing plant” or “being homeless” or the like. It isn’t hard to think of things more dangerous than professional blogging. Still, it is a reason why it seems to me that it is better to be an amateur blogger.

I might be able to use this in the Writing for the World Wide Web class this spring….