October 2008

New way to index scanned docs, a bit of inspiration and a common screw up

October 31, 2008

Google gets mentioned here so often that by now you must think I’m getting paid by the company. I can’t help myself–Google is always doing cool things. Today, Google says it is now able to use optical character recognition to index scanned documents stored as Adobe PDFs. Previously, the company rarely scanned docs because it [...]

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10 tips on tweaking SEO in WordPress

October 31, 2008

This blog is built on WordPress, using Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme. I paid something like $65 for Thesis and I think it was well worth it. And I’m the kind of guy who believes the best price is $Free. Check out the Thesis Gallery Showcase while you’re at it. I get a lot of traffic [...]

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It’s not ‘you annoy me,’ it’s ‘eunoia’…

October 30, 2008

Here’s a squib about a book that doesn’t have anything to do with Web writing, but I think you’ll find it interesting anyway–and if not that, quirky and weird. This is from the BBC’s news site about the book Eunoia… Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels–and it means “beautiful thinking.” [...]

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Visualize your data in a few simple steps

October 29, 2008

The other day, when I wrote about ways to turn data into prose and data visualization, little did I know IBM and The New York Times would introduce a terrific data visualization tool the following day. The newspaper’s new Visualization Lab at The New York Times is based on IBM’s Many Eyes project, which  enables [...]

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Newspapering on the Web is the Christian thing to do

October 29, 2008

Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor, which will have been in business for 100 years next month, announced it will become the first newspaper with a national audience to transition from a daily print newspaper to a 24/7 online newspaper. CSM says it will stop printing its daily paper, push all its resources over to its [...]

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Big Idea: Turn your numbers into prose

October 28, 2008

Whenever you write copy that includes lots of numbers, think about ways to turn them into prose so the reader can visualize what you’re taking about. It should be plain to read Look for any opportunity to substitute plain English for numbers. Long sentences packed with hard-to-imagine numbers or with too many figures are hard [...]

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Authors, publishers and Google agree to $125 million book search deal

October 28, 2008

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google today agreed to a settlement that would give online readers access to millions of books and other written materials in U.S. libraries while ensuring  writers and publishers are compensated for their works. The agreement applies to content in the collections of major U.S. libraries participating [...]

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Come Sunday, it will be 20 years ago that day a worm came out to play

October 27, 2008

The first time I heard the words “Internet,” “worm” and “virus” was 20 years ago, on November 2, 1998. I was working as a senior editor at Computerworld at the time. I came in early one morning–I think it was a Friday. Only the news editor and I were in the office (we were always [...]

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Mark Twain’s views on writing still apply for Web writing and blogging

October 27, 2008

I would have loved to have hung with Mark Twain, assuming he would have let me. He was a technology buff, well ahead of his time. He was among the first to use a typewriter to compose his manuscripts and to own a telephone (he had a booth in his house in Hartford, Conn.) He [...]

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Here’s one way to sell or share your creative work online

October 24, 2008

YouPublish has revamped its Web site, which is designed to make it easy for writers, musicians and other content creators to share and sell their works. The site now enables you to view different file types–video, audio, text, PDFs, photographs and more—in a browser without having to download them. There’s no fee to use the [...]

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