Mea Culpa

Welcome to my testimony.

When you correct someone's grammar, or point out a misspelling or errant apostrophe, you give permission for the rest of the world to scrutinize your own work ten-fold. Such is the case in my blog post below, where I repeated a word and had a missing comma. Two words were also run together. In other words, it was the 'touche' moment every editor/writer/word person has, and hates.

For this class I'm taking on digital brands/media, we are to produce a blog. Me being who I am, I must include some rantings about grammar or design. It's what I do. Or did, but whatever.

In the spirit of admitting mistakes -- and internet transparency -- I've corrected my blog below. I'm human, though sometimes I don't like to admit it. See a typo here? Let me know, and take some satisfaction in knowing you brought about the next set of red edit marks.

Enjoy!

Two out of three is pretty bad

So I read three articles today. One discussed the differences among Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress, which was concise and useful. It's the type of article we would have run in the Features section of the paper where I used to work. "Chunky type," some called it -- our editors loved the idea. It brought in the kids, they said. There wasn't much to it, but there didn't need to be.

The second and third took opposite stands; one said blogging is somewhat dying out, its audience marching to social media sites like Twitter. The other said blogging isn't dead so much as it is reverting back to its origin of niche topics. Both had their points, but ultimately I think the in-the-industry writers (i.e. not the <added a space!> 18- to 22-year-olds who are still in college) should reconsider saying "blogging is dead"dead, and rather revisit and redefine what blogging is.

What irked me: In two of the three of these articles, there were typos and/or grammatical errors. Yes, blogging may not be dead and may indeed be going back to the smaller niche areas of expertise where it began, but lordy, you undermine what you're trying to put out there when it's dotted with bad punctuation or misused words.

Edited to add the sentiment that it's hard to be both writer and copy editor.

A is also for Apple

I've always used the Internet as a tool. I use it, I expect it to have what I want, and I get frustrated when what I want isn't accessible in two minutes or less. And after reading Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, it seems I'm not in the minority. These were the longest articles I've read on the Internet in I don't know how long. And that's kind of sad considering I'm former newspaper person who encouraged reporters to turn in a shorter version of their stories for the paper and a longer (more golden wordy) version for online.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think I fall on the side of Anderson, who argues narrow and niched apps will overtake the openness of the Web.  With Wednesday's resignation of Steve Jobs, Apple -- with its app-driven gadget empire -- will be the company to watch in the coming year. Will its brand suffer from a changing of the guard, or will it be improved with its new, though handpicked by Jobs himself, leader at the helm? Will we see an iPhone 5 this fall? These are the questions.


Awesome: Self realization. The scholarly part of me -- albeit a small one -- sighs a bit when thinking about how instant-gratificationed we've become. I'm just as guilty as the rest, but I truly believe lounging with a good book and burying my iPhone deep away restores part of my over media-ed soul. So, on a trip I'm taking this weekend, I'll be sure and pack a good book to help foster the kind of reading Carr describes in his concluding graphs as, " ... valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds."

Not Awesome, a sidenote: From a former newspaper designer's standpoint, I found the Anderson-Wolff article difficult to read mainly because of its presentation. Do I read all of one side, then the other?  What's up with the horizontal red lines breaking up the story -- are these different sections, or merely there to break up the sections for Internet readers? Do I go section by section reading left, then right? Don't make me think about how to read your article, Wired. Design it so that thought never even occurs to me.