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| April 22, 2007 |
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Welcome Action Plan
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Introduction: I'm Penney Kome and the Editor of Straight Goods I have been a professional writer since 1971, and have published six non-fiction books and hundreds of periodical articles since then. I bought my first computer in 1982, starting filing stories computer-to-computer in the early 1990s, and got my first email account in 1995. Now I'd like to learn about who you are,
in this room today, and what you would like to get from this workshop.
Here is the menu I suggest: 1. Using the web for creating your work:
Google is the best-known search engine, but there are many others. Journalismnet offers several excellent tutorials, including one on how to use the different search engines. Journalismnet also provides links to newspapers and periodicals around the world. Sometimes you need to find real live people to interview. If you have a specific topic in mind, you can often find people who are discussing it on Google Groups, (which was formerly the Usenet) or on email lists. Try CataList, the official catalogue of 56,357 public LISTSERV lists. Both of these are searchable databases: you can type in "World War I", or "dogs", or your last name, and see if anyone is discussing the topic. There are also scads of genealogy sites, lists and groups, that can help locate people or their descendants. Also consider collections of links, such as the Straight Goods Useful URLs. I've put my favorite Online Tools in a section by that name. b) Once you find people, you can correspond by email. If you need to look up phone numbers or street addresses, try the online phone directories, such as 411.com or canada411.com You can also use these websites for reverse look-up -- if you have a phone number but no name, often you can find the name and address through a reverse look-up. c) Most museums now offer information about their collections online. See the Virtual Library of Museums for the worldwide round-up, or the Virtual Museum of Canada for the national round-up. d) Similarly, libraries are offering their catalogues online. Check LibWeb, the Global Directory of Library Servers for libraries at a distance or in other languages. Libraries often offer reference services that can help you pinpoint when events where reported in local newspapers. Then you can find the newspapers through Journalismnet (above) or refdesk.com and order up the article you want, usually for a nominal fee. e) The Web is very useful for compiling grant applications - you can find and quote actual prices for airfares and accommodations. Obviously, you can also compare prices and arrange real travel too, either directly, or through sites like Travelocity or Priceline. f) More and more websites like Mozy now let you backup your work online. Mozy says it provides up to 2 GB free of charge. Some people find it easier to upload than to copy to a disc or flash drive. g) If you don't like slide shows, such
as Power Point, you can upload your presentations to the Web and they will
be accessible to you from wherever you can get access to a computer.
2. Using the web for building your professional profile a) In my view, the single most important place to put your name online is as an entry in Wikipedia If you have created a significant body of work, then you deserve your own entry in this universal encyclopedia. It's widely trusted and is often the first source that people check. b) I think it is very useful to have a personal website as an online résumé. If you hire somebody to make one for you, you should not pay more than $30 - $50 an hour. And there are more and more places online that offer very good pre-made websites for cheap. I built my personal website and the cnfc website using Netscape Composer, which comes bundled with Netscape 4.79. But here are a couple of websites I created more recently, using the Web hosts' templates. Here is a conference and legal reference website for the 25th anniversary of the Women's Constitutional Conference: and here is a memorial website for my stepfather. Not only are these fast and easy and affordable
to build, they also take care of the webweaver's bane -- link rot -- and
the adhoc25.org site comes bundled with extras like a huge mailing
list capacity. Some of the Web hosts that offer affordable
templates are Freeservers.com
,
Hostdepartment.com
and Homestead.com
Hostdepartment.com and Homestead.com are actually designed for small businesses,
and offer the option of shopping carts and credit card payments, if you
want to sell articles or stories online. The #1 commercial application
on the Web is -- selling information.
c) More and more writers are turning to blogs. I'm not that taken with blogs, because in my view, it amounts to writing for free, and I don't have a lot of free time. However, what I find exciting about blogs is that the drift towards Web 2.0 produces a product that looks very much like a personal website and offers more flexibility. Like Hostdepartment and Homestead, these blogs hold all the necessary software on the Web, not on your home computer. You can update from wherever you happen to be, if you are traveling. And if your hard drive crashes, the blog/website is safe. Two interesting examples of blogs are Christopher Moore's "history news" blog, and Stephen Leahy's environmental journalism blog. Chris is using blogger.com , which is a fairly recent merger of blogger and blogspot.com, under the ownership of Google. He says that he finds Blogger fairly easy to use. I haven't had much success with it, but then I haven't been able to set aside more than 30 minutes to try to work with it. Stephen uses wordpress.com which in some ways is a more congenial mileu for a serious writer -- the categories actually include "News" and not just entertainment gossip -- but I found (and Chris agrees) that wordpress software can be cranky and buggy. Some people generate a bit of income through
their blogs or websites by allowing Google to place ads on them, or by
joining affiliate programs such as Amazon or Abebooks. I haven't heard
of anyone who actually got rich this way. My instinct would be to avoid
ads whenever possible, to preserve the professional appearance. In
case you were wondering, the social networking sites are mostly aimed at
younger folks. Facebook and the Canadian equivalent, Nexopia, are mainly
for young adults who want to keep in touch with their high school friends.
Myspace, my kids say, is for rock bands.
d) You can build your profile and protect your copyright through enforcement. Go ego surfing regularly to find out who is using your work, or citing your name. Just type your name into Google, and scroll down at least four pages. When you find an unauthorized use, send them an email with a bill. If they refuse to respond, and if you're an Access Copyright affiliate, you can ask Access Copyright to follow up. e) For contacting people who might be hostile,
or for signing on to commercial sites that might generate spam, it's always
useful to have a throwaway email address (or two). Many of my friends who
travel or relocate frequently swear by Gmail.
A Gmail account has almost unlimited capacity, good spam protection, and
it's searchable. The downside is that, of course, Google has sworn to collect
all the information in the world. So far, Google does seem to respect clients'
privacy. (Unlike, say, AOL, which revealed a sailor's sexual orientation
to his superiors.) Yahoo.com mail offers a good alternative.
3. Writing for the Internet a) Straight up writing online is a different style of writing from writing for print. Conventional wisdom says that you have 14 seconds to grab the reader's attention before they click on. Wordsmith and the Online Journalism Review have good guidelines for adapting your writing to the Web. Some writers have used the medium to create non-linear stories, or to incorporate visual art or music. Ashok Mathur's Foundland is one example. Tech-Head has a page full of links to multi-media stories online. b) Unfortunately, there usually is not much money in creative writing online. There are indeed job-auction sites like elance.com, guru.com , and mediabistro.com but unlike eBay, where prices go higher and higher, these sites encourage writers to underbid each other for jobs. And while they offer hundred or thousands of listings, most of the jobs put out to tender have budgets under $250. EG, mediabistro.com lists >1700 media jobs in US - most not writing. guru.com lists ~590 website writing or editing gigs, mostly US, mostly paying <$250. c) In the Web world, the most-wanted topics
tend to be TECHNICAL, health, and parenting.
d) The Internet does offer a chance for writers to control the means of production, through Print On Demand services such as lulu.com. lulu.com prints up books one at a time and ships them directly to the customer. The site also sells documents as e-books, at whatever price you set (including, free). All you have to do is provide a .pdf of file a formatted work, which might be an out-of-print book (assuming you have the publishers confirmation that rights have reverted to you). When and if E-books ever make the breakthrough to the broad popular market, a distributor like lulu.com has huge potential. e) Writersweekly.com sends out a weekly newletter which lists writing markets, some of which look worthwhile. It's a good newsletter too, chatty, full of personality, and with some good tips. Writersweekly also buys uplifting articles about the writing life, for nominal fees. f) Some people do make a living by writing very focused newsletters, on topics such as investing, or recipes, or surviving as a writer. In general, I haven't heard many good reports about people earning money from sites like about.com or suite 101.com They are often very good reference sites that attract very knowledgeable writers, but I just haven't heard of any "editors" who have earned enough to be able to quit their day jobs. The Internet -- it's a tool, it's a place,
it's a new medium. Hope this guide has been helpful.
By the way -- Webheads are always speculating and comparing notes about what the "killer applications" on the Web are, the software programs that become almost universal and that literally change people's lives. Here's my list of the top five killer apps. 1. Email
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