Write Rightly

I’ve been thinking about my writing on this blog lately and wondering if I’ve been writing on appropriate level. My goal is to write clearly that a person not into technology in general can get something out of any given post if the topic is of interest to them. However, I also want those who follow the field, who I suspect are at least a good portion of readers here, to not be bored.

I wondered if there is any (free, of course) way to objectify some of these goals. At about that time, I found an interesting list of writing tools for bloggers and other writers at a publication I wasn’t familiar with, Smashing Magazine.

One that seemed of particular interest to me was Advanced Text analysis. Back when I used Windows ‘95 (Yikes!) and Microsoft Works (Double Yikes!), one of the features that I liked was a readability grade. It gave you an idea of how complicated a text was by analyzing how many long and multi-syllabic words were used in your document.

The folks at UsingEnglish.com are giving you that tool and many others, but most of them require that you be registered.

Here are some of the results of the analysis of my last 10 blog posts.

Readability:

	Overall	Sampled	Calculated Grading
Hard Words:	538	13
Long Words:	1,046	21
Lexical Density:	26.56 %	68.91 %
Gunning Fog Index:	12.38	12.30	Hard
Coleman-Liau Grade:	17.85	9.29	9th Grade
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level:	9.40	8.31	8th Grade (3 years)
Flesch Reading Ease:	64.06	70.82	Fairly Easy: 6th Grade
ARI (Automated Readability Index):	15.69	8.55	8th Grade
SMOG:	11.03	11.06	11 Years (Some high school)
LIX (Laesbarhedsindex):	40.91	37.48	Standard

In some ways, I’m happy to see that my writing is not too complicated, but it seems that I might consider upping the bar a little bit. As a point of reference this article describes the writing level of various publications.

The thing that really struck me though were the values of different words used.

General:

	Overall	Sampled
Characters (all):	29,174	641
Characters (words only):	22,988	507
Words:	5,106	119
Different Words:	1,356	82

With over 5,000 words generated, I had only used 1,356 total words. That’s a pretty staggering figure to me. It may mean I need to vary my word choice a little more, or that I should talk about some different topics.

This is really only the beginning of the analysis on the site, and you can find lots of interesting and frankly not so interesting pieces of data about your writing.

Hopefully, you won’t find this analysis too self-indulgent, but if you are fellow or blogger or doing writing somewhere else in your life, it might be worthwhile to put your text through the analyzer and see what you get.

If you find some interesting results, let me know in the comments.

Fax Check

The year I am writing this is 2009, yet sadly the fax, as in facsimile, machine is still in common use. A machine that was first demonstrated in 1851, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and one that has been in offices since 1948 has not substantially changed. A document here goes in and it ends up slowly over there.

The problem with this is that it is slow, expensive and wastes a lot of resources. You have to have a separate machine in order to things most computers are capable of doing on their own.

Of course, there are lots of ways around this, but here I’m going to look for the least expensive possible. That, of course, means free.

First, we’ll deal with the easy part sending your faxes to someone else. There are a number of sites that do this, but I’ve used and like GotFreeFax.com. Here you simply enter your name and e-mail, and the name and fax number of the person you are sending to into a form. Then, you can enter text into an editor (RTF, if you care) or you can attach a PDF or Microsoft Word DOC formatted file. Hit Send Free Fax, and you are done.

The drawbacks with this site are that you are only allowed 2 faxes a day with a maximum of 3 pages, but since I rarely ever fax anyone and there are other sites with different restrictions, this has not been a problem for me.

You will have to confirm your fax by clicking on a link sent to your e-mail, which slows down the process a lit bit, but it sure beats having a fax machine and paying for a phone call.

The other side of the equation receiving a fax for free seems to be a little trickier. I’m hoping that the opening up of the Google Voice beta will eventually lead to some better options in this area, but that remains to be seen.

For now though, the best thing I have found is K7.net, which will issue you a free Washington-State-based number to receive faxes and voice mail messages on. I know a number of podcasts use this technology in order to get messages from their listeners onto their shows and the quality of that has been pretty good. I did have some problems and delays using it for faxes though. In fairness to them, all of my faxes did eventually get through and were e-mailed to my account as a TIF image file. However, there was a significant delay for some of them of a few hours.

If there’s no particular rush and you don’t want to deal with having a fax machine this may be a good solution for you. One other drawback is that an inactive number is returned to them after 30 days without use. This is something to keep in mind, if like me you are an occasional receiver of faxes.

Do you have any great tips for avoiding the pain of the fax machine? Let me know in the comments.

Cell Phone Resolution, Mostly

In case you have not been following the blog, (shame on you) last time I talked about cell phone options for my wife and me. You can read more about it here.

After some consideration, my wife and I did end up sticking with the Straight Talk/Tracfone split. I’ll continue using my beat-up Tracfone for now and my wife, who uses her phone more will get the new Straight Talk plan. We’ve had the phone for a few days now, so let me give you some impressions. The deciding factor for me was that I was a little nervous about buying a first-generation smartphone. There is always some concern that one of parts was designed poorly and will break down prematurely. This decision allows us to buy some time to see how the Pre and the applications for it develop and gives the flexibility to change should the timing be correct.

As far as executing our decision, first, we went to the Straight Talk website and ordered a phone which was sold through Wal-Mart’s online store. There were three options of phones to  choose from: the LG200, which is a very basic model, the Motorola W385, which has quite a bit more functionality including a camera and web browsing, and finally the Motorazr V3a, which is the most expensive and has upgraded components.

We ended up selecting the least expensive phone, the LG200. We though this would minimize our losses in the event it got lost or stolen and would do the job we needed it for. After some use though, we decided it might not have been the right choice for us. First, this phone does not come with any web-browsing abilities at all. After taking a wrong turn on a trip we were on, we realized that the ability to use the 30 MB of data on the Straight Talk plan would be a useful thing. It also seemed to be a shame to not take full advantage of the plan we had gotten for ourselves.

The phone itself was very light and easy to use. For some people, including the less tech savvy among us, this may be the perfect choice. The only disappointment in this regard is that the buttons may be just a little too small for an elderly person with arthritis to be able to use effectively. Otherwise, this might be a great plan for someone who wants a very basic phone and wants to talk on the phone sometimes, but not too often.

The reception on the phone, however, was very good in our area in Brooklyn and in Northern and Central New Jersey. We did not have any trouble with dropped calls, and was very pleased with the Verizon-supplied service.

Ultimately, we’ve elected to return the phone, and upgrade to one of the other models. This is where the Wal-Mart store will come into play. Since we’ve already paid for the first month’s service in order to use it, our plan is to return it after the first month’s time is up. Wal-Mart has a 90-day return policy on this item, so it could be a simple matter of just returning the phone, buying a new one and porting the new number over. Of course, any number of things could go wrong with this plan, so we’ll keep you posted and see the real resolution of our cell phone conundrum.

Thanks to the great post in the comments, and if you have any thoughts, comment away.

Cell Phone Conundrum

My wife and I are now in the market for a cell phone. I’m currently making do without one, while she borrows my pre-paid phone that I used to use. She had been on her family’s plan, but the time has come for us to strike out on our own.

I’m ambivalent toward cell phones in general. While I like being able to contact others, I’m not very happy with being “on call” at every moment. Of course, I’m under no obligation to answer the phone at all times, but there is some social pressure that is placed on you once you do have a cell phone.

For me a pre-paid plan through Tracfone worked very well, I could use it only when I really needed to, otherwise it was simply not affordable to take calls. Buying the full year card, I had about 20 minutes a month to use, and the net cost was about $15 a month, including the phone itself. This works well for me because obviously I don’t use this phone very much.

The major drawback for me, though, is that I’ve lost the wonderful world of wireless data. To be able to uses the internet anywhere is a pretty amazing ability to have. The latest phones also have GPS all included in one device for all those times on the roadways that I inevitably get lost on.

These abilities of course come with a cost. Billshrink.com comes up with an excellent break down of the comparison of costs between the latest smartphones out on the market: The iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre, and the Android G1. Ultimately, over the life of the contract (and hopefully the phone) the iPhone costs $3800 vs. $3150 for the G1, and $2600 for the Pre. This is, however, for unlimited service. Right now, with my raggedy pre-paid TracPhone, I would be paying about $15 a month. For the next two years, assuming the phone holds up that’s a grand total of $360.

$2240 is a significant investment for the functionality of the Pre and $3440 for the iPhone simply seems extravegent when compared on a dollar for value ratio.

However, there’s also a new plan out called Straight Talk, which seems to be a new branding mechanism for TracPhone. The idea here is that you pay $30 a month for 1000 minutes, a 1000 texts and 30MB of data with no overages. It seems to be offered through Wal-Mart, which is a bit of a problem since there are no Wal-Marts very close to New York City. Also, the web pages link to the phone selection is down, so you can’t see the upfront costs and phone selection. The way this plan works is that you can either have the phone automatically renewed for $30 each month, or you can buy additional cards to extend the service, but if you are not subscribed for a 30-day period, you lose your cell phone number.

This may be the perfect way to split the difference. $720 plus the cost of the phone over two years is still a lot less than the $2600 for the Pre.

At this point, I’m still torn between all of my options. If you have any ideas, please add them to the comments.

Should I stick with the basic Tracfone serive, upgrade to StraightTalk or go whole hog with something like the Palm Pre?

Decisions, decisions…

Grammar Rules for Twitter (Eventually)

Since it’s been almost two months since I’ve talked about microblogging site Twitter, I suppose it is time to go to the old war horse again. This time I want to discuss the language and grammar of Twitter and how with the help of a new non-profit could actually become codified.

On the Get Satisfaction message boards for Twitter I had posted a call for a Twitter grammar guide, or at least some official guidelines from the company. After a couple of bumps to get the subject noticed a friendly fellow user added what she had done as a presentation for work to get her company on board with Twitter. While it was a nice gesture and I agree with her conclusions, it lacked the official response for which I was hoping.

To quote her response here:

“I made this for a presentation at work:

Twitter = Platform
Twit = One who Tweets
Tweet = What the Twit is doing
Tweeps = Your favorite Twits
Tweeted = What the Twit did

“A twit is one who tweets on Twitter with their Tweeps” “

While I’m not very keen on Twit being someone who Tweets, the logical alternatives I’ve come up with aren’t very good either. (Twitterer? Tweeter? Twitter user?)

It is worth mentioning that this is not merely a semantic exercise as you can see how the grammar of Twitter can lead to embarrassment in this Stephen Colbert appearance on Today.

So what will save us from this grammatical abyss? A wiki, of course. The Microsyntax organization is hoping to solve these issues with their new wiki at http://microsyntax.pbworks.com/.  This wiki is a bit different from something like Wikipedia in that they are hoping that discussion will take place in the background before edits of people’s pages are done. I fear that this model may stifle the growth of the page, as I wonder how many people are going to be interested in doing the work necessary to succeed in “identifying, researching and finding consensus on information syntax.”

I do wish them luck, though and since they did get a posting about the effort on TechCrunch that may go a long way in getting them the attention they need to make this a success.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments and if you want to follow me, I’m @dustin_gervais on the site.

Some of the Surprising Results of Content Piracy

Content piracy is a very controversial topic, and as a blogger focused on getting stuff on the cheap, it seem like an appropriate area to look at and discuss. As I suspect most people are deep down, I am generally anti-piracy. I feel that intellectual property is a meaningful term, and that content creators should be able to market their wares for some value in order to create additional content. I do acknowledge that industry forces put a stranglehold on some content and put it at prices that are not sustainable in the marketplace.

My solution to that problem thus far has been to simply ignore that content, but there are many out there who fell justified to in a Robin-Hood-like mentality of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Of course, there are other who simply feel that digital content should be free to sample and if you want to support a creator than you simply give them money directly in various ways.

I see value in both arguments, and I’m clearly not here to solve this issue today. Today, I want to talk about a couple of the interesting results of piracy and what effect it has a content creation and consumption. (I discuss torrents below, which are one of the most popular methods of content piracy) to find out more about this technology, check out this About.com tutorial.)

Slashdot had a very interesting post by a former indie-music producer who argues that The Pirate Bay (the most popular torrent tracker) hosting actually strengthens  the hegemony of the music industry. That is to say, piracy actually keep big industry content popular. I have heard arguments that content piracy is the best thing for independent artists because it gets more people to consume their content, but do these statistics prove the contrary. It is a difficult question, and I hope you check out the argument for more details.

One other interesting aspect of this discussion is the use of language by each side to describe its habits. Those who are using unauthorized content first called themselves file-sharers, casting themselves in a benevolent light. Then, the content industry labeled these people as pirates evoking greedy thieves, but this move backfired in the sense that these users took back the term to cast it in the positive ‘Disney-fied’ pirates as romantic, swashbuckling heroes. Things like The Pirate Bay and torrents (by definition, a turbulent, swift-flowing stream) evoke this romantic sense of the terminology. I look forward to seeing what the next volley in the language war will be.

As always, feel free to leave your thoughts on the topic in the comments.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note. Since one of my most popular stories last year was on the announcement by Apple of their by a computer get an iPod deal for students and educators, I wanted to mention that it has begun again this year. You can check out the details here.

The Good Ol’ Days of Tech

Nostalgia isn’t a huge part of the technology world. Outside of the realm of video games, it is almost always about the newest and latest thing on the block. It occurred to me the other day that on some of my computers I am using ancient software that I would have a hard time replacing if I were to ever have a system failure. Why was I using such outdated software you might ask? The primary answer was speed.

The best example of this is in a program that I thoroughly dislike, Adobe Acrobat Reader. Since the early days, I always thought this was a bloated, slow to load, useless program that deserved to go away. However, it continues to grow, and instead of getting faster with newer versions it got slower. So, I decided to stick with version 5 of the software. It actually got faster as time went on, however, Adobe was able to one-up me by making certain PDFs incompatible with previous versions with new features, but most of the time Adobe Reader 5.0 worked just fine. (As a side note, since I’m usually looking at PDFs as I’m browsing the Internet I now use Foxit Reader to look at PDFs.)

Well, how would I replace it if I needed to today? There’s oldversion.com. A website with a treasure trove of download-able old versions of a variety of programs all in one place. From chat engines like AOL Instant Messenger to old security programs. Maybe you have an old machine that you want to serve as an FTP server, but only has Windows ‘95. Here’s a place where you can find an FTP client for that operating system.

This website suggests other reasons why old versions can be an improvement on the “upgrades” of newer versions including, digital rights management functions of Windows Media Player, advertising in chat programs like ICQ and programs that have disappeared.

So if you adhere to the adage “Newer is not always better.” You’ll be in good company at oldversion.com. Let me know in the comments what old version of programs you still use.

When the Monolith Wobbles

At the beginning of this week, I was alerted by TechCrunch to a new service being offered to convert all of your old e-mail and contacts from places like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail into Google’s G-mail, so that you could start to become a G-Mail user.

G-mail is a great service for e-mail and I do a lot of my e-mailing from there. I was even considering discussing with my wife moving her e-mail from Hotmail to G-Mail. Then, the monolith wobbled, and I was reminded why having too many eggs in one basket can be a dangerous thing.

Let me explain. Google, in the political language of the day, is too big to fail. There are so many services that are absolutely dependent on Google to operate that if they fail, their entire business model breaks. Even more operations are severely hampered by an interruption in service and almost anyone on the Internet is at least effected. The Google monolith didn’t tip over on May 14th, but it did wobble a moment and woe to anyone who has become totally reliant on the company.

I first heard of a problem with the trending tag on Twitter #googlefail. (As a side note, this trend of forming a compound word out of the name of something that is ‘broken’ and “fail” is not a very useful one.) I clicked on an saw some people were not able to use the main search engine or access G-Mail. I quickly checked for myself and found it working. I then went to Google’s Apps Status Dashboard, which was created after the February incident where G-Mail went down for a period of time. Google had indicated there was a small service disruption.

Satisfied for the moment, I later checked Google News (Ah, the irony) to see if anybody had written about and found a quickly put together, but well written article by CNET describing what was known so far.  Included in that article is the very interesting story of someone on Twitter, who says that she was not able to access her bank’s website, because it uses Google Analytics to track user statistics.

This story, I think really gets down to the heart of the matter of where the real problem with Google lies. For many people, the first point of entry into the Internet is Google. Without it, those folks couldn’t get anywhere. For some websites like this user’s, without Google Analytics tracking your entry on to the website, you can’t even get on it. Without G-Mail, some business can’t take orders or execute their day-to-day operations.

So what does this mean for you? It means that you should think about how dependent you are on Google. I have G-mail, of course, but I also have a secondary e-mail on which I do a fair amount of communications. I also have other search engines on the ready if needed and know the addresses of many of the places I needed to go on the web manually.

Clearly, there is something to be said for not over reacting to what amounts to a couple hours worth of an outage but you should consider if the monolith ever does topple…how the Internet will look vastly different.

Wikipedia Is Not a Valid Source (Except When I Have To Look Something Up)

Wikipedia is a cluster of contradictions. It’s a site that nobody takes seriously, but everyone refers to. It’s a compendium of knowledge of the world, but has more information about Star Trek than particle physics. It’s written in most part by non-experts (at least in the academic sense of the word) but is understood to have significant content.

A couple of events in recent days has brought this resource to mind. The first is the story of French composer Maurice Jarre. After dying in late March, inevitably the obituaries by newspapers around the world came out. During the interim, according to a report from the Irish Times and substantiated by other news sources, a senior at University College Dublin named Shane Fitzgerald fabricated a quote for Jarre and inserted it into his Wikipedia profile.

In Wikipedia’s defense, the quote was removed after no source was attributed to it. However, Fitzgerald kept simply reinserting it until it remained up there for over 24 hours. At this point, several newspapers including The Guardian and the Daily Mail used the inaccurate quote. The Guardian subsequently issued a correction when Fitzgerald alerted them to the fact that he had fabricated the quotation.

One of the interesting facts about this case is that it demonstrates that Wikipedia is a source of biographical information for many journalists. While many outlets might be in a position to check that information before publication, some clearly do not, or just do not do it every time.

However, one of the more interesting things to take away from this is that under more normal circumstances (i.e. this hoax hadn’t been revealed) this quote would have a verifiable source and would then be worthy of inclusion into Wikipedia. For each hoax that has been revealed, it would be fascinating to know how many have not. One should note that there have been studies that indicate that Wikipedia is actually more accurate in certain areas than even the esteemed Encyclopedia Britannica, although some people, Britannica in particular, have claimed that at least one of those studies was fundamentally flawed.

Speaking of Encyclopedia Britannica as a blogger, I am given access to the content of the online site there for free. (This is actually the second reason I have encyclopedia content on my mind, since I had to renew my account this week.) However, I find myself using it exceedingly rarely. Why is that? I’m not exactly sure, but I think the primary reason is that I have to go through the trouble of logging in to the site before I can access the content. Concurrently, I also assume that its content of pop culture content is not up to snuff, so that when I want to look up something about Star Trek, as opposed to particle physics, I believe that Wikipedia will have better content. This combined with the impressive presence that Wikipedia articles have on Google searches means that I rarely ever use my Britannica account.

Another important aspect of this is that most of the Wikipedia’s work is done by people who are not paid. Volunteer who work on the site for the sheer enjoyment of it. I’m pretty confident that there are exceedingly few Britannica volunteer, so how does an online encyclopedia compete on this business model? That’s a question I’ll have to leave unanswered for now…unless it is on Wikipedia.

Newspapers and Too Little Black Ink

As the Boston Globe continues its frenzied negotiation to continue operating with the New York Times Company (Stock Symbol: NYT), the entire industry is in a state of flux. What’s the problem? As with many things in the digital age, it is too expensive to create physical objects to disseminate information, but people are very hesitant to pay for information that they can get elsewhere for free.

The most recent example of this is the folding of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Recently, there have been efforts underway by the staff of the newspaper to move the journalists to a digital format called InDenverTimes.com. After initially announcing that they wanted to obtain 50,000 premium subscribers for their venture, (note that this was at a newspaper that had a circulation at just over 200,000, so they needed a conversion rate of about 25%) they announced they were only able to obtain 3,000.

At this point the venture decided to downsize their operations, from what Poynter cited as 31 newsroom staffers and 18 contributors to a staff of 2 and no contributors. It is interesting that they have one staffer on “News/Business” and another on “Sports,” a noteworthy division of labor by itself. As the folks at Poynter point out, the previous line up was most certainly overly ambitious for what amounts to a start-up media venture. One might also notice on visiting the site is the lack of advertising. While there is an e-mail link to the advertising department at the bottom, nothing has come to fruition on the site yet.

As mentioned earlier, the industry as a whole is suffering tremendously and there are several factors, some obvious and some less so. The Internet is obviously a key component, but John C. Dvorak, a technology expert, and Marketwatch.com columnist, has an interesting argument that newspapers have become too flowery and aren’t doing enough local news. Given the pared down nature of the InDenverTimes, he might be a fan of simply having a news/business reporter and a sports reporter as the staff.

I believe that another important factor is simply a case of supply and demand. It is expensive and time-consuming to do actual reporting, while it is relatively cheap to do something like what I do. Basically, I just re-write and re-organize content that is already out there. In fact, it is so easy that there are many people (like me) who are willing to do this for free. This is where I think the enterprise of journalism is in the most trouble. There are enough people to do things that appear close enough to journalism to the average reader for free that the value derived from the customer for that information is cheapened to the point where it becomes not economically viable to create content.

I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and I acknowledge that I may, in fact, be wrong. However, I’ll leave you with one final question, how much are you willing to pay for news content today? Whatever the answer, the newspaper industry thinks it is not enough.