Beyond the Elements of Style

Let’s Talk Search!

It’s something I haven’t done lately … talk about, that is, though I’m doing plenty of search engine optimization these days, and for very good reasons: in a failing economy, customer/client/donor acquisition is more critial than ever, and yet budgets for doing so are smaller than ever. SEO offers a relatively low-cost way to get potential clients and customers to one’s website, and Customline Wordware is offering a number of recession-special SEO Lite packages.

But it’s not fun always working with the Big Three of search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN — so today I was delighted to come across this article that announces some new and interesting search engines. I looked at them with some trepidation (after all, who doesn’t remember the dazzling failure of Cuil?), but was pleased with what I saw. No, we won’t be optimizing for them anytime soon, but they’re great tools to keep tucked in the back of your mind as you roam the web.

I won’t rehash the article, but will note the names of the new search engines reviewed:

• Soovle
• facesaerch
• Tastekid
• fasteagle
• FanSnap
• compfight
• Kedricx

Check the article out and play around with the engine that interests you most. With Google’s domination of the search engine landscape, we often forget that there is more than one way to skin a cat. These (and my own perennial favorite, Kartoo) will challenge your boxed-in thinking. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

It Isn’t What You Read, It’s How You Read It

The history of world includes the history of ideas; and ideas require communication in order to flourish. How does that communication happen?

People talk, and people write. Talking hasn’t changed much over the years; but reading and writing certainly have.

I like this brief history, neatly summarized by David Usborne last year in The Independent:

The first “manuscripts” are thought to have been produced around the seventh to 13th centuries, with largely religious texts produced by hand. A well-known example is the Book of Kells, a Latin collection of the Gospels lavishly decorated with an eight-circle cross. From the 13th century, with the “secularisation” of book production, books changed from being objects of worship to descriptive works. This expansion – though limited, given the lack of printing presses – was driven by the Rennaisance (sic.), and with it the rise of European universities and the return in the 13th century of Crusaders, who brought texts from Byzantium – books from ancient Greek and Roman times about world affairs.
The first printed – religious – books emerged in the 15th century but books as we know them took off in the 17th century. In the 1600s Gutenberg printing presses were invented in Germany. By 1424, the Cambridge University library owned 122 books. Woodblock printing and paper arrived from the Far East and in 1800.

I’ve finally taken my own first steps into the future of the manuscript: last week I bought my first ebook reader in the form of Amazon’s Kindle. And it’s certainly an interesting experience.

I bought it mostly because, as a writer myself, I feel I need to experience what is clearly the future of books, at least for many people. I also am enormously attracted by the ability to carry a whole library with me when I travel, and (with the easy ability to order more books) no more panic when I’m on a trip and run out of things to read.

So while it’s early days, for what it’s worth, here are my impressions so far:

• The screen is terrific. It’s really easy to read and the font size can be changed quickly if necessary.
• I have not yet gotten used to the page forward and page back buttons, which are all aligned on either side of the screen — the places where I’m most likely to grasp the “book” and therefore inadvertantly flip around. I expect that ease will come with practice, but right now it’s damned annoying.
• Also annoying is the fact that the spiffy jacket fits loosely and falls off easily.
• I thought I’d be mostly reading books, but it’s absolutely marvelous for magazine reading. So you don’t get the pictures (and obviously Smithsonian and National Geographic aren’t therefore good candidates); but I get to read articles in one of my favorites, the Atlantic Monthly at a fraction of the offline subscription price, and don’t use dead trees to do it. That pretty much rocks my world right there.
• I haven’t yet got the process down, but a deal-breaker for me had always been that I was confined to buying books from Amazon to read via the Kindle. This is not the case: other ebooks and even pdfs can be sent to the Kindle from my very own MacBook. It’s trickier to do than to simply buy from Amazon, but it’s feasible, and some rainy Saturday afternoon soon I shall learn how to do it.
• The looks aren’t as bad as I’d feared, Yeah, it looks like a clunky version of some medical device that would be used in sick bay on the starship Enterprise, but it grows on you. I have dreams, still, of what Apple’s eventual ebook reader will look like, but for now I’m willing to settle for this one.
• The first three days I had the Kindle I was in Boston taking the subway all over the place and it’s absolutely terrific for reading in small crowded spaces. It remembers what page you were on and gets you admiring glances from people around you.

I don’t yet have any gradiose conclusions about the future of printed books or how we’ll communicate our ideas in the next century. But I’m having a lot of fun in this one dipping my toe into the waters of the future.

As long as there are words, I’ll survive … beyond the elements of style!

Don’t Let The Spammers Stop You

I wrote in a previous article about subject lines, and how spammers are making it more and more difficult to find one that works.

And now we have Second Life, with which I’m intimately acquainted, as I co-author a site, SecondSeeker.com, that reviews places in Second Life that new (and not-so-new) residents might wish to visit. And as I move about that particular virtual world, I’m struck again and again by the names that people acquire.

I should digress to say that one has a limited choice of both first and surnames in Second Life, unless one wishes to pay a significant amount of money to keep or choose one’s own. Otherwise, it’s pretty much mix-and-match with what’s available, and with millions of residents, fewer and fewer “good” names are available.

The fact is that most of them sound like the friendly bots who bring you your daily serving of spam: Hammond Gillnose, Tarteru Higglebottom, Sally Tennyfeathers, Brice Haiku.

Creative … or confusing?

Remember Lewis Carroll? In The Hunting of the Snark, he writes,

His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends,” And his enemies “Toasted-cheese.”

The Internet has changed the way that we look at a lot of things, and we’d do well to learn its lessons. But let’s not let that keep us from being creative – with subject lines, names, or indeed anything else in which we engage.

And then we’ll all be … beyond the elements of style!

The Sky Still Isn’t Falling

The appearance of Amazon’s new ebook reader, Kindle, has rekindled online debates about The End of Literature As We Know It and the probability that piracy will shortly reduce all writers to starving in garrets (if they’re not already doing so). One particularly strident member of one of my Internet discussion groups is predicting that all content will now be up for grabs to whomever wants it and that online content is merely another way to spell “screw the writer.”

And while some of these concerns are real and justified, the reality is that technology is at the helm these days. If it can be done, it will be done, and instead of complaining we’d all perhaps do best to adapt. The Navajo talk about being in harmony with one’s environment, including change in that environment; and the Darwininan notion of adaptation or extinction is very much relevant here. Reading is no longer confined to peering at words written on dead trees, and the faster we incorporate that notion into our thinking, the better we’ll all be able to weather some of the storms ahead.

For there will be storms. No birth occurs without pain, and in many ways we’re still enduring the pangs of the naiscent Technology Age. Computer use and the Internet have changed nearly everything about everything we do, and so it’s no small surprise that reading and writing are affected as well.

Many people still prefer to hold physical books in their hands. Many others happily read from laptop or ebook reader screens or even mobile devices. There’s no question of which is better, either from a quality or a moral standpoint; there’s simply a question of how we’re going to adapt.

In a recent New York Times articles entitled “Crossover Dreams,” Motoko Rich notes the number of books that appeared first online (either as blogs or in fact as serialized or full ebook offerings, all of them free) and that were later sold as print books, in some cases for very impressive advances. While they are not necessarily the norm, they do exist, one of many ways that new technologies and subsequent reader habits are changing the way books are published.

Will there be theft? Of course there will be: it’s apparently part of human nature to want something for nothing. Will those thefts overwhelm the system and destroy content creators? Of course they won’t: the majority of people do still pay for what they receive and will continue to do so, whether the format is traditional or electronic.

The sky isn’t falling yet. But it will for those who believe that they can control the way the world is moving. For the rest of us, keeping up is keeping us … beyond the elements of style!

If Content is King in SEO, it Rules the Universe in SMM!

I often talk about content being king. I even have a monthly newsletter titled Limitless Content (sign up for it at http://www.customline.com), and for good reason: content is the point of the web. People go online to do a great many things – make purchases, meet friends, look up information, learn a language, sell an heirloom – and every one of those actions is predicated on there being some content on the site where they ultimately do whatever it is that they’re doing.

Every time Google dances and other SEO experts go swooning over page ranks and links and so on, I order another latte. I don’t care. Page rank is so 2005, folks, and links can be manipulated more than golf scores. But content – good, solid, reliable, authoritative, changing content – that’s what will bring visitors (and customers!) to a site.

The social media sites, no matter which one you choose to consider (and new ones spring up, literally, daily), are all about content. They’re frequented by people who are generally less educated but far more web-saavy than those who are attracted to pre-web 2.0 sites, and these users know all about links – and aren’t about to play that game. You can’t ask for links in this world, and you can’t buy links, either; you have to earn them.

And you earn them through great content. I’m starting to sense a theme here.

The social media world focuses on experience rather than on destinations. It focuses on connections rather than on sales pitches. And it values creativity above anything else. The best way to get noticed is to do something new, something cool, something insanely great – and tell somebody about it. Tell everybody about it.

Who do you tell? Ah, that’s the other catch. To market to these communities, you have to be part of the community. You cannot communicate to web 2.0 denizens unless you’re one of them, unless you’ve spent the time and taken the effort to be there. You have to grow a bit of a thick skin, for social media sites can feature some very mean individuals (read Digg for a few pages and you’ll see what I’m talking about); as is true everywhere, it is generally the people who know the least who attack the most. So you’re going to get some slingshots. You need to have humor and a sense of balance out here – it’s not for the faint of heart.

Let’s get back to content, though. Because social media has changed the way content is presented: even though it must be even better than ever in terms of quality, the quantity rules have changed:

• First, your content has to be bite-sized. Say what you have to say, say it well, remind people of what you just said, and get out. If you can’t do this well, hire someone who can (maybe even a copywriter like me!): it’s essential.
• Secondly, your bites need to be in a lot of different places. Study the sites. (I’m not going to list them here; those lists are available elsewhere – check out SEOMoz’s fine articles on social media marketing, as an example.) Everyone wants something a little different. Modify your bite-sized bits of content to suit the specific audience.
• Finally, and this is where all your old creaky SEO skills come in: change content. All the time. Follow up your bite-sized nuggets with other ones. Experiment with doing a series of such nuggets on a given site. Keep creating this great content and tossing the articles, lenses, and tidbits out into the social media you select. They won’t all stick; but some will.

Remember that you’re not going to make any sales out here: social media sites aren’t going to buy anything from you. But put out content that is creative, dynamic, and intriguing, and if you’re any kind of decent marketer, you’ll draw people in to where you want them to be … and encourage them to do what you want them to do.

Do that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Say Good-Bye. Or Is That … Goodbye?

Even Newsweek found it worthy this past week of notice: the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has removed hyphens from 16,000 words. Not eactly Newsweek’s usual cup of tea; but there it is. Hyphens – or, perhaps, the lack thereof – make headlines.

The dictionary committed what Brian Brailer in the article termed “punctuational genocide,” in some cases closing up the word by removing the hyphen, in other instances replacing the hyphen with a space.

This sort of thing usually gets me livid; I’m conservative in only one area of my life, and that’s language. Change is bad! I screech with each linguistic step forward. If it was good enough for my grandmother …

But the Newsweek columnist is right in this instance: there’s no need for me to get my knickers in a twist, as the English would say. Because that’s what this change is about: the English – as differentiated from American – style of writing. And as an American, I’m not particularly perturbed at changes to expressions I never used.

And it does open up a larger question: how language, despite my discomfort with change, is about keeping up with life. Language communicates, describes, enables connections; and that can only happen if it is alive, a living tool.

In fact, I myself embraced some changes before they could discomfit me: in a recent style guide I wrote, I went ahead and closed up email, emessaging, and emarketing. I can read the moving finger, the writing on the wall, and I may as well get used to it now.

Change is good. It’s my new mantra … and it’s taking me way beyond the elements of style!

Check Your Assumptions at the Door, Please

The story is told by Norman MacLean in his posthumously published book Young Men and Fire. On the fifth of August in 1949, fifteen young Forest Service smokejumpers landed at a fire in remote Mann Gulch, Montana. It was supposed to be a “ten o’clock fire” — a fire that would be out by ten o’clock on the morning after the élite squad arrived. It wasn’t. Within an hour, thirteen of them were dead or fatally burned.

They didn’t die because the fire was too hot or too difficult to contain. They didn’t die because of a lack of leadership or a lack of courage. They didn’t die because they were lazy or stupid or unwilling to help each other. They died because they had been trained to deal with fires in one way and one way only, and couldn’t stop thinking of firefighting that way — not even to save their own lives.

This was a grass fire, a fire that burns hotter and faster than the forest fires to which the smokejumpers were accustomed. Suddenly cut off from their escape route, the men had only one option: to outrun a fire moving at seven miles an hour up a 76 percent incline, carrying gear they had been trained never to drop, in heat they had never before experienced.

One person didn’t die and wasn’t burned. His name was Wag Dodge, and he was the crew foreman.

He didn’t die for one reason: he discarded what he thought he “knew” about fighting fires, and he thought of something new. He dropped his heavy gear and set fire to the grass directly in front of him. The new fire spread rapidly uphill and he stepped into the burned area — now a safe zone. He called to the others to join him. They didn’t — and most of them died because of it. (Building an “escape fire” such as the one Wag Dodge improvised at Mann Gulch has now become part of the repertoire of all smokejumpers.)

One of the pieces of equipment keeping the men from running fast enough, the piece they had been trained never to drop, was a combination axe and pick called a Pulaski.

A Pulaski is very useful in a forest fire and completely useless in a grass fire; but it didn’t occur to anyone to drop their Pulaskis in their race against death.

For those of you who thought I’d never get around to writing, breathe a sigh of relief: there is a point to all of this. All of us carry our own Pulaskis; all of us “know” the right way to write, to market our work. But most of us learned to write in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: we had to have, because the world is changing so rapidly. We were trained on forest fires and we’re dealing with grass fires here.

Is it really a good idea to keep carrying a Pulaski?

We “know” certain things about writing just as the smokejumpers “knew” how to deal with fire. We have training. We have experience. Some of us even consider ourselves among the élite in our own niches. But new technology is changing the Internet and the world so rapidly that sometimes it only takes a few months for what we “know” to become obsolete. And then what do we do? What will it take for us to drop our Pulaskis?

History is filled with examples of a better technology vanquishing a less-evolved one. But part of using any new technology is realizing that the old values don’t hold: that assumptions we made based on our experience with one technology do not necessarily translate into the new one. Along with Wag Dodge, we have to think of something new.

Do you have any Pulaskis you can drop… now? You’ll be beyond the elements of style!

Promoting Your Book in the Virtual World

Second Life can in some ways be seen as an extension of one’s “real” life into the virtual world. Unlike the popular role-playing games that dominate the Net with fantasy scenarios, it enables people to conduct themselves in very “real” scenarios … just like we do now, in many ways, but with the added visual element that is lacking in the traditional URLs through which we access information.

It may be virtual, but it is also very real. Support groups are held in SL. A professor has created a place where his students can experience what it’s like to be schizophrenic. Major League Baseball has a presence there, as does Harvard University. John Warner is using Second Life to launch a possible presidential campaign; Suzanne Vega and Duran Duran have performed concerts there; and the Linden Lab virtual world is being used to model everything from the possible layout of an office to a global response to disaster or terrorism.

And, as Toby Sterling of the AP has reported, people are paying real money for things in Second Life, which would have a GDP of $150 million if it were to stop growing today. But it’s not: it will probably pass the million-user mark later this year, and many of those users are earning a full-time living there, selling virtual things or offering virtual services.

And authors are not immune. There have already been a number of readings and signings on Second Life … and it may not be such a bad idea. Based on the numbers of people who turn up for concerts and the like, you could potentially do far better there than at your loal Borders!

There are a lot of details to arrange, the primary one being the facilitation of buying books easily and quickly when doing a reading in Second Life. I’m not yet sure of all the practical ramifications.

But — here goes. Watch this space. I’m going to give it a try! When my new book, Open Your Heart with Geocaching, comes out this spring, I’m going to try a book reading and signing in Seconf Life. I already have a character there: my name is Sherpa Voyager, and together with my partner Seeker Gray I offer occasional reviews of interesting places to visit in Second Life (check us out at SecondSeeker.com); so Sherpa will be my spokesperson. I’ll give it a try and let you all know how it goes!

I’ll make sure that Sherpa gets … beyond the elements of style!

What’s in a Neologism?

Well, it’s that time again, time for Merriam-Webster to tell us which colloquialisms they’re ready to accept as official: yes, folks, it’s Brand New Word Time!

Do I sound a little sour? Probably so. But do we really need to add “mouse potato” to our lexicon? Is this a useful expression? Or is it important for those of us who don’t have any to be able to officially use the word “bling”? Anyone who watches the Red Sox play knows about that little beard that appears to be a team trademark, but why must we name it? Doesn’t “little beard” work better than — wait for it — “soul patch”?

I’m sorry: I have nothing against expanding our linguistic horizons, as long as there’s a good reason for doing so. I applaud Merriam-Webster for including “biodiesel” in last week’s list. And, like it or not (and trademark violation or not), it seems clear that the verb “to google” is here to stay.

But it occurs to me that a lot of the neologisms thus recognized are little more than verbal crutches, aids for the lazy of pen and of voice. And if there’s one thing that our consumer-happy, multi-tasking, user-friendly society doesn’t need, it’s another way to be lazy.

I shouldn’t complain. I’m waiting for the day when Merriam-Webster accepts the use of “like” to serve as a placeholder in conversation, thus giving the linguistic stamp of approval on, like, sentences that, like, sound like — well, like this!

It’s all a little beyond me… and beyond the elements of style.