Language is a virus (from outer space)

Hey – still not posting often enough, sorry… Anyway – here’s a little off-the-wall musing (do I ever do any other type of musing?)…

Techniques for “Writing for the web” are long established and well proven.

It’s not hard to do and a few points cover it: write short paragraphs with key words at the beginning of them, use headers and bullet point lists, avoid jargon, abbreviations, hyperbole and buzzwords… that’s about it.

It’s also our most frequently ignored best practice intranet guideline. Everyone thinks they know how to write, and ‘communicators’ seem to be unwilling to change their writing to adapt to the medium of the web – so they write with a style that assumes you are reading on paper, or a glossy brochure.

On our intranet we’ve got very well written guidelines about web writing. Most intranets do.

So why do – otherwise competent – writers not write well? I think the style guide is competing against something more pervasive, the house style is defined by a long tradition of previous writing – something can’t be important if it doesn’t have the whiff of officialese, if it doesn’t feel like previous writings. Bad writing is infectious.

Ironically some of the best writing in our intranet is emerging from social media, from less trained writers. Social media doesn’t encourage such a formal style and it doesn’t have the weight of history. But writing style is still infectious and the style adopted in a social media will spread. It’s best to make sure the good kind of writing spreads, so I suggest one of the first things to add to a wiki is a writing style guide. You may not ‘infect’ all the contributors, but you’ve set the tone and enabled the wiki gardners to do their work.

Quiz

Its been a while since I did a quiz, so here’s a new one:

http://filledwithstraw.com/voice.php

It’s about voices overs and so kind of fits with the theme about applying the right style to the context. Comments always welcome on the quizzes, so boast about your high scores in the comment box.

Pop music

My music choice for this post is from Laurie Anderson, indeed, the idea of describing web writing as a communicable disease comes from her song that gives this posting it’s title. I love Laurie Anderson, her Big Science album especially, but if you get the chance to see her you should do so, her performance at the Glasgow Concert hall (mid 90s? ) was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.

Sometime the you tube embed doesn’t work so here’s a link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FeyGTmw0I0

Intranets: 1995 vs 2008

Apologies for not writing this for a while, I spent a few weeks on hoiday in Ardersier near Inverness.

As a short, I’m back posting I think I’ll go back to the beginning of intranets. It would seem that “intranets” as a term first starts to be used around 1995, in an article by Steven Lawton.

That 1995 article is a fascinating snapshot of how people thought about information, the people being interviewed talk about making things available – rather than allowing everybody to make things available to each other. The 1995 intranet has a gatekeeper publishing model.

I’ve had a few discussions lately that make me think that this concept is still there. intranets are things other people go away and do. That won’t be true for much longer. Actually the thing that is puzzling me is why it is still partly true.

It’s not because people don’t want to take part – nor that companies don’t trust their people, but that we haven’t worked out how to get the best out of a decentralised model, that loose, ‘free for all’ publishing is still quite a poor experience for consumers of that knowledge.

The 1995 intranets were based on 1995 internet, within a few years we learned that there were differences, that we needed to think about governance and user satisfaction quite differently and do different things, the 2008 intranet is now  trying to use models from the 2004-8 internet of social media, user generated content and to do it successfully we need to learn again how that works – but remember 1995, it isn’t a lift and shift.

Anyway, just a quick thought to share, I will get back into the swing of this blog and write something more interesting soon – I must do a quiz too.

For pop music link here is something from 1995..

Hmm, My favourite tune from 1995 was Long Fin Killie’s, ‘Head of Dead Surfers’ but its not on You Tube (though their fine – but not as good - ’Hollywood Gem‘ is) I also loved Spare Snare’s ‘Bugs’ but the only You Tube version is a camera phone recording, so here’s Spare Snare doing something else.

Content, the once and future king

A few years ago (or several hundred in internet time) there was a saying that “content was king”.

The phrase was used in discussions during the web 1.0 boom where to get market share more and more sites were using eye-candy rather than optimising the content (Boo.com is the poster child for this). I think history shows that indeed content was king.

A recurring theme of current commentators is that ’collaboration is king’, google the phrase to find it popping up all over the place.

It’s a misleading phrase though, setting up collaboration in opposition to content (there is only one king!)  misses what is the most valuable aspect of collaboration; it produces better content. That’s certainly true about sites where the collaboration is the content - such as focused social networking sites like Ravelry, or  many wiki’s.

Which leads to looking at the collabaration process from the other side, not how many people are taking part, but how good is the content that it produces? We’ve got a decade’s worth of research that tell us how to assess how good content is, we should apply those techniques to collaboration sites and it will tell us how good the engagement / collaboration is. By that standard, I still say Ravelry is the social media site with all the answers.

The usual, rather sketchy, pop music analogy.

Collaborations between musicians seems to fall into two camps, amazing and terrible. As with websites it’s the outcome (the “content”) that defines how well the collaboration worked. This collaboration is, um, not likely to be an anybody’s list of easy listening favourites. (I did initially look for Bonnie Prince Billy’s brilliant collaboration with Shooglenifty, but its not on Youtube), so here’s Sonic Youth and Lydia lunch making a terrifying racket.

 

Update: for some reason the video isn’t working, here’s the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abFsnnsa_6A

 

Partnerships quiz

New quiz, can you name the celebrity partners?

Partners quiz

I had been thinking of using this quiz as part of a discussion about partnerships within an organisation, what is the responsibility of the IT department, what should comms people do and how does it all work together, especially for things like social media.

I’ll do that another day maybe, because I wanted to mention a strange phenomenon. As I’ve said in previous postings, I’m playing about with on line quizzes to examine issues on engagement and content creation, my reasoning was that there are valuable lessons for all types of publishers when considering what makes a quiz work well.

But its been very difficult to get folks to talk about the ‘meta’ discussion of the quiz, because a quiz has such a strongly defined objective , people have focused on that. My conversations go a bit like this:

• me: Do you think the way I’ve laid out the questions and answers is optimum?
• you: Um, I dunno, I didn’t get question seven right.
• me: Erm, yes, what about where I put the ‘next question’ link?
• you: And question five, I was sure it was ‘cheese’ but it wasn’t.

What this most reminds me is the difficulty with discussing designs in general, when you are trying to decide on the most effective information architecture, don’t ask other people what they think, you’ll just get a discussion on how the site looks.

Anyway, hope you like the quiz, feel free to discuss either the design or how you got on with the questions, these are just for fun after all. Speaking of fun, of the three quizzes I’ve done

• shakespeare quiz
• crooners quiz
• web site style

The crooners one has been by far the most popular, getting more page hits than the blog post that linked to it, I think the url must be travelling the internet in emails (guessing from the referring links in the logs) Which is nice. I didn’t think of the quizzes as independant things (I put no contact details in them for feedback), there is probably a lesson there too. 

Pop Music link

Well, folks that know me must have guessed I would eventually do this one – a song I love so much I named my child after it. Being a duet it fits the partnership theme too. One day I’d like to be as cool as Lee Hazelwood.

 

The Style Council

I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about my “governance of the crowd” idea.

I think I differ from most folks who comment on this because I still think social media needs governance. Governance is wrongly perceived as a device to slow down and limit something. We seem to have forgotten why governance became an important issue in the enterprise, it was needed because the free for all that characterised intranets in the late 90s was not efficient and various problems of duplicated, abandoned, orphaned, contradictory, or just badly written sites proliferated.

It may have a radically different publishing model, but we can still judge a wiki in the same way we judge any other web site – is it providing me with the info I need.

But it’s a barrier to entry to force people to go through all the training needed to become a web writing expert, and people are too busy with their day jobs to do it anyway. Much as I would like to, we can’t make everybody read Jakob Neilsen - this isn’t to say that Jakob is usually spot on with what he says.

There is a good model about how this can work already, wikipedia, but most commentators focus in on the amount of content contributors and fail to notice wikipedia has a very well defined set of standards and a good mechanism for allowing the users to flag pages that don’t meet this standards.

The standards can be arbitrary as long as they are consistent. There is no right answer to what font to use on a web page, but picking one and getting everybody to use it helps with the consistency.

With that in mind, here is a quiz on the small details of style.

do it with style quiz

A couple of the answers folks might disagree with (and if you do so, thats what blog comments are for!) the point is its a style guide (in quiz form) that most folks can understand.

And – not to be obvious or anything, but todays pop music link is Paul Wellers post Jam group The Style Council

Now rather overlooked, and often willfully, annoyingly mannered they did some cracking tunes (and a lot of dross). The best tune they did was this one, a stomping Curtis Mayfield homage to breaking down barriers.

 

 

 

What five metronomes, two soda cans and a piece of wood can teach us about intranets.

I really liked this video – there’s something very satisfying about watching something self organise. (spotted on the music thing blog).

For things to work well together you need a framework that loosely connects each part, the framework needs some flexibility: the cans move slightly because of the average of the metronome movement, and it’s that framework movement that syncs them all.

I’ve often said here that the web 2.0 promoters are usually wrong when they say social media self organises, because the overlook the framework, the metronomes won’t sync if there is no connection, no framework.

However neither will a rigid connection work, which reflects the style of governance that dominates intranets (and seems to be enshrined in the increasingly old fashioned looking BSI standard PAS 124).

I’m going to avoid calling the equivalent intranet syncing “governance”, and say its a framework – though it is a governance, the “governance of the crowd” and it needs to be in place (note, I was so pleased with that last phrase I googled it, as far as I can tell nobody else has used it yet!).

More on what I mean by this framework, how it works and what an intranet manager should do about it another time. meanwhile… enjoy the clicking..

The Crooners quiz

The Shakespeare quiz had 14 people complete it. However over 30 people looked at the front page…. was it too intimidating?  Highest score was 7.

Well I’m enjoying doing them so here’s another:

The Crooner Quiz

I’ll get back to posting articles about pop music and intranets soon. But I think there is an interesting lesson about return of investment here.

The concept that got me thinking about quizzes was the puzzle about the time it takes to create content versus how much it engages people, what’s the best effort to value ratio?

If I just wrote a bunch of stuff about 40s crooners in text it would have a low creation cost, it would be fine for reference – but it wouldn’t really engage anybody, if I made a multimedia extravaganza it could take days and days – and that would be for each time I did it.

I recorded roughly how I wrote this one.

5:45 Decide to do a new quiz, argue with my wife for ten minutes about which subject to do, she’s not keen on “mid 80s industrial post punk”.

5.55 Decide to do “Crooners”. Make a start by reading wikipedia and I cut and paste interesting trivia into a text editor.

6.10 Am reminded its my turn to make the tea.

6.55 Get back to the computer, I edit my snippets into questions, grab some images from wikipedia too.

7.00 Finish draft text version which I show to my wife, she’s doesn’t think Johnny Mathis is a crooner and so I replace him, she thinks we should have a Paul Anka question but I can’t find anything interesting to say about him.

7.10 Pasted all the questions to my quiz edit form and its live.

So by my reckoning that’s 30 minutes writing and less that 10 minutes ‘publishing’ now that I’ve written a quiz editor, and even that was longer than it needed to be because, well, I kept getting distracted with reading other things in wikipedia… did you know it was Bing Crosby’s daughter who shot JR? Plus I had the down time of making the tea, and you can’t really have a ‘is Johnny Mathis a crooner’ debate in less than five minutes…

OK so maybe the crooner quiz isn’t the most interesting thing ever written, but it is quite a good effort to engagement ratio… Well it will be once I write a quiz on something people are interested in.

Let me know how you got on with the quiz in the comments – obviously you can boast about your high scores too.

I was going to add in a you tube video of early 80s Edinburgh teen pop/punk group The Questions, but I can’t find any, they were signed to Paul Wellers record label ‘respond’ and backed Tracy who had a hit with ‘the house that jack built’. Its perhaps just as well I din’t find anything, I have a terrible feeling they weren’t nearly as good as I remember.

Quiz update

Just a quickie to mention that I finally got around to doing my quiz, you can read up on why I’m experimenting on quiz design in this previous posting.

Here’s a beta of a Shakespeare one – let me know how you get on.

I’ll be doing these occasionally as part of the blog, hopefully more relevant to something I’m talking about.

I was wanting to embed these into the actual blog posting, like with your tube video, but I can’t work out how – anyone help? (iframes????)

Can intranet managers survive on their good looks alone?

In the middle of my posting about the ‘boring’ problem, I suggested that difficulty with boring websites in an intranet was that a common solution was to add in some fancy graphics.

However a more common scenario in a large company intranet is to get the design group, or an external agency designer to put the fancy graphics in first, fill the pages with “placeholder text” and ask for sign off / approval.

Usually the design is in powerpoint slides, or static images in pdf format and the approval often boils down to ‘does the sponsoring department think this looks cool’

That’s a bad way to do things.

How to assess a design properly

The important aspects of a design are (in order)

• Is it functional and efficient
• Is it accessible
• Is it extendable
• Is it maintainable

None of these features are easy to determine from looking at slideware. Often the people originating the design won’t consider these factors, and we end up with a cool looking site which is difficult to maintain looks shabby and ill-fitting after a few tweaks.

Tenuous pop music reference

For the pop music link, here’s an interesting example. Jobraith was a mid 70s glam performer most famous for being a total failure, launched with a huge publicity campaign, the audience stayed away in droves.

It’s not hard to hear why, but it is a fun video for people fond of 70s kitch.

What ? and the Mysterians can teach us about intranet management

Try this pop quiz. Fun wasn’t it? I scored 19. I didn’t know the Status Quo chart hits and had obliterated Pookah Makes Three from my memory.

‘Coffee time’ quizzes are a good way to get people to use, understand and return to a website – and learning what makes a quiz work is a good way of learning about your users, a quiz is a microcosm of the issues that arise from all websites.

You can analyse a quiz in the same way you can analyse a website. Work out what makes a quiz good and you’ve worked out how to make your website visitors happy.

There is the interface: what helps and what gets in the way of the objective (answering the questions)? The Guardian quiz uses radiobuttons, and I’ve seen ones that use pulldowns. Radiobuttons are OK here, pulldowns, not so much, but I think the optimum is that the text of the answer is a clicky.

There is the user satisfaction: It’s very hard to resist the temptation to get in the way and try to inject a little too much learning into each question, use the discipline of minimal space to make the words of the question count.

There is the content creation: Make the questions interesting and thoughtful. The Status Quo question in the Guardian is neither. Just as there is a writing style and a writing tone that works well on web page writing, there is style and tone to most good questions. The style should be helpful, a hint is always welcome as it makes a hard question easier but still feels like answering a hard question!

There is maintenance: People will only do a quiz once. If you are using a quiz to encourage returning users change it frequently, so you need to think about how good your quiz creator is. Maintenance and keeping content fresh is often forgotten in intranet projects.

There is the consistency: for a simple coffee time quiz each question should have the same format, in the Guardian quiz it was a short text question and four answers. Is four the right amount for maximum quiz fun? Meh, I think three is slightly better, and you don’t have so many wrong answers to think up. I hate all those ‘pick three from seven’ or ‘all that apply from ten’. Its too easy to get wrong because of the interface rather than not actually knowing.. and that’s just annoying.

And most importantly, remember why you are doing this. That’s how you asses a website and how you asses if a quiz is good. Usually it’s for coffee time fun, you aren’t awarding a PhD. Just trying to attract people, get them thinking a bit, but you aren’t lecturing to them.

There are quite a lot of online quiz creators, but almost all of them offer too many features and so become over complicated – that’s a shame, I think restricting the format to be as simple as possible makes the quiz author focus on the important issues – good questions.

Here’s another quiz example Questionaut –  it’s great fun (warning! its also a great time waster!) , though I’m not suggesting it’s a model to use, the flash bits make it a maintenance problem.

There are a free open source tools for simple surveys that would make good quiz makers (example) but since the aim is to keep it simple its not a difficult thing to write.

Since none of these actually fitted my needs I currently writting my own and I’ll add in an example here once I get some hosting issues fixed. I’ll follow my own very restricted format and you can all see if my theory that “less is more” when it comes to quizzes holds water.

Please add in to the comments any good quizzes you find on the net and we can all talk about what is good and bad in the format. If you find any good online quiz creator applications – especially ones that would work well embedded on an intranet site, let us all know too.

Tenuous pop music link to this is the all time classic 60s garage band standard 96 tears, it has everything a perfect song needs – the monstrous self pity, the brutally primitive farfisa riff, the strange vocal inflection… y’know it doesn’t get any better than this really, stripped down to the basics, and single-mindedly doing the basics really well, that’s what makes things, be the pop songs or intranets work really well, not the bells and whistles…