When Did You Last Blog? A Fresh Start. Nacin did it! Explains the pigs flying outside my window this morning. đ
Tag: writing
Scaling my long-form writing
Earlier Daniel asked me about starting a blog circle of sorts to help each other work on longer form writing that requires research, editing, and more careful thought. I think it’s a great idea. There’s a few things that I’d love to explore in more depth here that I don’t have a good structure in place for right now.
A benefit to attending a liberal arts school like Whitman was the sheer amount of writing I did every semester. Many classes required 4 papers a semester each of 5-7 pages. It meant I was writing something almost every week.
Since graduating the frequency of writing I’ve done has gone up drastically. Whether it’s on this blog or in my work at Automattic I’m writing far more and in far more varied contexts than I ever have before. That’s fun. What I’m not doing is the type of sustained, long-form writing that causes me to dig deeper and push my abilities. That’s also fun but is more difficult to do on a blog than as part of coursework.
There’s a few ideas that have been kicking around in my head that may fit for getting back into the swing of things with research and in-depth writing.
First, I’ve been thinking more about how news organizations need to think of themselves as crafting a product. It’s something I’ve written about before and is something I’d love to dive more deeply into. There could be an interesting line to trace here between the history of news publications and the growth of technology companies that more readily grok what it means to create a product.
Second, it’d be great to spend more time researching how WordPress can play a role in a rebooted school system. I think our current system of schooling is on its way out. Something may take its place and I think WordPress can, and in many cases probably is, playing a role here. Collecting those stories and theorizing a bit about what a more sustainable school system could look like would be fun.
We’ll see how this goes. It’d be a blast to get back into writing pieces longer than 500 words.
Pub Rules. In a follow-up of sorts to the quote I posted yesterday Brent Simmons writes about what he would do if in charge of a publication. I think it will only be a matter of time before we see someone try this with a large-scale site. I bet that when they do they’ll supplant whatever the main source is for that community. The trick will be sticking to these principles as the site grows and not becoming a bloated mess of “business opportunities.”
One more thought on technology reviews
Earlier today I posted a few tweets from Dustin Curtis on mainstream technology reviews. A couple tweets from Doug Stewart made me think about one more thing worth jotting down.
Last month Matt wrote an essay titled “What’s Next for Apple.” In that he says this about Best Buy:
When I walk through Best Buy, which I try to do once every few months, it feels like itâs technology at its worst, the magic of progress used as smoke and mirrors to confuse and dupe consumers rather than make their lives better.
That’s how I feel reading a product review on the sites Dustin mentioned. It’s technology writing at its worst.
Reviews on sites like Gizmodo and Engadget prey upon gadget heads thinking that their week, month, or year-old technology is “worse.” This is what leads us to the land of 4″+ touch screens and thinking that devices with more megapixels or gigahertz are, somehow, inherently better.
Sure, normals may not be the target market of tech site product reviews. That doesn’t mean the site’s reviews can’t be thoughtful and useful pieces of text. Right now they’re drivel.
My blog as a commonplace book
Greg Linch likes to talk about commonplace books. It’s even what he named his Tumblr. Basically, it’s a means of collecting and storing all those bits of information that make our lives interesting. It could be a photo, an essay, or a quote. Regardless, it’s important information that you want to mark and save for later.
This has long been the approach I’ve taken to this site. Years ago Matt wrote about how asides are useful. Presenting content in the form most appropriate is something I have tried to make more explicit in the design of this site. It’s why I’ve also experimented with things like the reading list that I now have. Different content requires different presentation but there’s no reason it can’t all live in the same house.
Anil Dash has said, “I expect that my blog will in some ways be one of the most significant things I create in my life.” I agree. There’s something immensely powerful about taking a corner of the web and saying “this is mine.”
Sharing things in my corner of the web makes them also form a part of my identity. What I share, to a large extent, is who I am. It’s how I communicate with you even if I’m not able to talk to you everyday.
As this history of shared items grows there’s also the fun aspect of flipping back through it. Steven Johnson has a great post about the commonplace book where he writes that:
Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.
Where I can, I avoid farming out my identity. If I do sharecrop I back it up. This is why my blog is my public commonplace book. The collection makes me, me. It’s on my domain. It’s free. That’s all important because if I lose my shared items, I lose a part of that core identity.
The destruction of a sharing service means I would also lose the ability to flip back through a history of my thought. Those long-forgotten hunches would stay forgotten and lost to history. Without a commonplace book that you control you’re gambling your ability to learn and grow from your current actions.
A Return to Blogging. Max Cutler writes about what he’s been up to in the last 6 months and about how he’s going to start writing more. I’m looking forward to what’s coming from his site.
WordCamp St. Louis: WordPress for Writers and More
Shawntelle Madison gave a talk at WordCamp St. Louis titled “WordPress for Writers, Publishers, and other Content Providers.” Shawntelle is an urban fantasy writer with a new book coming out. She also works with design firms in St. Louis and has been working with WordPress for over 5 years.
With her book coming out Shawntelle has seen both sides of the coin with what publishers require from author websites.
WP in the publishing community
It’s a lot more prevalent than you first think. Shawntelle polled 47 authors from various genres and 85% were using WordPress. The user-friendly Dashboard, ease of theme changes, and flexibility with widgets and plugins were favorites.
They also like it because it’s far easier than coding a site from scratch. When your job is writing content you don’t want to be spending all the time coding and designing your site.
Branding
Shawntelle said that “branding is very important for authors.” The design is what readers first see and it should really fit with the genre of your writing.
A great example is Scott Westerfeld who has a site which fits his steampunk style writing quite well.
What’s common
Authors expect a few key features for almost every site. They like having things like:
- Newsletter integration
- The ability to add a backlist of books
- Integration with social media
- Other basics like ad management, contact forms, and a well-designed blog
Most authors Shawntelle works with already have had some experience with WordPress. They don’t want a complex front-end layout and prefer to keep things simple.
Determining who is responsible for site maintenance is key to any project you work with an author on. Many won’t keep the site updated so figuring out who will be responsible for that going forward is crucial.
Shawntelle also mentioned some of her favorite and most useful plugins from projects with authors.
- Contact Form 7
- Secure Form Mailer
- Pick Giveaway Winner
- Quote This
- Advanced Spoiler
- WP Quick Deploy
- Sitemap Generator
Publishers
Out of the 6 big publishers 2 are running WordPress in their work.1 Random House and Hachette use WordPress to power parts of their imprint on the web.
For example, Random House uses WordPress to power their At Random site. There’s tons of reader guides, audio and video, as well as links to the books in the Random House catalog.
Data from the existing Random House catalog was used to power things like the New Releases slider and more on the site. They also link up to services like Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing.
- The big 6 are Macmillan, Random House, Penguin, Simon and Schuster, Hachette Books, and HarperCollins.
Marginalia on Post-Artifact Books and Publishing
Author’s note: A quote or a few sentences about a piece make up many of my posts here. This time I’m trying something new. Consider it an experiment in turning my blog into a type of digital marginalia. I’d love to hear what you think about it.
A rainy Sunday in Portland seemed like a good time to sit down and read Craig Mod’s essay Post-Artifact Books and Publishing. In a word it’s brilliance. Craig nails it. It’s such a thought-provoking piece that I wanted to make some notes. All quotes come from the essay unless otherwise noted.1
Natively digital
Take a set of encyclopedias and ask, âHow do I make this digital?â You get a Microsoft Encarta CD. Take the philosophy of encyclopedia-making and ask, âHow does digital change our engagement with this?â You get Wikipedia.
Great observation. Like much of the essay the driving point is that digital becomes powerful when it is not shoehorned into analog conceptions of artifacts. A book is a book (or a newspaper a newspaper) because that was what the technology used to best allow for. With new technology we will redefine our artifacts of information.
This quote also made me think of what we call “online learning” today. For the most part I think we’ve taken our idea of instruction in college and high school and placed that into online tools. What we’re missing is the form of instruction that stems from asking, “How does digital change what we can do with information, instruction, and learning?”
Publishing for all
We cannot know how much magnificent culture went unpublished by the white men in tweed jackets who ran publishing for the past century but just because they did publish some great books doesnât mean they didnât ignore a great many more … So weâre restoring the, we think, the natural balance of things the ecosystem of writing and reading.
That bit’s from Richard Nash of Red Lemonade. The more voices we have the better.
Reminds me of something Fred Wilson has written about multiple times: everyone deserves a printing press. He writes that:
If I look back at my core investment thesis over the past five years, it is this single idea, that everyone has a voice on the Internet, that is central to it.
The more pieces of information we can have publicly available in the world the better.
Shared experience
But â and hereâs the real magic â itâs a shared telepathy. A telepathy from one to many, and in that, the many have experiential overlap. Printed matter binds this experience to pulp. With digital, there is the promise of networking that shared experience.
That’s a really cool point. It brings to mind the video IDEO produced on the future of the book. When a text can connect us to others in a shared experience that leads to really powerful possibilities.
This is similar to something Whitman tried to do with it’s Freshman year CORE class. The goal was to create a shared background of foundation texts that could serve as a common frame of reference for the 4 year experience. A problem in that, and in other experiential overlaps that are dependent upon printed texts, is that it requires a common place and time. Digital blows that wide open. Our networking allows us to share that telepathy in real-time or asynchronously from wherever we are.
- A note on this: writing up notes on something as complex as this essay has made me once again wish that emphasis was by default on the web. Since it’s not command + F is your friend to find these quotes.
The Year of Wonders. Alex Shakar writes a beautiful story about his first major book deal. Sometimes not everything works out as planned. (via Kottke)
Tweet For The Moment, Blog For The Ages
And a week or so later, when you try to remember what you said at this party, that really terrific thing, you rack your brain, but canât quite come up with it. Thatâs Twitter.
The blog, on the other hand, is slow, reliably reference-able, and findable. Itâs like a speech, prepared in advance, with the text distributed. Some will hear the speech on the day itâs delivered, but others will be able to reference its text across the years.
Randy Murray – Business Blogging: Tweet For The Moment, Blog For The Ages.