To my eternal shame I loaded about half a dozen AI images on to my web site as an experiment when Midjourney first appeared. I now want to remove them, but there are around 2100 pages and sifting through them looking for the offending images is tedious. I’m just going to wait until they show up.

I had never heard the term ‘take a raincheck’ before coming to New Zealand in the 1980s. Wrongly assumed it had something to do with the weather.

It’s been a long time since I saw a stranger reading a newspaper story that I wrote. Five years at least. But it happened twice today.

Thank god for that. One of the pains in my work life is navigating umpteen different videoconferencing systems, most of which, like Chime, are flakey and unreliable.

techcrunch.com/2025/02/2…

Excellent point here. We often forget how important WordPress has been over the years.

www.manton.org/2025/02/2…

I still have great memories of WordPress, but it’s no longer aligned with my needs.

“Poet Hera Lindsay Bird once described New Zealand as a “mean-spirited sale at Briscoes racist sexist 40% off deck furniture piss country”, and now Tourism NZ’s latest campaign appears to be inadvertently leaning into that image.”

It’s a pity the story is behind a paywall, the intro certainly make me want to read on.

businessdesk.co.nz/article/e…

Any lawyers out there who can tell me if I can sue Google for defamation if the algorithm decides I’m the target market for an advertisement?

I’m thinking here of the time a few years ago when I got bombarded with ads for a Nickleback concert. If any family members or friends had seen those ads on my laptop my reputation as a cool person would have been shot to pieces.

That has to be worth a six figure settlement… right?

Northcote point, Auckland. Wednesday evening.

Canadian special forces prepare for US invasion:

I installed DeepSeek on my phone and iPad for testing purposes, but it set off so many privacy and security alarms that I now have to stop testing.

Here’s the post I wrote earlier about the AI chatbot:

billbennett.co.nz/deepseek-…

An excellent post cum manifesto from Dave Winer who has done some deep thinking about the web in the past.

Here he encapsulates one perspective on the current state of play that many of us would subscribe to even if it isn’t orthodox thinking.

Activity.pub is fine and good, but as Winer says, it isn’t the only open protocol. Links are essential, but I’d argue the RSS feeds first developed by WIner are equally important.

Don’t waste time warming up when writing for online audiences. Get started straight away.

Readers are busy. They scan text looking for meaning and they want it fast. Other writing competes for their attention and it is only a click away.

Your first paragraph should summarise the entire story in less than 40 words. A 30-word intro is better. And make sure those words aren’t all in one sentence.

Don’t overload the first paragraph with too many facts. Save details for later.

Move straight to the action. Passive first sentences send readers fleeing for the exit.

Online, opening words are often a teaser to lure readers. If Google indexed your story, the first 150 characters become the descriptive text telling people what to expect when they click the link.

If you struggle to write short, snappy first paragraphs, imagine you are writing an old-style tweet. When Twitter still had its 140-character limit that was excellent training for writing introductions.

People who live outside the marketing and media bubble don’t always understand how advertising and publicity are not the same thing.

Advertising is a commercial deal between a business and the media.

If you are an advertiser, you buy a fixed amount of print space, billboards, radio or TV airtime, or web traffic. You take responsibility for providing the advertising material – we call it copy in the industry – at your cost.

If you’ve got the budget, you can hire creative specialists to prepare the copy for you. Paying for professional writers is worth the cost. Advertising professionals know how to get results.

As an advertiser you are in control. You decide when and where your adverts run. You have the last say over the message.

Advertising is expensive. Publicity is often cheaper. It is also riskier.

Publicity is when you grab people’s attention in other ways. If you hire a publicist, a public relations expert or a press officer, those people will attempt to place stories in the media on your behalf. They can’t usually guarantee anyone will sit up and take notice.

You have far less control with publicity. It works best when you have something newsworthy or interesting to say. If it isn’t interesting then the media will ignore it. And your story can be crowded out on days when there are other more interesting stories.

Editors and journalists’ first responsibility is to their readers. They don’t see selling your business as their job. It is their job to keep readers informed and interested.

Publicity is a scattergun. It can work. It might not. Use advertising to make certain your message reaches your target audience. It acts like a guided missile and costs about as much.

There is a twist on the gap between advertising and publicity. Less professional (or more desperate) media outlets will swallow your publicity and possibly publish it on your behalf if they think their might be a future commercial relationship. This explains why you might often see dull or uninteresting publicity campaigns show up in the media.

This is a post from 15 years ago on my main website. It was written in the golden age of online journalism when there was still plenty of money for freelances, but the point about writing tighter copy applies just as much today.

Print publishers paid freelance writers by the word. They needed to fill space around lucrative ads and draw readers in with informative or entertaining copy. There was a ready market for bulk, readable copy.

Freelance writers responded to market forces.

They learned to write long. Some padded their prose with waffle. Most didn’t feel pressure to write tight copy. A longer sentence bought a cup of coffee; a couple of extra paragraphs could fund a night in the pub.

Online publishing follows a different economic model. Web readers don’t hang around. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen says: “If you want many readers, focus on short and scannable content.”

Online publishers want snappy copy over and over to maximise page reads and advertising clicks.

Which means freelance writers have to unlearn bad habits and get back to writing tight copy. For us older journalists this means going back to our roots.

Those of us who learnt our trade in the 1970s grew up in a world where newspapers and magazines didn’t have acres of space to fill. And well-staffed newsrooms meant every available column inch was fought over.

Reporting share price movements in general news bulletins on television or radio is pointless and meaningless.

The majority of viewers and listeners don’t give a toss about individual share prices. But they are not the target audience. Actually, it’s hard to figure out who is the target audience.

The information given in a quick bulletin is of little use to those who do care. Nobody in their right mind is going to run out and buy or sell shares if the reporter says “Company X is down two cents at $2.12”.

A share owner will want to check this information before acting. They have apps and other information sources to help them.

Share trading professionals will have immediate access to better and fuller information. Even keen amateur traders will want more than a raw price.

So why do news bulletins broadcast this information?

It could be filler. Some TV bulletins flick up the numbers on the way into or out of commercial breaks. Lord knows New Zealand broadcasters sometimes struggle to fill their long news bulletins with enough worthwhile material.

Reporting share price movements also sends an important signal to audiences that the broadcasters are aware of business news and determined to take it seriously. But that’s it. A form of virtue signalling or marketing, not the dissemination of information.

One of the great things about Micro.Blog is you can use it for quick social-media style thoughts or you can write a more expansive blog post.

Good blog posts communicate ideas and information. Do it with crisp, unambiguous writing.

There’s nothing wrong with flowery writing. Just leave it for poetry, song lyrics and literary fiction.

Here are seven steps to help you turn out snappy blog posts that’ll have readers coming back for more:

1. Get straight to the point. Set out your store in the opening paragraph. Tell readers what the rest of the story will be about. If you’ve got one, make the first paragraph your opening argument.

2. Prove it. Follow your opening paragraph by building on the first idea or argument. Provide back-up information to explain or support the first paragraph. Tell readers why you said what you did in that first paragraph.

3. Make extra points in descending order of importance. Readers can drop out at any point. Make sure they get the best points early while you still have their attention.

4. Use plenty of full stops and line breaks. Short sentences make your copy dynamic and fast-moving. Short paragraphs make text easier to read. This is more important online. As a bonus, tight copy helps you articulate your ideas.

5. Murder your darlings. If you think you’ve written something clever, chances are you haven’t. Hit the delete key and move on. Don’t use favourite obscure words or complicated metaphors. Anything that sounds like poetry needs cutting, unless you are writing poetry.

6. Get on, get off, don’t hang around. And don’t outstay your welcome. Don’t feel the need for a long wrap-up. Make your last point, summarise if it helps, then stop writing.

7. Check before hitting the send button. Read through your post, spell-check, look for poor grammar, weed out the needless words, make sure the text is understandable. I sometimes walk away from the screen and do something else before returning for one last read. The distance helps.

Rules number four and five in Writing for the web in 300 words say:

Learn grammar. Forget what teachers said about long words making you look smart. It isn’t true. Instead use simple words, grammar and sentences. It is harder to go wrong.

Finding simple words isn’t always easy, especially when you are in a hurry.

A thesaurus helps. There are online thesauri and there are two paper ones on my bookshelf at home. There’s a thesaurus built into MacOS.

And then there is Ironic Sans’ Thsrs.

Thsrs is a short word thesaurus designed to help social users find shorter words to fit in tight character limits. Thsrs is a great tool for digging out a simpler, easier-to-read alternative, option, choice.

You may call it a blog post, article or something else. A journalist would call it a story. Here’s how to write a good one.

Start your story by telling the reader what it is about. You do this briefly in the headline. Then again in the introduction or intro, which is a stop press paragraph.

Ask yourself:

• What is this story about,
• what information am I trying to get across and..
• what points must I make to do this?

Sum up the story in your mind in one simple sentence. This is your intro.

Its job is to tell the reader what the article is about and draw the reader in. As a rule, readers prefer brief intros.

Write so a reader who only gets as far as your intro still has a basic grasp of your story.

Newspapers teach journalists to start with a single sentence of between 15 and 21 words. This is what you should aim for, although at times you’ll need to use more words.

As an aside, proper nouns made up of multiple words only count as a single word when you’re calculating the ideal intro length.

You can have one sentence in your first paragraph or two or three. Either way keep it short and crisp.

Next comes the how — how did it happen or, more usually in your case, what happens next?

This is background information or explanation.

After the explanation comes amplification. You amplify the point or points following on from the intro.

Make these points one by one and in descending order of importance.

Last, after making all the main points, tie up any loose ends — ie., add any extra or background information deemed necessary but of lesser importance.

Elmore Leonard wrote this as the last of his ten rules of writing.

If it sounds like writing, rewrite it

Leonard is an author. A first-rate author who writes fast-paced novels with great dialogue and plenty of action.

While Leonard is an artist, his advice applies to journalists and anyone else who writes for a living.

What he means is make sure your writing doesn’t sound like an undergraduate essay or a high school homework.

Some of the stories on my other site (https://billbennett.co.nz) are so old that companies still had managing directors.

There is a useful post at the Columbia Journalism Review chewing over the difference between words like electric and electrical or historic and historical.

There are people who swear by ChatGPT, but I only ever get rubbish when I test the service.

Today I asked it what it thought of my Premier League match prediction that Manchester City would beat Ipswich and I got this gem:

“Ipswich is not currently in the Premier League; they play in the Championship. You might want to double-check this fixture as it seems misplaced.”

For those who don’t know, it’s been around eight months since Ipswich was promoted.

I continually test ChatGPT by asking about things I know really well. On balance it is wrong more often than it is right. The disturbing thing is that people are using tools like this to make business decisions.

Newcastle v AFC Bournemouth - Home

Brentford v Liverpool - Home

Leicester v Fulham - Away

West Ham v Crystal Palace - Draw

Arsenal v Aston Villa - Home

Everton v Spurs - Draw

Man United v Brighton - Draw

Notts Forest v Southampton - Home

Ipswich v Man City - Away

Chelsea v Wolves - Home

I haven’t published predictions since the Boxing Day fixtures where I got 5 out of 10 correct. So far this season I’m running at 49 percent correct, which is way below previous years.

Modern newspaper style books tell journalists to use among rather than amongst. The rule applies on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in Australia and New Zealand.

While both words are correct, amongst is regarded as old-fashioned and may soon be obsolete. At least one newspaper style book describes it as archaic.

My 50-year-old printed copy of the Oxford Concise Dictionary offers the two words as alternatives.

According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, among is “chiefly British”. This surprised me.

Years ago, when training journalists, I would joke that Americans use more commas than British journalists because they are rich and can afford the extra ink. The same applies to journalists in Ireland, Australia or New Zealand.

You would often find long, comma-packed sentences in American newspapers. They don’t make for easy reading.

It’s better to write using plenty of full stops instead — periods if you’re American — and go sparing on the comma.

Keeping track of who does what to whom is hard in long, comma-laden sentences. Breaking sentences into smaller units of meaning makes writing easier to follow.

Only use commas where they aid understanding.

Writers often underrate the comma’s use as an aid to sense.

Some Americans put commas between all clauses and sub-clauses. Som grammar checking software tells you to do the same.

British-trained writers avoid them between short clauses at the start of sentences.

Americans also use commas before and at the end of a list of items. This is sometimes called the Oxford comma. As the name suggests, this is an not exclusively American habit.

Argument in favour of the Oxford comma seems to be gaining ground in some circles. That’s partly because writers who favour the Oxford comma have trained us to read prose the way we might read a formal logic argument.

Some experts say Americans are moving towards British patterns and commas are now less common on both sides of the Atlantic. Let’s hope so.

One last point. Neither approach is right or wrong. How one uses commas and full stops is a matter of editorial style, not grammar. The important thing about style is to be consistent.