E-newsletters a great tool
While Facebook and Twitter continue to get all the press, email newsletters just keep building their solid reputation. In fact, they are “the Internet’s best tool for supplementing a website,” according to web usability expert Jakob Nielsen:...Funny but dubious honour
Leave it to the British to give an award for Bad Sex in Fiction! The 18th annual (dis)honour, given out last night, went to Rowan Somerville for his novel The Shape of Her. Somerville won over the judges with phrases such as the one describing an act of lovemaking as...Where are the proofreaders?
Yesterday, a headline in a prominent newspaper boldly proclaimed that the Saudi king was handing over the reigns while he was in the U.S. for treatment. Since a king only has one reign, and he holds it whether he’s in the U.S. or not, I thought at first maybe...
Drop the dictionary; choose words that communicate
The author of one of my textbooks must be a friend of the magniloquent (see below) Conrad Black, or maybe a contributor to the harder levels of FreeRice.com. I say that because the text is sprinkled with so many obscure, unusual, “look how smart I am” kinds of words....
Corporatespeak for ‘axed’ doesn’t hide the truth
Nobody believes a corporate announcement* that an executive has left to “pursue other opportunities,” so why do companies continue to pretend that they don’t fire people? Sometimes the person’s “contract has not been renewed” or he...Blogs still going strong
Hobbyists, or people who express their personal musings online as a hobby, make up the “backbone” (64%) of the blogging world, according to Technorati’s 2010 State of the blogosphere, which covered 7,200 bloggers. Self-employeds, like me, make up the...Salary survey shows women lag; indies a bargain
Two things jumped out at me about the 2009 IABC/Canada online salary survey*: 1. “Nationally speaking, men do appear to make more on average than women.” According to the survey, the mean (essentially the average) yearly salary / median (the middle-most value when the...