It could be time to cut all ties with Shopify:
Seen enough of this movie.
Now can we fast forward to the part where Indiana Jones socks Nazis on the jaw and the Ark of the Covenant vaporises Elon Musk?
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:
This Manchester United - Leicester City FA Cup tie is dreary… two teams that look like they don’t belong in the Premier League.
It wouldn’t surprise me if I woke up on morning in New Zealand, opened the news, and found the US president had issued an executive order to reinstate slavery.
Imagine you’ve just been elected as president of New Zealand.
What would be your first executive order?
I realise some people might think this odd, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s trip to Jaycar. www.jaycar.co.nz
This trip is to update my Repair Cafe tool kit, but I bet I find something else when I’m there.
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.
Two weeks ago I needed a courier label. Turned the wireless inkjet printer on and got a label first try. Today I’ve have spent almost two hours and still the MacBook can’t “find” a printer that is physically 1.5 metres away.
If you were really committed to a Paleolithic diet, you eat woolly mammoth steaks, the sabre tooth tiger, by the way, is inedible
NZ supermarkets sell bags of fresh chopped slaw and salad, which saves faffing about and means you aren’t left with three-quarters of a cabbage or whatever, but they come with packets of toxic-looking chemicals (allegedly dressing) that we throw away. Does anyone sell salad bags without the gunge?
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.
Brighton v Everton - Home
Liverpool v Ipswich Town - Home
Southhamption v Newcastle - Away
Wolves v Arsenal - Away
Bournemouth v Nottingham Forest - Draw
Man City v Chelsea - Draw
Tottenham v Leicester City - Home
Crystal Palace v Brentford - Home
Aston Villa v West Ham - Home
Fulham v Manchester United - Draw
Last week I had five right. Still wobbling along at 49% for the season to date.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
I swear the TradeMe sales experience is worse now than when I last sold things five or six years ago.
There is a useful post at the Columbia Journalism Review chewing over the difference between words like electric and electrical or historic and historical.