Mitch Joel says there’s never been a better time to start your own blog. Technorati says in its State of the Blogosphere/2008 report that “blogging is not dead” and “blogs are here to stay.” The report also notes that bloggers have been at it a average of three years and are collectively creating close to [...]
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Just say no
I scared myself last week by turning down two jobs. Two! Before you wonder how well my brain is functioning, let me tell you why I turned away work, and why you should seriously consider doing the same when you have the option. Both jobs had unreasonable deadlines; I would have had to drop everything [...]
Make it easy to do business
Jakob Nielsen’s September 15th Alertbox talks about store locators on web sites, where he says “it must be not only possible to accomplish the task, but also easy and pleasant to do so.” Good advice. I’ve run into sites before where it’s easy to find the locator and it pulls up all the necessary information [...]
Weed out weasel words
Having just edited a client’s news release, I found David Meerman Scott’s recent post on weasel words, gobbledygook, jargon and other baloney quite topical! (Check it out for some awful examples of what not to write.) The release I worked on started out in the classic dreadful style: “[Client name] [stock symbol], [standard long, jargon-filled [...]
5 steps to keep paying the rent
Don’t you almost hate to open a newspaper, watch the news or check your stocks these days? The bad news is unrelenting. Formerly solid companies going bust. Layoffs. Gasoline prices through the roof. Catastrophic weather. It’s definitely an uncertain world we live in. But is it time for independents to worry? It may not be [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Tagged Freelance writing, The independent life Leave a comment
Sesame Street rules at clever writing
One of the great things about having small children is watching Sesame Street. My children loved that show for the funny puppets and silly sketches. I loved it for the way it made learning fun, and because the writers did crazy things that made parents as well as children laugh, and did clever things referencing [...]
Say what you mean
(I posted this earlier today, but a hard drive failure on the server hosting my site washed it away. So apologies if it shows up twice. To make up, I’ve added two bonus errors!) We all make mistakes, but in this business, you need to work hard to keep the error rate down. Here are [...]
Straw to gold in 5 steps
Last week, I was juggling several different articles for two different employee publications. One memorable piece started off with three interviews, four people to quote and three pages of notes. I had 1,500 words to boil down into 500, a process I like to call spinning straw into gold. If you’re faced with a similar [...]
Fun words
From the always amusing WordSpy and BuzzWhack: Defriend/de-friend: To remove a person from one’s list of friends on a social networking site Foodprint: Growing your own food, shopping local, eating in season. Social notworking: Surfing a social networking site instead of working. PowerPoint singalong: A presentation read verbatim from the slides without observations, comments or [...]
