In my ongoing campaign to encourage the creation of a styleguide for Slashdot blurbs, I'd like to point out again that the link to the sample chapter in this blurb will be a 'gotcha' for many readers, who need to give PDFs special handling (or skip them).
Just marking it [pdf] would be a big help, for minimal effort. (See my other recent replies for similar style suggestions.)
(Another episode in my ongoing campaign to bring enlightenment to Slashdot blurbs...)
Usually on Slashdot when a blurb-er links 'The Economist' or 'Scientific American' they're linking the magazine's homepage, and they also link the individual article separately. In the current blurb, I had to doublecheck that the links went to the articles instead.
I'd like to see a Slashdot styleguide that recommends against linking the magazines' homepages at all (because it just adds confusion, and if you really want to get there, you're sure to find a link via the article).
For linking the article, my recommendation is that the least ambiguous anchortext is the word 'article'. (The W3C says the anchortext should be descriptive, out of context, but I think this is more work than anyone really needs.)
This is about my eighth 'META' comment, and almost all of them have been moderated down as offtopic, but I think the Slashdot community needs to become more sensitive to these usability issues.
I think I was actually the first to point out the need for XHTML, but I think the direction it's gone has been a disaster.
Nicholas Chase seems completely oblivious to the fact that no-one would ever really associate a style with the semantic-category 'holiday'-- styles are just a way of varying emphasis, and almost never reflect the underlying semantics in that fashion. (If you mention three different holidays on the same page, is there any reason to expect they'll all need the same style? Of course not-- semantics doesn't really work that way.) [more]
My original proposal was a response to the incompatibility of XML with HTML, but this 2.0 proposal even throws that away. Given that there are several billion HTML docs floating around, how likely is it that anyone is going to use a browser that can't render them? It just ain't gonna happen-- human factors doesn't work that way.
I've even called for a 'W3C Secession' because they seem so out-of-touch with the real world and the real Web.
Given that the biggest barrier to popular acceptance of Linux is its user-unfriendliness, and given that Slashdot is the world's most popular forum for Linux enthusiasts, isn't the idea of a campaign to raise Slashdot's collective standards for user-friendliness actually rather significant and important?
I've recently started a lowkey campaign to make Slashdot blurbs more user-friendly (click my user-info link above for recent examples, all flagged 'META').
In this blurb, "for a mere 15 million U.S. dollars" is completely random, chosen simply to be near the start of the blurb. My preference is to highlight a word that describes the type of content so I'd favor using "article" in the last sentence.
W3C-doctrine is that the highlighted text should be self-explanatory when it's pulled out of context, as in Slashdot's marginal winnowing of links. I see the argument, but I don't believe it's really workable. (How often do those marginal links get clicked, anyway?)
The most common Slashdot style is to include extra links to the publication, etc-- I hate this because it requires me to look closely at the various choices to be sure I'm getting the right one. Even though the article is at SpaceDaily, there just isn't any reason to include an extra link to their main page, and I'd like to see Slashdot start a styleguide that deprecates that approach.
My previous METAs have all been flagged offtopic, but Slashdot ought to be sophisticated enough to appreciate when METAs need a forum, too...
"What a terrible way to kill a
man, with a knife in his back. If I had killed him, I might have struck him over the
head with a brick, but I wouldn't use a knife... knife... knife... knife... Alice please pass me the bread knife."
(Why it's on-topic-- the Copland article creates this exact Hitchcock-effect via its repeating links to 'Apple'.)
"Actually, in this case I think that Roland is just plain right about the Economist being the best English-language news magazine around today."
And do you also agree with him that anytime anyone sees a link to an Economist article they should read it without question? (If so, I think you have a screw loose.)
"But then, I've only been writing non-fiction technical articles professionally since 1984, so I
doubt that you will give my opinion much credence."
Quite right. Tech writers rank pretty low on my scale of values.
"Consider that the Economist articles have far fewer misspelled words and grammer abortions than SlashDot by a wide margin."
Heh. Love that 'grammer'.
"It's the essence of clear writing, intelligent but not pompous (to use what appears to be your favorite word)."
I'd say you're a tad hasty in that deduction, given the miniscule sample size.
"Translation: '*Please* don't make me click on the link read an article before I am able to post an insightful/funny/whatever comment to/. !!!!' right?"
No, not even close. I'm campaigning against the laziness and selfishness of the blurb-authors who can't be troubled to write an informative blurb, and against the common Slashdot attitude that it's somehow more 3l33t and studly to click on every link, whether you know what it's about or not.
Some people have their own priorities to keep them busy, and well-designed hypertext should make their lives easier not harder.
"rest assured that an article from the Economist is worth your time"
I wish that when Slashdotters linked file-formats beyond the basic HTML or txt, they'd at least add a little warning of some kind, eg link[pdf] so people can choose whether to mess with it. (In my case, it just starts downloading and I have to specifically cancel it.)
"Google is your friend. When I don't know what something is, I put it into google."
Let's analyse it in terms of economics:
X% of Slashdot readers know what the names refer to. So (100-X)% don't. The X% that do can immediately decide if they want to click for more info. The (100-X)% have no way to decide, because all they see are the names, not what the packages do.
So you're suggesting each one of those (100-X)% of Slashdotters visit Google (or click the links themselves, of course) to discover whether or not the topic is even of interest to them. I'm suggesting the blurb-authors add three words to each blurb to save those (100-X)% the effort.
"If you have not heard of the packages, then you haven't investigated much into those sort of applications..." Absolutely true.
"...and you probably don't care anyway. So why post?" Absolutely untrue. There are thousands of topics that interest me, that I haven't had time to investigate. Basic communication skills are about supplying the extra three words that bridge that gap.
"FWIW, Kapital is a personal finance manager. Aethera is PIM/groupware." Bueno-- you got it now.
Is it too much to ask that the blurbs on Slashdot's frontpage should explain what a software package does, instead of just citing the name as if everyone should magically be familiar with them all?
I keep hearing about a spam problem on Usenet,
but I never see it in the groups I read. Am
I reading the wrong groups? Is it a big problem
in, eg, groups with 'sex' in the groupname?
Or is my newsfeed being pre-filtered, and
nobody told me?
Gimme a break-- one database for traffic control, earthquake management, wind-dispersal simulation, sewers and cables and pipes? And they built this when, exactly? And got it all finished before anybody heard of it? And now it's leaked out in a VVoice article that focuses on reactions from TMBG and Yoko Ono?
I think the 'skeptic' community is just as guilty on this issue as the fringe-science community-- they have their equal-and-opposite 'confirmation bias' that in recent decades has rejected the idea of continental drift, the idea of ulcers being caused by bacteria, the idea that prions could be contagious, various health-and-diet ideas, etc etc etc.
Similarly, it's becoming clear that humans are sensitive to pheromones, so there could be a whole realm of 'sixth sense' communication that skeptical-correctness has been unwilling to allow for. [some old thoughts on 'vibes']
My only experience with Ibiblio is via Project Gutenberg, so maybe you're the wrong person to ask, but I'm troubled by some of PG's design decisions, and wonder if you can throw any light on them:
- the preference for ascii over html (I've seen a few cases lately where html-versions were offered too-- will this be the future policy?)
- the annoying pages of smallprint at the start
- the 'server indirection' that requires a decision *every single time* of which server to use
- the absence (or obscure placement) of basic bibliographic info like publication-date
It seems like these choices were made several generations ago, in Internet Time, so I hope they're all being reconsidered?
Yee bought 667 ad impressions on Google for US$10 and got six click-throughs. In other words, his CPM (advertising cost per thousand audience members) was about $15 and his click-through rate was about 0.9%.
His clickthru rate was comparable from my site (Robot Wisdom Weblog), but he got a much, much, much better value because I can afford to sell for cheap-- and for me this was the real point of the experiment.
Any weblog than can build an audience of a few thousand regular readers ought to be able to make a modest living at it, say by charging $20-$100/week for an ad (more for commercial sites) and keeping five ads running at all times.
From my point of view, another aspect of the experiment was keeping control of the appearance so that my readers would not be driven away. Plus I hope to charge less for sites I like, and more for sites I don't.
The whole Slashdot idea of putting a blurb on the main page with a link to the full story is that you can read the blurb and decide, intelligently, whether or not you want to follow it.
This doesn't work at all with Slashback because you have to follow the link first, to even find out what it's about.
So I think Slashback should be eliminated as a topic category.
(Also, I really hate following a link and finding my only choices are PDF or PostScript or Word. You should always warn if there's no plain-HTML version.)
Okay, this RealVid shows the intermediate forms I wanted. But I still think there's some sleight of hand going on, making it look much more competent than it really is.
Slashdot Mirror
Just marking it [pdf] would be a big help, for minimal effort. (See my other recent replies for similar style suggestions.)
Usually on Slashdot when a blurb-er links 'The Economist' or 'Scientific American' they're linking the magazine's homepage, and they also link the individual article separately. In the current blurb, I had to doublecheck that the links went to the articles instead.
I'd like to see a Slashdot styleguide that recommends against linking the magazines' homepages at all (because it just adds confusion, and if you really want to get there, you're sure to find a link via the article).
For linking the article, my recommendation is that the least ambiguous anchortext is the word 'article'. (The W3C says the anchortext should be descriptive, out of context, but I think this is more work than anyone really needs.)
This is about my eighth 'META' comment, and almost all of them have been moderated down as offtopic, but I think the Slashdot community needs to become more sensitive to these usability issues.
Nicholas Chase seems completely oblivious to the fact that no-one would ever really associate a style with the semantic-category 'holiday'-- styles are just a way of varying emphasis, and almost never reflect the underlying semantics in that fashion. (If you mention three different holidays on the same page, is there any reason to expect they'll all need the same style? Of course not-- semantics doesn't really work that way.) [more]
My original proposal was a response to the incompatibility of XML with HTML, but this 2.0 proposal even throws that away. Given that there are several billion HTML docs floating around, how likely is it that anyone is going to use a browser that can't render them? It just ain't gonna happen-- human factors doesn't work that way.
I've even called for a 'W3C Secession' because they seem so out-of-touch with the real world and the real Web.
Given that the biggest barrier to popular acceptance of Linux is its user-unfriendliness, and given that Slashdot is the world's most popular forum for Linux enthusiasts, isn't the idea of a campaign to raise Slashdot's collective standards for user-friendliness actually rather significant and important?
In this blurb, "for a mere 15 million U.S. dollars" is completely random, chosen simply to be near the start of the blurb. My preference is to highlight a word that describes the type of content so I'd favor using "article" in the last sentence.
W3C-doctrine is that the highlighted text should be self-explanatory when it's pulled out of context, as in Slashdot's marginal winnowing of links. I see the argument, but I don't believe it's really workable. (How often do those marginal links get clicked, anyway?)
The most common Slashdot style is to include extra links to the publication, etc-- I hate this because it requires me to look closely at the various choices to be sure I'm getting the right one. Even though the article is at SpaceDaily, there just isn't any reason to include an extra link to their main page, and I'd like to see Slashdot start a styleguide that deprecates that approach.
My previous METAs have all been flagged offtopic, but Slashdot ought to be sophisticated enough to appreciate when METAs need a forum, too...
(Why it's on-topic-- the Copland article creates this exact Hitchcock-effect via its repeating links to 'Apple'.)
And do you also agree with him that anytime anyone sees a link to an Economist article they should read it without question? (If so, I think you have a screw loose.)
"But then, I've only been writing non-fiction technical articles professionally since 1984, so I doubt that you will give my opinion much credence."
Quite right. Tech writers rank pretty low on my scale of values.
"Consider that the Economist articles have far fewer misspelled words and grammer abortions than SlashDot by a wide margin."
Heh. Love that 'grammer'.
"It's the essence of clear writing, intelligent but not pompous (to use what appears to be your favorite word)."
I'd say you're a tad hasty in that deduction, given the miniscule sample size.
"Can you do as well?"
'Click' on my 'link' for 'prose' 'samples'.
No, not even close. I'm campaigning against the laziness and selfishness of the blurb-authors who can't be troubled to write an informative blurb, and against the common Slashdot attitude that it's somehow more 3l33t and studly to click on every link, whether you know what it's about or not.
Some people have their own priorities to keep them busy, and well-designed hypertext should make their lives easier not harder.
"rest assured that an article from the Economist is worth your time"
Geez, you're not half-pompous, are you?
Not everyone knows that Ed Felten is an
anti-DMCA activist, so it would have been
helpful to spell this out in the blurb.
I wish that when Slashdotters linked file-formats beyond the basic HTML or txt, they'd at least add a little warning of some kind, eg link [pdf] so people can choose whether to mess with it. (In my case, it just starts downloading and I have to specifically cancel it.)
Let's analyse it in terms of economics:
X% of Slashdot readers know what the names refer to. So (100-X)% don't. The X% that do can immediately decide if they want to click for more info. The (100-X)% have no way to decide, because all they see are the names, not what the packages do.
So you're suggesting each one of those (100-X)% of Slashdotters visit Google (or click the links themselves, of course) to discover whether or not the topic is even of interest to them. I'm suggesting the blurb-authors add three words to each blurb to save those (100-X)% the effort.
"...and you probably don't care anyway. So why post?" Absolutely untrue. There are thousands of topics that interest me, that I haven't had time to investigate. Basic communication skills are about supplying the extra three words that bridge that gap.
"FWIW, Kapital is a personal finance manager. Aethera is PIM/groupware." Bueno-- you got it now.
Is it too much to ask that the blurbs on Slashdot's frontpage should explain what a software package does, instead of just citing the name as if everyone should magically be familiar with them all?
Or is my newsfeed being pre-filtered, and nobody told me?
Yep-- 15 more like that every year, and we're talking 1% of the defense budget.
Slashdotters need to get out more...
Similarly, it's becoming clear that humans are sensitive to pheromones, so there could be a whole realm of 'sixth sense' communication that skeptical-correctness has been unwilling to allow for. [some old thoughts on 'vibes']
Thanks! I withdraw my question, on grounds of satisfaction.
My only experience with Ibiblio is via Project Gutenberg, so maybe you're the wrong person to ask, but I'm troubled by some of PG's design decisions, and wonder if you can throw any light on them:
- the preference for ascii over html (I've seen a few cases lately where html-versions were offered too-- will this be the future policy?)
- the annoying pages of smallprint at the start
- the 'server indirection' that requires a decision *every single time* of which server to use
- the absence (or obscure placement) of basic bibliographic info like publication-date
It seems like these choices were made several generations ago, in Internet Time, so I hope they're all being reconsidered?
For more on RACTER [Barger 1993] and for more on Cyc [Barger 1999] and for more on Mindpixel [Barger 2002]
My website is down at the moment, but when it comes back up I'll be posting a new page of links for Weed and PKC: [timeline]
They're a datapoint. That's all they claim to be.
Ten dollars for six visitors is not a level that small sites can afford. $20 for 250 is.
His clickthru rate was comparable from my site (Robot Wisdom Weblog), but he got a much, much, much better value because I can afford to sell for cheap-- and for me this was the real point of the experiment.
Any weblog than can build an audience of a few thousand regular readers ought to be able to make a modest living at it, say by charging $20-$100/week for an ad (more for commercial sites) and keeping five ads running at all times.
From my point of view, another aspect of the experiment was keeping control of the appearance so that my readers would not be driven away. Plus I hope to charge less for sites I like, and more for sites I don't.
This doesn't work at all with Slashback because you have to follow the link first, to even find out what it's about.
So I think Slashback should be eliminated as a topic category.
(Also, I really hate following a link and finding my only choices are PDF or PostScript or Word. You should always warn if there's no plain-HTML version.)
Okay, this RealVid shows the intermediate forms I wanted. But I still think there's some sleight of hand going on, making it look much more competent than it really is.