Walt at Random

Minor (or not so minor) unrelated items:

• Dear Academic Journals: Sending me emails (from specific journal “editors”) asking me to review specific scholarly papers within a week’s turnaround, after zero advance vetting, with no prior agreement on my part to serve as a referee–and on topics consistently well outside even the broadest scope of my possible expertise–serve mostly to remove any question about the nature of your operation. “Refereed by random email recipients” is not the mark of a quality OA journal, and I hasten to add that there are many quality OA journals that do adhere to proper standards.
• Speaking of which, have I mentioned recently that everybody really should buy my terrific, world-changing, concise overview from ALA Editions, Open Access: What You Need to Know Now? 30,000 words of my best work–with the advantage of professional editing, copyediting and indexing–in a neat little package. You can buy an “eEditions” ebook bundle–a .zip file containg ePDF, ePub, Kindle and MobiPocket versions–or, if you’re so inclined, buy a Kindle edition as a direct Amazon Kindle download.
• I was reminded again this week of that important internet truth: “Don’t feed the trolls.” And two corollaries: “Learn to recognize a troll” and “Don’t become a troll–at least not too often.”
• An interesting week, beginning under the weather (some odd combo of upper respiratory virus/flu and something like food poisoning–I’m mostly better now) and continuing with crucial next steps in two Real Book projects. To wit, the first half of the advance for my 2012 project was deposited to my account (and the countersigned contract is in the mail), while the signed contract for my 2011 project (which might not actually appear until 2012) arrived yesterday (and the countersigned copy will go out in today’s mail). I continue to be excited about both projects…and am more than 1/3 of the way through the rough draft for the 2011 project, one I truly believe will be worth having for nearly every public library.
• And there’s a new Cites & Insights issue…a two-month combo to leave some room to think about C&I and work on other stuff.
• An odd little Slate article about rules for punctuation and quotation marks that asserts that British style is “logical” and U.S. style isn’t. The writer seems to be saying that stuff on the web represents better editorial practice than copyedited material. To me, the U.S. rule is the “flyspeck rule.” To wit: Too often, a period or comma following a closing quotation mark–especially when using proportional type, which today means “almost all the time”–looks like a flyspeck on the page, an accident rather than a purposeful mark. Yes, that’s an aesthetic argument; I also believe it’s a reasonable one. It’s fair to say that I plan to continue following U.S. rules here, and that I find the British practice no more logical than the U.S. practice. Oh, and as for the Oxford comma (properly the “serial comma,” what I think of as the penultimate comma, as it follows the penultimate item in a list)? Call me an AP man in this case–I prefer not to use the serial comma unless it’s needed to reduce ambiguity. (Note that: I do use serial commas when required to reduce ambiguity.) As it happens, I’m being inconsistent, since the serial comma is less commonly used in Britain and in other languages.

Hmm. Maybe not quite as random as I thought. Perhaps worth noting: I wouldn’t argue with a copyeditor on serial commas–and, in fact, I normally make a point of not going back to my original manuscript when reviewing galleys, assuming that professional editors usually know what they’re doing–but I think I’d be dismayed if I published through a UK publisher and saw a bunch of flyspecks at the end of quoted material.

 

First there was Farhad Manjoo, the Apple fanboi technology columnist for Slate and lots of other places. It increasingly makes me nervous to agree with Manjoo, but in this case…well, definitely overstating the case, but I agree.

As of now: 941 comments!

Some of them, naturally, saying there are more important issues, get a life, whatever.

One thing Manjoo gets absolutely, dare I say inarguably wrong:

He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

I see several hundred comments in that stream making it clear that “inarguably” is laughably erroneous. And countless typing teachers and countable style manuals that emphasize the arguability, at least, of using two periods.

Then there was John Scalzi–who has the ability to be concise (an ability that Farhad Manjoo and certain other idiots seem to lack). Here’s his post, entitled “Farhad Manjoo is Right and I Will Go to This Barricade With Him,” in full:

The vile perniciousness that is the second space after a period. If you do this, you are everything that is wrong and bad in this world. That is all.

Only 88 comments–although, on a comments-per-word-in-original-post basis (a metric that I just created out of that orifice from which most good social science metrics emerge), he’s getting more comments than Manjoo. Well, why not? He’s a much better writer…

And now there’s me. Noting that it’s Friday, and we’re allowed to offer up silly posts on Friday. Heck, if we’re Farhad Manjoo, we even get paid for them.

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Quick clarification: The “He uses…” in the quoted material is part of Manjoo’s text. It’s not that Manjoo uses two spaces after each period; that’s what he’s saying about someone else. Who? Not important.

In an odd and interesting FriendFeed thread today, I included this comment:

Derailing further, I find myself wanting to do a post about semi-related issues (the distinction between getting and liking)…and what I might call the Walter Carlos Williams problem (*not* Wendy Carlos Williams on later albums), or “is this a dancing bear?” Probably won’t; even that description is all over the place. [Oops: My bad. I've removed "Williams." Sorry.]

OK, I wrote “Walter Carlos Williams” and “Wendy Carlos Williams,” somehow having conflated William Carlos Williams–whose poetry I read in college–with Wendy Carlos (orig. Walter Carlos), whose synthesized classical recordings I was, at one point, very fond of. If you go to the thread, you’ll just see the right names–I don’t know how to do overstrikes in FF.

Now, as to the post itself, which isn’t directly about transliteracy but may be about new forms and whether you should be able to enjoy or even understand all of them…

Well, I didn’t mean “dancing bear” but “chess-playing bear,” where the marvel isn’t that it’s done well but that it’s done at all (if it is).

As for fleshing out that post: Not gonna happen. My thoughts there are too confused, even by my standards, and I’ll just leave them that way. If you take the implication that, when I went back to it 10 years later, I no longer found Switched-On Bach either revelatory or very enjoyable–well, that’s true. If you do find it either one, good for you: Tastes do and should differ.

It’s an ad–but not some tiny little offhand ad or a local ad.

It’s a two-page color ad, on special heavyweight slick paper, in a very large circulation national magazines.

The ad’s from British Airways. It’s about an impressive program, one in which BA flies “hundreds of small business owners” to meet with potential partners…for free.

And here’s the first sentence of the first paragraph of the actual ad copy:

Last year British Airways launched it’s Face-to-Face program and awarded hundreds of small businesses free flights and other services to nurture their business growth.

The. very. first. sentence. Yes, I know, British English and American English differ in some ways. Not this way, however: “It’s” is not a possessive in either language.

Is this stuff that hard? Shouldn’t copywriters at least have a basic command of the language?

Just a little post about a wrong word choice that seems ever more omnipresent in journalism–and it may be one where the reporters and editors (and proofreaders, if newspapers still have such functions) are more at fault than the people being quoted.

Track housing.

I suppose there might be such a thing as track housing:

• Housing built adjacent to a track, just as there’s golf-course housing.
• A house with a track around it? Or a house that has a track inside it?
• Perhaps a house in which runners change clothes before going out to the track?

But I’m guessing that, oh, 99.99% of the time “track house” or “track housing” appears in print, what’s meant is…

Tract housing

Here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition of “tract house”:

Any of many similarly designed houses built on a tract of land.

You know: Shady Acres, Magnolia Pines, all those named (and nameless) developments where the houses either look alike or can be recognized as permutations of the same two or three floor plans. The developer purchases a tract of land–”a defined area of land” (boy, there’s a thrilling definition)–and builds tract houses on it. (At one extreme, cue Malvina Reynolds’ love song for Daly City: “Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky…and they all look just the same.” And yes, I love Tom Lehrer’s line, as quoted in a pretty good Wikipedia entry on the song, that it’s “the most sanctimonious song ever written.”)

Is this so difficult?

I suppose it is if a reporter (or editor) has no idea what a tract of land is and somehow thinks that “houses built along the same tracks” (I’m stretching here) may be “track housing.”

Mostly, though, I suspect it’s just plain ignorance.

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I should note that I don’t deride tract housing. Our neighborhood in Mountain View consisted primarily of minor variations on two or three house designs (so, for example, before they remodeled it, our next-door neighbor’s house was an exact mirror image of ours). They were and are good houses; we liked our house a lot.

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Followup, later that day, which most folks may not see: Steve Lawson commented (on FriendFeed) that he gets a lot of “tact” for “tack” at his place of work. That’s another one–rarely the reverse (“he showed a distinct lack of tack”) but way, way too often the misuse of “tact” when “tack” is meant, primarily “time to take a different tact” or the like.

As I noted there, if you really wanted to reach, you could suggest that people think of “tact” as short for “tactic”–but that’s reaching way too far. More likely people know nothing about sailing and have never really heard of “tack” except as a kind of pin or nail with a broad head, and they know that’s not what they mean.

If you’ve seen a sailing vessel tack (or “take a different tack”)–turning into the wind–it’s quite a lovely sight.

Feel free to ignore this post. I’m a little grumpy–partly because it started raining just as I was on my way to the Wednesday hike (and then stopped after it was too late), just as it did last Wednesday. Strange: I think I only missed a hike once during the proper rainy season because of weather–and here it happens twice in a row in late April, with most other days being beautiful. [These are real hikes--4 to 6 miles, significant vertical in most cases, with hiking sticks. My wife & I also do afternoon walks every day when it's feasible, but that's only 1.25 miles with a couple dozen feet vertical. Those are walks, not hikes.]

Anyhoo… a couple of grumps about language, not that they’ll do any good:

• The singular of media is medium. TV is a medium, it is not a media. I’m hoping this one isn’t lost just yet…
• Conversely, unless you’re talking about a psychic convention or a stack of clothes that are neither small nor large, the plural of medium is media, not “mediums.” I’ve seen “mediums” a few times too often lately; I autocorrect it in blogs that I’m citing for C&I, but it’s maddening. When you put TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, the web together, you’re talking about media, not mediums. [Gaah. Looking at Merriam-Webster, I see that advertising folks talk about "media" as singular and "medias" as plural. Gaah. I might buy "media" as a mass noun in certain cases--"the news media"--in which case you could reasonably use the singular. But medias? Really?]
• The verb that results in something being lost has the same number of os as the condition–it’s lose, not loose. This should not be difficult; I have yet to see anyone assume that “loost” is a correct spelling. I would love to say “loose is not a verb,” but that’s not true, although it’s a fairly quaint verb. On the other hand, when used intransitively, there’s no question: Loose is always a transitive verb. You can lose (“you lose” is a perfectly good sentence) but you can’t loose, you can only loose something.
• The word for a flashing of light produced by a discharge of atmospheric electricity does not have an e in it. The word is lightning. Yes, lightening (with an e) is a word–but it only applies if a color or burden or something becomes lighter/lessened.

Enough grumpiness for today. I don’t think I’m a stickler for grammar, and I know language changes and believe it should. (I regard “data” as a mass noun taking singular formation except when used in a scientific sense, for example, and I deliberately use “they” as a genderless singular third-person pronoun.) These ones don’t represent changing language, though, I don’t think–just sloppiness.

I won’t even start on less and fewer. I’d like to think there’s still hope for the distinction, but I’m not very confident.

I was working on the draft of a future Online column (based, as they mostly are, on edited & updated material from previous Cites & Insights) on the uniqueness of everyday language–taking the two-year-old test I ran, doing a new, slightly smaller, test and updating the commentary.

One piece of commentary had to do with the likelihood that people would use the same actual words to talk about the same thing–as someone commented, “after all, how many ways are there to discuss Hamlet’s ambivalence?” Two years ago, when I checked Google for the two key words, I came up with “around 57,000,” and didn’t see that any of the first 100 seemed to be the same text.

This time, I came up with more than ten times as many results (which I regard as having more to do with Google’s increasingly silly initial result numbers than anything else–yes, the database continues to grow, but by >10x in 18 months?)–and, in looking through the first 100 results, I found two pairs that sounded an awful lot alike.

In one case, a Yahoo! Answer was almost identical to a paragraph in a Wikipedia article…but split into three paragraphs and with one or two word changes. Checking dates, it was pretty easy to conclude that the Yahoo! Answer was, shall we say, an innocent failure to attribute text to Wikipedia (text which was considerably older there). (Note: I’m not accusing Wikipedia of plagiarism–the text was pretty clearly copied from Wikipedia, not to it.)

The other was odder–a fairly long commentary on a scene from the play. One was from a signed, nicely formatted, set of discussions on Hamlet’s scenes (or, rather, on scenes from Act One, with the full set available as an inexpensive ebook). The other was from an ad-supported multiple-blog site, with no apparent authorship and with a bunch of HTML-like code appearing at the top of the “post,” and with no signature. I’m pretty sure I can guess which was copied from which–and in that case, since the original doesn’t include a copyright waiver, there’s more at stake than failure to attribute.

All of which is somewhat tangential to the original story. That story continues to be that everyday language is a lot less “common” than we may think–that, by and large, sentences at least 10 words long are likely to be unique even within a corpus as large as Google’s database. (The first test had relied mostly on my own writing and on first sentences of paragraphs; the new test uses the second sentence of the second paragraph of a post from each of 150 different blogs. Very similar results…) Basically, while one identical sentence (that is, a sentence in one work that’s also found in another) is absolutely, positively insufficient grounds to assert plagiarism–it may be enough to suggest that further checking is warranted.

Once in a while, I get accused of uncharitable reading. Once in a while, the accusation is right on the money.

On the other hand, I will assert that, any time an article or column or post starts with the five words used as the title for this post:

• The writer is itching for a fight.
• The writer is not interested in logical argument.
• The writer is likely to be wrong–unless, of course, the writer gets to decide who’s sane and who isn’t.

Heck, “I think most sensible people would agree” may be strong, but it’s in a whole different ballpark.

The particular story that prompted this mini-post? Not important. I didn’t read the whole thing. Why bother? The first sentence told me that the writer considers me to be insane or deluded.

And if that’s uncharitable reading, so be it. When faced with uncharitable writing–with monolithic, “my way or the asylum” statements, I’ll go for fisking and lack of charity.

Cites & Insights 9:8 (July 2009) has just been published.

The 30-page issue, PDF as usual but with HTML versions of most essays, includes:

Bibs & Blather

Notes on sponsorship for C&I, the status of four possible future projects–and the move of Walt at Random to ScienceBlogs.

Making it Work Perspective: Thinking about Blogging 2: Why We Blog

Continuing the discussion of blogging philosophy and practice that began in Cites & Insights 9:5 with a focus on reasons for blogging.

Interesting & Peculiar Products

Seven individual items and technologies, plus eight editors’ choices and group reviews. From high-def Bluetooth to whether you can call a $1,500 computer a netbook…

Perspective: On Privatization

Musings on whether Charles Dodgson had the proper theory of language (as stated by his character, noted wordsmith H. Dumpty), plus unaltered copies of the two blog posts (and most of the comments) at issue.

Trends & Quick Takes

Three trendy items: Myths and limits, “They are not your friends” and the world of plentiful bandwidth.

My Back Pages

Nine little items on nine less serious topics; as usual, this one’s a bonus for those who download the issue.

Here goes nothing:

I believe that I coined the term “conversational intensity” as applied to blogs, when I first used it in “Perspective: Investigating the Biblioblogosphere“–which was published on August 10, 2005 as part of the September 2008 Cites & Insights. (That essay, by the way, appears to be the second-most-frequently-viewed essay in the history of C&I, with just under 20,000 full-issue downloads and single-article pageviews to date.)

No, I’m not claiming credit for the term itself. It’s been used in social sciences for decades, but it’s related to things like the loudness of conversations within a party and the like.

Conversational intensity, if you’re new to this game, is a relatively simple metric for a blog: Over a period of time (I typically use a three-month period), it is:

Number of comments divided by number of posts.

That’s it. The higher the number, the greater the conversational intensity.

U’r doin’ it wrong

The earliest use of the term related to blogs that I can find, other than my own, is from Mitch Ratcliffe’s Ratiuonal Rants blog at ZDNet, as the title of a February 5, 2006 post. That’s half a year later (although I’m not suggesting Ratcliffe picked it up from me–that would assume that Big-Deal Bloggers pay attention to anyone else other than other Big-Deal Bloggers, which seems unlikely)–and his usage is, in my humble opinion, wrong wrong wrong.

To wit, he’s using this term as a synonym for Conversational Index, a metric proposed by Stowe Boyd. The problem with this metric is that it’s inverted (and includes something that I regard as peripheral to conversation, namely the number of trackbacks, which are frequently just spam). CI is

Number of posts divided by number of (comments plus trackbacks)

That’s counterintuitive: Lower is better. How many metrics do you know (other than error metrics) where lower is better, higher is worse?

Otherwise, if you take out the trackbacks, it’s exactly the same metric, but inverted: A Conversational Index of 0.5 is the same as a conversational intensity of 2.0.

So what?

So not much of anything. I explicitly disclaim any intention of trademarking the term, claiming proprietary rights, or hounding anyone who uses it without giving me credit. Period. It’s just a bit of recent history.

Now, if someone was silly enough to write a Wikipedia entry on conversational intensity, I would expect credit (and the September 2005 C&I would be citable as a source). But why would anyone do that? (And no, please Gaia, don’t go the next step and try to create such an entry for the unnotable Walt Crawford.)

If anyone has an earlier citation of this term used in relationship to blogging, let me know.

Credit where credit is due: I picked this up first in Andy Powell’s post at eFoundations–but I was reminded of it by Lorcan Dempsey’s longer discussion at Lorcan Dempsey’s blog.

Both posts point to “Not ‘natives’ & ‘immigrants’ but ‘visitors’ & residents” by Dave White at TALL Blog.

Here’s White’s suggestion (the same paragraphs Powell quoted, but I’m including a little more of each):

The resident is an individual who lives a percentage of their life online. The web supports the projection of their identity and facilitates relationships. These are people who have an persona online which they regularly maintain… the resident considers that a certain portion of their social life is lived out online. The web has become a crucial aspect of how they present themselves and how they remain part of networks of friends or colleagues.

The Visitor is an individual who uses the web as a tool in an organised manner whenever the need arises. They may book a holiday or research a specific subject. They may choose to use a voice chat tool if they have friends or family abroad. Often the Visitor puts aside a specific time to go online rather than sitting down at a screen to maintain their presence at any point during the day. They always have an appropriate and focused need to use the web but don’t ‘reside’ there…

In effect the Resident has a presence online which they are constantly developing while the Visitor logs on, performs a specific task and then logs off

I like this terminology. It’s not pejorative, it’s not generational or ageist, and–as White makes very clear in the post–it’s not black and white, it’s a spectrum. All three bloggers have identified the key difference as attitude, not age.

Different, not better or worse

That’s the biggest thing for me. As White says, a visitor may actually be more skillful in some online settings than a resident–but a visitor is less likely to gravitate immediately toward social-web tools and to be “connected” 24/7. I suspect visitors are also less likely to be dismayed when useful tools lack social components.

Mostly a visitor

As you can guess, I’m mostly a visitor. I say “mostly” because I certainly have a web presence, and I do spend some time in the LSW Meebo room (less time than I’d like to, probably more time than I can afford to, the latter because I’m a poor multitasker). My “visitor” nature may have something to do with my decision to leave Twitter–and while I’m still thinking about Facebook, that may also be a poor choice for a visitor. (It’s pretty clear that Ning just didn’t work for me because I wouldn’t provide the ongoing presence it seemed to require.)

In a time when respected organizations seem to delight in labels that are clearly pejorative–and when even some of my colleagues and friends seem only too happy to engage in casual ageism–I salute Dave White. Good terms, good explanation, good thinking.

Those of you who read Cites & Insights–and if you don’t, you really should–know that I’ve looked at Wikipedia off and on, from a number of angles.

One aspect of Wikipedia that’s always bothered me is, I believe, built into the model: The more important the entry, the less likely that it will have a coherent voice. From what I’m seeing, the situation at Wikipedia is getting worse as there are more efforts to assure that everything is properly footnoted. I was hoping Citizendium would be different–that requiring signed contributions would encourage coherent essays–but even Citizendium has procedures that work against editorial coherence to some extent, as I discussed in “Citizendium and the Writer’s Voice,” in the May 2008 issue. The essay starts on page 10, but the relevant discussion starts on page 17: “The writer’s voice, the expert’s mind.”

For a one-paragraph factoid, it doesn’t much matter. But for anything much more significant, I’d really like an encyclopedia article to be an essay, something that leads me to an understanding of the subject. My belief is that Wikipedia’s methodology pushes in the other direction, as it discourages commentary and encourages strings of documentable statements. Instead of essays, you get big long sets of sentences and paragraphs with little coherence or narrative flow.

But there you go: I’ve used two paragraphs and not really gotten at what I mean to say.

Then I read Tim Spalding’s post today at Thingology: “Wikimania 2008 (Alexandria, Egypt).” And this comment on an article that requires more than a factual paragraph (in this case, “Alexander the Great”):

It’s lumpy, unbalanced, poorly written and poorly sourced—a bright fourteen year-old child sitting next to you on a bus, telling you everything he knows.* Parts are good. Parts are bad. Parts are just off somehow—their correction requiring un-Wikipedia-esque virtues like restraint, proportionality and style.

“A bright fourteen-year-old child sitting next to you on a bus, telling you everything he knows.” That’s just about perfect.

I’ll add to “restraint, proportionality and style,” one more virtue that may be covered in “style”: narrative coherence.

An encyclopedia article on Alexander the Great should be a story. It should have voice, coherence, style, narrative flow. When I’m done reading it, I should understand something about Alexander the Great. I don’t believe you can get there from a series of factual sentences and paragraphs–and I believe it’s a lot harder when commentary is disallowed and writers are anonymous.

This doesn’t suggest that Wikipedia’s useless–and I’d guess the vast majority of its uses are for quick lookups anyway, where the lack of narrative coherence doesn’t much matter. It does suggest that Wikipedia has real limits and that, in some ways, it will never be as good as traditional encyclopedias, even if it may exceed them in other ways.

Thanks, Tim. I’ll use that elsewhere, and try to remember to give you credit.

I get press releases sometimes–presumably because I write a column for EContent, maybe because I’ve started writing a column for ONLINE again. Most of them I simply delete. Those that plead with me to call for an interview with Mr. X, I respond to, noting that “disContent”–my EContent column–is based on my being an outsider, a “citizen,” thus having inside contacts would weaken my role.

And then there are others. What appears below in indented paragraphs is a press release I received yesterday. Names will be neutralized, for reasons that may be obvious…

Author A Discovers Cure For Information Overload With Help Of Proven Authoring And Business Development System

B, author and infopreneur guru, demonstrates to fast write a money-making book in less than 12 hours and build a business focused on multiple streams of income.

That’s an italicized small-type sentence under the large-type title. We’re talking about writing and reading a supposedly professional press release, so editorial nitpicking may be in order. Let’s see: no “how” between “demonstrates” and “to.” “fast write a money-making book in less than 12 hours“–well, this isn’t editorial, but I cringe instantly at the thought of a book written in less than 12 hours.

Not too long ago, when someone wanted information, she would have to drive to the library, use the card catalog, and search the stacks of books and magazine to find it. Then the Information Age arrived. Computers and the internet have brought information home to the average person. There is now too much of a good thing because of this fact.

Yep. There were no sources of information other than libraries before the information age–no newspapers, no telephones, no friends to call for advice, no experts. Never mind. It gets better.

Many people believe we are still in the Information Age. What they do not realize is that people are drowning in too much information to the point where they are easily overwhelmed. Anyone who wants to test this can look up almost any search term on Google to experience the feeling of information overload.

Isn’t that what happens with you every day? You look up something on Google and say, “Oh no! I’m overwhelmed! I can’t cope!” And, of course, being smart, you never use Google again. Information overload claims another victim!

Technoradi Inc. estimates that over 75 thousand new blogs are created each day. A recent University of Iowa study calculated the size of the worldwide web at more than 11.5 billion pages. Having too much information to sort through is counter productive.

I wonder how many blogs Technorati thinks are being built? I’ve never heard of this other outfit. And, of course, thinking the number of entities in a universe has anything to do with what you need to sort with is not so much counterproductive (one word) as it is, well, stupid. There are more than one hundred million books; somehow, that doesn’t prevent me from finding the ones I want in Worldcat.org or my local library.

What people are really looking for is not the information, but what results the information will give them. Someone who buys a drill is really buying the holes that the drill will make. One who buys a mattress is in search of a good night’s sleep. Information is a means to an end.

This paragraph’s OK.

Now people are looking for more than information. With too much of a good thing ready at hand, what they want is a trusted guide to go beyond facts and figures to provide a recommendation. They want advice, easy answers, and a shortcut to the answers they seek.

So when there was less information, people were satisfied to get the information? When (he asks) has there been a time that people were more interested in information than they were in results? And when has there been a time when people didn’t seek shortcuts. Like, for example, shortcuts to writing “books” so that they take less than 12 hours, instead of the several hundred hours that sloths like me require.

Society has moved from the Information Age to the Recommendation Age. The savvy author and entrepreneur who understands the Recommendation Age can become the industry leader in his or her area of expertise and build a business around a book even before the manuscript is complete.

Now we’re getting to the crux of the matter–and it’s clearly not about crafting superior books. “Recommendation Age” leaves me cold, but that’s personal.

A, author of C D, of C.com, currently offers the book as an electronic book or e-book. He is building a business around his system for E and getting feedback from readers as he prepares to publish the book in print. Jensen worked with B and his team at E.com to create the book and build a well-developed business model around it.

If you’re wondering C and D are both multiword phrases, one the title and the other the subtitle of the book; C is in italics, D isn’t. There’s no colon between them.

The ebook is available through Lulu.com. While Lulu won’t show me somebody else’s sales, it does show anybody what the sales rank for an item is. So how is A doing on feedback from readers of the ebook? Well…let’s just say that the item ranks somewhere below 60,000. The print version of Cites & Insights 2007 ranks somewhere around 31,000. It would be inappropriate of me to say what the actual sales are, I suppose–particularly since sales rank may not mean the same thing for ebooks as it does for print books. (I will say that C&I 2006 has sold fewer than one-half as many copies on Lulu than Academic Library Blogs, which is doing better on Amazon–and that book, in turn, has sold roughly 5% as many copies as Balanced Libraries at Lulu. I’ll also say that BL is nowhere near my previously announced “Success point.” Draw your own conclusions.)

B’s F Program teaches clients to write a money-making book in 12 hours of actual writing time. Clients who complete the program discover how to write a book that is “entrepreneurially sound.”

I went to E.com. Yep, it’s there in big type: “Write A 100 Page Money-Making Book In Less Than 12 Hours Of Actual Writing Time And Gain Instant Access To A New York Publisher.” Note That Every Word Is Capitalized, including articles and conjunctions. Yes, the string from the space before “12″ through “Publisher” is also underlined (interestingly, the underlined space is on the line before the rest: this page doesn’t for any of that new-age flowing text crap), but of course it’s not a link. There is a link a little further down. If you click on that one, you get the same text–but this time it’s all underlined. Further down, there’s the eloquent “Here you will see for yourself Why our program works and what sets us apart from others who make similar claims”–a random capital letter being one of the marks of successful book writing.

Here’s a warning for you: “WARNING: If You Are Not A Knowledge Broker In The Recommendation Age, You Are A Nobody!” All in big red type. (Look, B is a Former Vice Principal, so you better not doubt his word–you’ll get detention.)

Taking B’s program, A has discovered how to turn his expertise into a step-by-step system through which people that have X can achieve better physical and mental health. His consulting and speaking business is growing steadily. The feedback he is receiving as a result of working with individuals and speaking to groups allows him to develop his business to match the wants and needs of his target audience.

I wouldn’t be surprised if A actually had worthwhile expertise. I would be very surprised if A wrote that ebook (>250 pages) in less than 12 hours–and unless there are other editions hiding somewhere, A sure isn’t getting a big business based on ebook sales.

B has dozens of video testimonials of successful clients like A on his website and blog. He offers his case study driven H e-class, a $700 value, at no cost on his website F.com. B, a former Vice Principal with Two Post-Graduate Degrees, replaced his income and his wife’s income with a proven, breakthrough system he created. He now teaches his clients how to replicate his proprietary program. B is founder and President of G. B also provides keynotes, seminars, workshops, teleseminars, and [another trademarked term], as well as being known as an international speaker. In addition helping entrepreneurs with business authoring, he also teaches entrepreneurs and business owners how to successfully create a digital product and then build an online business that produces consistent, multiple streams of income. For additional media information about F or B please visit F.com.

Ah, more random capital letters–and a “$700 value” course offered “at no cost.” Would I be cynical if I suggested that there are costs, and big ones, somewhere down the road? Including, for example, the cost of thinking you’ve written a hot stuff book in less than 12 hours and that you’ll gain wealth and fame from the New York publisher you’ll be introduced to and the multistream income system that accompanies it.

B even throws in $300 worth of books or ebooks as part of the offer, speaking of setting sales records. Yes, B does have one book on Amazon; yes, it’s within the top 50,000 in sales. (Worldcat.org shows three copies in libraries.) People who buy it buy lots of other get-rich-quick books, particularly ones having to do with the fabulous wealth that can be yours from writing, even if you’re nearly illiterate.

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I know. This is sour grapes. If I’d taken this free course, I’d be rolling in dough from multiple income streams from the book(s) I’d have written–each in less than 12 hours time!–and whatever it is I got from that New York Publisher. After all, it’s a proven, breakthrough system.Or maybe I could do PR for outfits like this. Given the attention to checking firm names and grammar and to normal (dull) English rules of capitalization, that press release sure as heck took less than 12 hours to write–maybe less than 12 minutes.Sigh. Back to my plodding old slow writing. If only I could learn Authoring instead.

When I “discover” a liblog I hadn’t read before–usually through a reference–I’ll check the current posts and, frequently, subscribe to it for a while. I’ve added some interesting new voices to my library reading through that process.

Today, though, I was made aware of a liblog, tried to read the recent posts…and gave up after a while.

I think there might have been some good content–but the presentation was so lacking that it kept getting in the way. Not visual presentation (after all, in an aggregator, even orange-text-on-maroon-background comes through readable, and this wasn’t one of those light-on-dark blogs), but the language.

Homophones were consistently misused–they’re/there/their, it’s/its, lose/loose, you’re/your and so many others. Worse, lots of words were missing letters and whole syllables–and some sentences were missing important words. Worst, this was happening in post titles and topic sentences, not down in the second or third paragraph.

I don’t expect blog posts to be perfect. I assume that most bloggers post the way I do–on the fly, directly in blogging software, skimmed through once over lightly and posted. Sure, some people actually edit their own posts carefully; some even write offline, let posts sit and polish them until they shine–or so they tell us. Not me, and I’m guessing not most of you. When I spot what I think of as a typo (e.g., most homophones) in a blog post where I’m at all acquainted with the blogger, I might send a quick email saying “You might want to fix that” (especially if it’s in the first paragraph), but that’s as far as it goes (and, as one who almost never makes “quiet changes” in posts–that is, changes that aren’t flagged by strikeouts and the like–I believe that it’s legitimate and desirable to make quiet changes to typos, unless doing so makes a commenter look like an idiot).

I think of most blogging as casual speech–a trifle more formal than casual conversation but more casual than most written communication. It makes sense to forgive occasional sloppiness in casual writing. And, since I don’t believe I’ve yet seen an issue of Cites & Insights that’s totally free of typos or other errors, I’m not going to play Mr. Perfectionist here.

What I ran into on this blog was something different. It was somewhere between sloppy and slovenly: I’d guess that at least one-third of the blog titles were wrong. And the errors were so common, and so extreme, that I really couldn’t read through them to the content. So I gave up.
This isn’t a call to apply Strunk & White to blog posts. (I’m not that wild about Strunk & White anyway.) It’s not a call for 100% perfect grammar/syntax/spelling, by anyone’s set of rules, in blog posts. That’s ridiculous.

It is a call to show a little respect for your readers and your profession. After all, a blog that’s rife with wrong words and spelling errors suggests a level of literacy that casts doubt on the ML[I]S: “Geez, this idiot has a master’s?”

Gentle suggestions (not “rules” or anything like that–who am I to dictate to you?):

• Make sure your post titles use the words you think you’re using.

Homophone errors and missing syllables are one thing in the second paragraph of a post. In the two to five words of a post title, they’re much worse.

• If you know you have problems, try composing in Word or something like it–or at least run spellcheck before you publish.

When I say “try composing in Word or something like it,” I do mean with spellcheck and grammar checking on. I’m still using Word 2000 (not for long, I hope). The grammar check isn’t all that great: Most of the time, its suggestions are either wrong or flag “errors” that I intend to make (usually, when I have a sentence fragment or closing preposition, it’s because I damn well intend to have a sentence fragment or closing preposition). But even that particular blunt tool catches things just often enough that it’s worth my time to right-click on greenlined areas and see what’s up. I’m a halfway decent speller, so spelling errors are pretty rare–and Word catches those pretty well.

WordPress has a spell checker (or is that Firefox? It’s a right-click option). It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing.

• It’s not about perfection. It’s about perception.

Make a typo here and there? We’ll assume I’ll assume you’re typing quickly and possibly multitasking. No big deal. I’ll probably pass right on by. Screw up every other post title? I’ll assume you don’t much care about what you’re doing–and I’ll suspect that your thinking might be as sloppy as your typing. (Incidentally, that wasn’t a post modification. It was one of those cute rhetorical tricks that blogging encourages: An interlinear clarification and rethinking-on-the-spot using crossout to give my first thought, before I backed away from universalizing.)

• If you don’t respect your readers, at least respect your profession.

Professional librarians have higher degrees. The public may not know that, but I believe the assumption is that most of you are at least reasonably well educated. When a blog comes across as semiliterate and claims to be written by a librarian, it makes librarians look bad.

Yes, this is a blind item–for what I believe to be obvious reasons. You can eliminate several hundred candidates by checking my public Bloglines subscription list, since I chose not to add this particular blog. That leaves several hundred (maybe several thousand) others. And that’s the only clue you’re going to get; maybe this particular person was having a really bad few weeks, and will snap right out of it.Now, back to writing and editing, knowing I’ll never be perfect…

For the longest time, there seemed to be many differing opinions as to what “Library 2.0″ was all about.

So much so that I wrote an issue of Cites and Insights about it, an issue that was downloaded more than 15,000 times in PDF form (as of October 20) and another 15,000 times in HTML form (again as of October 1). For that matter, between September 1, 2007 and October 28, 2007, that issue was downloaded more often than any current issue. Apparently there are still people out there who think it’s unclear what it’s all about–lots of people.

So imagine my surprise at the title of this post: “We Know What Library 2.0 Is and Is Not.”

Wow. No ambiguity. No disagreements. Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk know.

It’s an interesting post. Not quite as interesting as the sheer certainty of the title, though.

Steven Chabot isn’t wild about the certainty of the post title, even as he agrees (as do I) that empirical research makes sense–that offering “solutions” nobody’s really asking for is less than ideal.

Chabot “can’t really stomach the opening statement” (the post title).

I don’t feel nearly as strongly. I think the absolute certainty of the title is amusing.

The post? Worth reading, as is Chabot’s.