The News That's Fit to Tweet?

Three ways The Huffington Post flubbed their Fort Hood Twitter List implementation. My new article is live on Razorfish's Scatter/Gather.

Guidelines for Capitalizing Headings & Titles

Folks often have difficulty knowing what to capitalize when writing headings for articles or, more often in my field, slides for PowerPoint presentations, so I've put together a list of rules to help you learn how to do it. Now, if you don't know the parts of speech, admittedly, I can't help you. Here's my small contribution to reducing the agony of presentation production. Note that it applies only to the English language.

What to Capitalize in a Heading or Title When Using Initial Caps

1. ALL nouns
2. ALL pronouns
3. ALL verbs, no matter how short. That means "is" and "are" always get capitalized
4. ALL adverbs and adjectives
5. ONLY prepositions over 3 letters in length - e.g. NOT "at" or "in" but "With," "Before" and "Along"
6. ONLY articles over 3 letters in length - e.g. NOT "a," "an," "the" but "There," "This," and "That"
7. NO conjunctions under 4 letters in length - e.g. NOT "for," "and," "or," "nor," "yet", "so," or "but"
8. ALWAYS the first word, no matter what part of speech
9. ALWAYS the last word, no matter what part of speech

Confusing? Yep. English often is. But I didn't make this stuff up. I did teach it to college freshmen for a couple of years, however, so that helped drill it in. Don't take my word for it, though. Here are some further sources. I'd link to more authoritative ones like the AP or Chicago Manual of Style, but they all have their content behind pay walls.

• Government Printing Office - Style Manual
• Search Engine Journal - Title Capitalization in the English Language
• Your Dictionary - Rules for Capitalization in Titles

One final note: some sources vary as to whether prepositions should ever be capitalized. Since experts differ (this ain't uncommon in English either), I've chosen the over 4 letters route as it "just looks right" and it's what I learned and taught in college.

I'm sure this can use some refining, and I'll update it in the future accordingly. And I welcome your suggestions.

Subway Poem 10

There's a man a foot of the subway stairs,
Angular, thin, white with graying hair
All pale against the pool of blood about him
And splashed upon the wall
He has fallen

After the sirens
A woman descends the stairs slowly to help him
It seems she will never arrive

11/02/09

Subway Poem 9

Two older men on the train,
Reflecting each other across the aisle
Graying, grizzled with beards
Clothing distressed, huddling
Their belongings in bundles at their feet
Invisible to others, brothers to themselves
When one spoke, the other attended, responded
Used to being unlistened to himself

11/03/09

Symphony of Science Supergroup

So great to see someone infuse so much joy into their love of science.

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. ... We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan

CNN Camerawoman Fights Back

We Will Not Walk in Fear

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven into an age of unreason if we dig deep into our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men. 

- Edward R. Murrow

We Live in Public

Over on Razorfish's content strategy blog, my companero Rachel Lovinger and I discuss our reaction to Ondi Timoner's new documentary, We Live in Public. We IMed each other, then distilled down our conversation into a blog entry.

RIP Ted Kennedy

Quality care shouldn't depend on your financial resources, or the type of job you have, or the medical condition you face. Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.
- Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy has died of brain cancer at the age of 77. Sadly, "the liberal lion of the Senate" never saw the universal healthcare he fought so hard for come to fruition.

May the Senator's fight not have be in vain.

Related:

New York Times: "Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies"

Los Angeles Times: "Ted Kennedy is making a final press for universal healthcare, from his sickbed"

Newsweek: "The Cause of my Life" by Ted Kennedy

5 Links

Time: Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin - Exercise makes many people gain weight. That's because the eat more because they exercised. Simple really. You have to eat less. And if you drink a bottle of Gatorade after you worked out, you may as well no thave worked out. Also, rats process fat better than we humans do and consequently stay slimmer more easily. Rats. If many people read this article, it could shut down thousands of gyms.

Wired: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess - Fascinating insight into Craig Newmark and the evolution of Craiglist, a company with 30 employees, which draws more traffic than eBay (16,000 employees) and Amazon (20,0000). Also, seems a measure of their success is due to the fact that they don't give a rip about profits.

ReadWriteWeb: Google Maps Gets Smarter: Crowdsources Live Traffic Data - Google enables social driving.

Rob Report: Safety First: The Mercedes-Benz ESF 2009 - Mercedes enables social driving, too, relaying data to other cars, so they get a heads-up about upcoming road conditions.

Mother Jones: Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle - Some delicate details on the Fuji Water company and the nature of its operations in a country under a military junta. Be careful what you sip!

Happy Mirth Day

We have Independence day in July, Labor Day coming up in September, but my good friend Jack Dillard - writer, poet, photographer extraordinairre, points out the sad fact: we don't have a holiday in August. Therefore, he's suggesting one. And if you're going to have a holiday between two such serious ones, why not something more frivilous, something fun. He's suggesting Mirth Day.As any 21st-century advocate worth his salt would do, Jack has set up a site with more info, including an exhortation to petition your elected officials.

Says Jack, "Join me in observing Mirth Day, a celebration of laughter and levity on the last Friday in August, the birth month of great American humorists, comedians, actors, and cartoonists, including Garrison Keillor, Steve Martin, Lucille Ball, Gary Larson, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Walt Kelly, Martin Mull, Buddy Hackett, Dave Chappelle, R. Crumb, Pee Wee Herman, and Chris Tucker." That's a whole lotta humor.

For more information, contact Jack Dillard at jack@happymirthday.com or 704-301-4317.

Hero of the Moment: Barney Frank

I often enjoy Barney Frank's unguarded and incisive way of getting to the point. But this moment when he responds abruptly to a heckling protestor, who doesn't have her facts straight, seems destined to go down in political history. It may even prove to be a watershed moment in the fight for universal healthcare.

"My question to you is, why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?" the woman asked Frank.

"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" an incredulous Frank rhetorically replied, indignantly adding "You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis....Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

Of course, the fact that Mr. Frank has a Jewish heritage and may take allegations of nazism quite seriously seemed entirely lost on the woman.

A couple more great Barney Frank moments:

After the Senate aprroved a 105.9 billion wartime spending bill a couple of months ago, Frank chastised both sides and expressed his dismay with social networking:

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.

A couple of months before that, Frank accused Republicans of not supporting a bill because if it passed, they'd miss something to be outraged about:

They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won't be able to be outraged anymore.

Subway Poem 8

When two trains follow each other
beneath the ground,
the impact for a moment is such that
We are each human fish in an aquarium
staring across the few scant feet
to the human fish in the aquarium
just beyond our group
but eternally out of touch
before slipping up and away into the darkness.

8/4

Trust but Verify

I have a new essay up on Razorfish's content strategy blog Scatter/Gather, entitled "Blinded by Content Bliss." In it, I argue for more care in verifying the authenticity of user-generated content before incorporating it into a site. The national media showed us how not to this recently when covering the election in Iran. Since that country's government keeps a tight reign on information, the media had to resort to broadcasting a lot of user-created content in the form of Flickr images, tweets and blog entries. Of course, some of this material did prove excellent, but all too often we started seeing the media backpeddling on content they'd already aired. Not a good for journalism. And not a good practice for any of us as content disseminators either. I offer some simple principles in how to avoid reproducing poorly-sourced content - and plain old fabrications.

You'd think these principles would be common sense, but with 28% of Republicans still believing Obama may not have born in the United States--due to the spread of this very sort of poorly sourced information--well, you'd be wrong.

Two more of my recent pieces:

"Cultivating Effective User-Generated Content," With Bob Maynard, Razorfish.com, July 2009 [pdf]

"Crowdsourcing Content," Scatter/Gather, April 22, 2009

Send to Trash After Reading

The last two years, I've reviewed a book of the year's best technology writing. If I could vote on entries for this year's, I'd have to include this New Yorker piece by Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. In it, he explains how the Kindle is still light years away from providing a superlative reading experience. Some consider Baker a bit of a neo-Luddite, but I can't sling that pejorative at such a good writer - especially since by the article's end, he does recommend using the iPhone with the Kindle app, as well as several other apps.

The whole article's definitely worth a read, but I found this section in particular on the experience of reading The New York Times on the Kindle particularly telling.

The real flurry over the new DX, though, has to do with the fate of newspapers. The DX offers more than twice as much Vizplex as the Kindle 2—about half the area of a piece of letter-size paper—enough, some assert, to reaccustom Web readers to paying for the digital version of, say, the Times, thereby rescuing daily print journalism from financial ruin. “With Kindle DX’s large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever,” according to Amazon’s Web site.

It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren’t there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times—Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin’s resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson’s funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees—were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven’t managed to find them (they’re available free on the Times Web site); the July 9th Kindle issue lacked the print edition’s reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20th and 21st: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

Emphasis mine.

None of this is to say that the Kindle (or, more accurately, the e-reader) isn't a revolutionary device. But sometimes we can get so caught up cheering on the technology that we overlook its obvious deficiencies.

Also,

• New York mag article in which Lane Brown guesstimates Baker's expenses for the piece, only to be corrected by him in comments.
• Stephen Johnson's more positive forecast for the impact of the e-reader on the future of books in April 20th's Wall Street Journal. He concludes, "We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?"
• On the Media podcast from May 8, 2009 on a Senate committee hearing on the "Future of Journalism."

Image above from my Flickr stream