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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

There’s an interesting piece of research out there called the Stanford Study of Writing that points out that the sky, in fact, is probably not falling when it comes to written language.  Despite the occasional puff-piece article describing a 4th grade teacher’s frustration with LOLessays, there is more writing going on now than at any time in the past, and the quality is actually improving with all that practice.  Maybe that’s just because the study focused on college freshmen instead of 4th graders, I don’t know.

I wonder, though, if the gains that have been made by forcing socialization to be text-based are temporary.  There is a constant push to make computer-mediated communication more audio and video based that ranges from programs like iChat and Skype to YouTube’s user-generated broadcast model.  Thoughout the development of the net there has always been this idea that we’re just waiting for the technology to get us to the point where we can use it as a glorified videophone.  Text has a lot of advantages, though…maybe video isn’t where we actually want to end up.

via Clive Thompson on the New Literacy.

Photo by magic_quote

The site asks for the URL of your RSS feed, a name for the site, and an optional icon. In return, it offers an iPhone-ized URL and a snippet of HTML you can put in your website’s code to redirect iPhones automatically. The optimized version of the site is complete with large links, buttons and scrolling lists suitable for thumbs and index fingers instead of mouse pointers.

This is a useful little feed-transform tool that takes any RSS feed and reformats it for use on an iPhone.  The difference between using Intersquash and just loading the feed into an RSS reader on the iPhone is that Intersquash is a developer tool; the “snippet of HTML” they give you is actually a Javascript that detects the iPhone’s user-agent string and redirects any visitors using an iPhone to Intersquash’s HTMLized version of your RSS.  It’s not necessarily the best way to handle iPhone visitors (much less other mobile users) but it is at least a fast way to handle them.  You didn’t have anything important on your site that’s not going in the RSS feed anyway, right?

via Autoformat Your Website for iPhones With Intersquash – Webmonkey.

The Brooklyn Museum has a program running where they’re trying to use social media to expand the scope of their supporters:

The big change we’ve made is taking something that is all marketing (membership) and turned it into something that is about personal interactions and growing the community. We’ve gone from a one-directional membership experience—we send you stuff again and again, and then you show up–to a triangular relationship where Shelley and I get to know the 1stfans, they get to know us, and they get to know each other.

The idea here is that they have a certain number of people who are willing to pay for a traditional membership and a certain number of people who use their free services, but they want to create a middle tier that’s based on exclusive content.  In this case, the exclusive content is partially being distributed via social media: a private Facebook group, private Twitter feed, etc.  They chose a price point of $20 and launched from there.

This program shows how hard it is to draw an audience to exclusive content.  It launched in Dec. 2008 and was targeted at 10,000 people who participate in the museum’s free First Saturday events.  As of February, when the linked article was written, the paid program had 272 members.  I’m not sure what the total number is now, but since the exclusive 1stfans Twitter account only has 218 followers as of this morning, it seems like it’s remained a very small percentage of the total audience the museum was targeting.  It seems to be a reminder that having an online audience by no means implies that you have a monetizable audience.

via Museum 2.0: 1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum.

EDIT:  Will (from the linked interview) responds to this post in the comments with some interesting thoughts and points out a bad assumption on my part, you should take a look at those for a closer perspective on this.

How to Switch from Blogger to WordPress Without Losing Google Traffic – Step by Step Guide.

Saw this post a little while ago on moving from Blogger to a custom WordPress install.  It has a neat little misuse of Blogger’s template system to create a custom 301 redirect template on Blogspot.  Kind of a nice idea since it’s not just redirecting every page of the old blog to the front page of that new one the way that Blogger’s default migration tool does.  I’m not quite as confident that it will maintain PageRank seamlessly, but it’s certainly a better solution than the default tools.

via Hack a Day.

Image by Kevin Marks

Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers: Shaquille O’Neal, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest. Sure, some serious people, like George Stephanopoulos and Al Gore, use Twitter. And a lot of publishing companies and bloggers (myself included) use Twitter to send links to articles we’ve published. But most of what streams across Twitter is junk. One recent study concluded that 40 percent of the messages are “pointless babble.”

via Twitter’s Popularity: Users Love Stupid Content | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com.

Really?  40% of Twitter messages are “pointless babble”?  Maybe it’s just me, but compared to television, radio, blogs, and, well, everyday conversations, that’s an amazingly good signal-to-noise ratio.

While Daniel Lyons catches up with those of us who have seen Idiocracy, a couple of other thoughts:

• $55 million in venture capital I can see.  But is somebody going to pay $1 billion to acquire Twitter, the company that has trumpeted how unconcerned it is with making money?
• Twitter has an audience…but what kind of audience is it?  Twitter users have become accustomed to filtering their messages precisely because of the spam, inane comments, and misdirected personal replies that fill the network.  How responsive are Twitter users going to be compared to users of traditional web sites?
• The introduction of AdSense to gmail was one of the key moments in turning Google from the “don’t be evil” company into a burgeoning Big Brother.  It was seen as significant for two reasons:  the ads were being placed in the context of personal communications, and Google was scanning email for keywords to target ad placements.  Twitter would be vulnerable to the first claim, but what about the second?  It seems like contextual placement would be the best/only way to effectively advertise on Twitter, but with that be subject to as big a backlash as gmail saw?
• Twitter’s service is already pretty bad, quite frankly.  Constant server outages, flaky search, and no real support system adds up to a service that probably would have been abandoned were it not free.  Are users going to put up with bad service when they have to see ads as well?  Are advertisers going to pay to place ads on a network that always seems to be a stiff breeze away from collapse?

Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies.

via HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business.

Not a whole lot to say on the content of the article itself as its pretty basic and self explanatory.  What I find interesting, though, is the hashtag idea itself.  It breaks the idea of a social network because you’re no longer just broadcasting to your friends, you’re attaching a global tag that can be found anywhere.  I wonder what would happen if Usenet were introduced as a new product today?  That’s essentially what we’re looking at with tags, except for the character limits.

The fun part about Usenet was that it created community by starting with the tags (group names, as topics, are essentially just tags).  Twitter, though, starts with a loose community and has now emergently added tags to it.  What do the network maps look like for both services?  It seems to me that Usenet was actually a more ‘social’ service in the sense that new communities were formed…users used to be more atomic, whereas now they’re more locked in to their individual, pre-determined circles.  Not that Usenet was a utopia of course, even the groups that weren’t overrun by spam, porn, and binaries eventually developed into impenetrable tribal cliques…but that seems to be largely how Twitter is starting out.

Scan the tabloid rack for headlines that make you want to shout, “Hey Martha, come see!” Try to create the same “must share this” effect in your own headlines. Really, who can resist “fembots and the geeks who love them”?

via Linkbait Your Blog – Wired How-To Wiki.

Oh dear.  This is an excellent theory.  It’s also exactly the wrong way to think about it.  Maybe the tabloid rack isn’t the best place to look…

I’m not sure why, but the idea that this came out of a wiki post seems wrong to me.  Is tabloid really the direction we want to go with social media?

EA has a new game coming out, shockingly enough.  You might be able to guess its name from the image above, or maybe you can tell it from the couple of times it was mentioned in Ars’ coverage of its controversial advertising campaign.

Why exactly it’s controversial, though, I’m not sure.  It’s really not doing anything any worse than advertisers have done in the past, and it’s far better than many.  The interesting part is that they’re actually admitting what they’re doing.  As in many things, it’s all about framing an action with an idea, and EA has decided that their idea is sin.  The fact that what they identify as sin is no different than what goes on all the time is a bit telling about the advertising industry in general.

I suspect what people are really reacting to is two things:  the trap and the exposure.  It’s a trap in the sense that there’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sense for the people who would like to react negatively to the campaign.  If they talk about it, it’s advertising, if they don’t, they’re missing the opportunity to throw stones (and who doesn’t want to do that?).  Exposure is what I already mentioned; these are the things that go on all the time anyway, and now they’re being labeled as sin.  That people are outraged by it is even more telling about the level of cognitive dissonance that’s floating around in the average ad target’s brain.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with aggressive self-promotion. Sift through your contacts to identify people who might be interested, even though they haven’t explicitly opted in. Focus on folks with whom you’ve enjoyed at least one warm exchange. Then tailor the messages. “Personalize each email,” says Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, a social-media consulting firm. “Send them one at a time and say one personal thing at the beginning of each.”

Yes, because form letters are clearly vastly superior to fliers.  Just make sure you put the right blandly-friendly triviality in the right envelope or you may end up in an old sitcom episode.

• What in heaven’s name made anybody think advertising was a good idea anywhere?  Haven’t advertisers been complaining that viewers skip ads ever since the invention of the VCR?  Much less the DVR, TiVo was supposedly the death knell for the entire ad-supported TV system.
• Along similar lines, what made anybody think clickthroughs are a good way to measure the effectiveness of advertising?  The clickthrough rate on television ads is 0%, same as newspapers, magazines, and the little blow-in cards that fall out of catalogs.  Until the web, advertisers never expected immediate response to their ads, so a consumer could be sitting at home watching TV, interacting with their family (for certain values of “interacting”) and still be considered a valid target for ads.  Why is the goal of TV ads long-term brand recognition and the goal of web ads immediate reaction?
• There’s a key line in this article:  “[...] at least viral videos provide some entertainment value — which is a lot more than you can say for those Social Ads on Facebook.”  Social ads fail because they do not provide entertainment.  Despite Ted McConnell’s ideas, there is no reason why people are unwilling to mix socializing with advertising, as long as the advertising is actually entertaining.  Do TV ads just show a screen full of text for 30 seconds?  Of course, people are annoyed with TV ads and would be with web ads as well; but there is an inherent quid pro quo in advertising, and when viewers don’t feel they’re getting their eyeball-time’s-worth, they’ll completely shut down.
• Rose focuses on astroturfed ads on YouTube made by traditional ad companies and notes that, not only do people know they’re astroturfed, but they don’t even generate any money for YouTube itself.  That’s changed somewhat, as YouTube has been making more and more sponsored videos available.  But that is only half of the problem Rose discusses…the other half is that the astroturfed ads are still being made by ad companies and so they don’t fit in with the rest of YouTube’s content.  Why is there not a program where YouTube takes advertising contracts and makes them available as contests for user-generated content?  The advertiser gets their ads, YouTube gets a cut for hosting, and actual users get paid for the content they’re making (and probably far less than the ad company they’re replacing, so the advertiser actually ends up saving money in the end).  Advertising on broadcast is easy because companies are good at making broadcast ads; advertising on peer-to-peer requires buying in to the entire peer-to-peer mindset and making ads that fit the medium, even if that means letting somebody else make them for you.

In the grand tradition of recreating the Mona Lisa in as many bizarre ways as possible, how about coffee with milk?

Wired had an article a couple weeks ago* on studies showing that the placebo effect is more effective now than it used to be.  It seems that while the big US drug companies thought they were just fleecing customers with massive ad campaigns ever since the FDA allowed direct advertising in 1997, they were actually healing them!  That’s the theory being advanced in the article, at least.  Interestingly enough, it points in the direction of drugs being assisted by holistic care–not in the odd pseudo-sciencey way the term is often used, but using the real definition and viewing the entire human body as an interdependent system rather than relying only on precisely targeted drugs and therapies.

*In unrelated news, Slashdot appears to have missed the 60-second news cycle memo.