Tuesday, April 11, 2006

PERMALINK

Why clever blog headers are counter-productive From Clive Thompson:   When I interviewed Cory Doctorow -- cofounder of Boing Boing -- for my recent New York magazine feature on blogging, he pointed out an interesting aspect of Boing Boing's success: Simple, straightforward headlines. Many bloggers tend to write clever, wry, allusive heads to their blog posts. This is a big mistake, Cory said, because so many people use RSS readers to scan their favorite blogs. Many RSS readers are configured to display the headline to each blog posting and a bit of text; in some cases, they display only the headline, Cory noted. And many people have dozens of dozens of blogs in their RSS readers, which means they're scanning hundreds or even thousands of headlines a day -- and thus scanning them at lightning pace. If you write abstruse, punning headlines where the meaning isn't immediately clear, the reader will never click on your entry. Boing Boing, in contrast, always writes simple, just-the-facts headlines -- and this, Cory says, is one secret to the blog's success. Get that? The human readers of blogs are beginning to behave like bots, too: Quickly scanning for semantic meaning and ignoring everything else. So much for my clever-headline-writing ways. Out with the puns! Utilitarian headers ho! comment [] 7:26:52 PM | permalink

Tie me Webaroo down, sport Is it a bubble yet? There's no way to be sure, but one telltale sign of irrational exuberance the last time around was the proliferation of companies based on ideas that simply made no sense. The portents are beginning to loom once more. Look at the actual service that a new startup called Webaroo, featured in a little piece in the Times yesterday, provides. Webaroo's home screen screams: "Now you can search the Web when you're NOT CONNECTED!" Great. Just when we figure out that the value of the Web lies in the connections and conversations it facilitates; just when this "Live Web" gets booster-rockets in the form of AJAX-based Web applications; just when municipal WiFi and other newfangled forms of broad-based, cheap wireless connectivity are rolling out, so that we can be connected almost as much of the time as we want... Webaroo comes and gives us the Web on a hard drive -- the disconnected Web -- the dead Web! Now, I'm sure there are situations and circumstances where the ability to store vast quantities of search-query results and cache gajillions of Web pages might come in handy. I'm not saying Webaroo is utterly useless. Just mostly. If you read closely on their site, it sounds like they started out focused on the vision of "The whole Web canned on your laptop!" -- and that's what the Times piece emphasized -- but now they're trying to reposition as a mobile-device content provider. I can't see your PocketPC or Treo having enough memory to get you very far with this, though. When I started covering technology in the early '90s, CD-ROMs were all the rage. Almost immediately upon the arrival of the Web, it became clear that the new medium was more valuable -- even though, at the start, CD-ROMs offered faster access to data and more elaborate interfaces. That's because closed-ended, rich interactivity with a small static pile of data was infinitely less interesting than open-ended interactivity, however crude, with millions of other people. So Webaroo will take the teeming ocean of today's Web and bottle it for offline consumption. When a step backwards is branded as a leap forwards, and when people can be persuased to invest in such retrograde ventures, you know that dumb money has started to pile in behind the smart. comment [] 4:16:24 PM | permalink

General outrage When I wrote yesterday about the power of public dissent by military leaders, I hadn't read the Time piece by Lieut. Gen. Greg Newbold (Ret.). Newbold, a Marine who was the Pentagon's chief operations officer, "voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war," but had not gone public till now. The article is a doozy. Here's some key excerpts. After Vietnam, "Never again, we thought, would our military's senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It's 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again."   Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent statement that "we" made the "right strategic decisions" but made thousands of "tactical errors" is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it. What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results. comment [] 9:02:53 AM | permalink