Scott Berkun in The idiot theory of news:

Non-news, news without context, is easy to generate. It takes less skill as a journalist to write these stories. Often these stories are more popular than better written stories about important things. The popular news is not the best news. The popular anything is rarely the best anything. The way we see the world is shaped by what sells best as news, rather than what will give us a realistic perspective on the world and our place in it.

(link via @iamFinch)

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the data mining of e-book reading habits. In Your E-Book Is Reading You they discuss, for example, what Barnes & Noble has learned from Nook data:

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

The article goes on to discuss how publishers are now using this kind of data to guide everything from the subject matter to the length of future publications. The whole thing makes me a little uncomfortable — I think I agree with Mr. Galassi here:

Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. “The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn’t have anything to do with,” says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “We’re not going to shorten ‘War and Peace’ because someone didn’t finish it.”

I realize there is a hint of hypocrisy in my feelings about data-driven book publishing. As a practitioner of user-centered design I am a big proponent of data-driven decisions (this presentation by Joshua Porter is a constant companion). But this feels different. I guess I’m worried that publishing books with the explicit purpose of satisfying some imaginary, averaged-out reader drone will pull us all towards a safe middle ground where no risk is allowed.

In my version of a nightmare scenario, my 2-year old daughter will be awash in Dora the Explorer books with no access to dangerous, crazy stories like Oh, The Places You’ll Go or Where The Wild Things Are. I don’t think a data-driven approach to publishing would have let those books see the light, and that would have been a tragedy.

Here’s to writers who take risks.

Oliver Reichenstein takes on the tendency to put social media sharing buttons all over a site in Sweep the Sleaze. This part in particular is something I’ve thought about as well:

If readers are too lazy to copy and paste the URL, and write a few words about your content, then it is not because you lack these magical buttons. If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it — Oliver’s team just did a gorgeous redesign of their iA site. Be sure to check out his post Responsive Typography, which goes into some of the details.

Jon Kolko goes on an full-scale assault against online advertising in a post for the Austin Center for Design called Advertising Is The Problem. I am no fan of the advertising model myself, but Jon paints a post-apocolyptically grim picture of what’s to come:

I’ve seen the future, and it’s awful. It’s The Shallows: In the future, you’ll only see the things that are most likely to get you to buy. Everywhere. All the time. It’s an internet of consumption, based on an algorithmic profile of everything you’ve done, and it’s constantly selling, selling, selling. It’s pervading into real life, through targeted and adaptable advertising on digital billboards, physical computing, mobility solutions, kiosks, digital product placement, taxi flat screens, in-flight entertainment, and on, and on. Ther’s no conversation. It’s not engaging. It’s consumptive. It’s mindless. And it’s happening all around us.

I am (slightly) less bleak on this topic — I think there is enough evidence of content creators selling their goods directly to their readers/listeners/viewers that we’ll start seeing a slow but steady shift away from traditional online advertising. See Chris Wolff’s The Facebook Fallacy for some commentary on that point, as well as a follow-up from Doc Searls called After Facebook fails, where he makes this statement against the traditional advertising model:

The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways. That is, to improve the ability of demand to drive supply, and not to constantly goose up supply to drive demand, and failing 99.x% of the time.

Ironically, Doc is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which Jon Kolko uses to set up his own post.

Anyway, I think viewpoints like Jon’s are important — whether we agree with them or not. They force us to think about how we spend our time, and how we can contribute to preventing those negative visions of the future from occurring.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states the following:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

Ian Betteridge explains his theory as follows:

The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

Betteridge’s point is that if a story had enough proof and citations, the headline would be assertive. Consider the latest story on TechCrunch, as of this writing: “Warren Buffett Is A Punk”. Regardless of its journalistic appeal, doesn’t that sound much better than “Is Warran Buffett A Punk?”. Headlines end in question marks when the authors want to retain a certain measure of deniability if their story turns out to be false (“Will iOS 6 Be Able To Make You Coffee?”).

However, lately these headlines have morphed into something beyond just a mixture of deniability and laziness: pure link bait. Consider a few randomly selected headlines from the last week:

• Should Celebrities Create Their Own Branded Social Networks?
• Could in-store navigation tech be a shopper’s worst nightmare?
• Samsung Galaxy S III: Is the Screen Its Achilles Heel?

The idea is to get people interested enough to click through, and then make them scroll past the ads until the answer (usually, “no”) is revealed in the last paragraph. It’s effective, but I just don’t think it should be done. Unfortunately I don’t have a business reason for my opinion, but I do have a reader reason.

I believe in respecting your audience’s intelligence, and not wasting their time. I believe in stating an article’s thesis and/or purpose clearly in the title, and trusting that if it’s interesting enough, the people you want on your site will click through and read it.

So, is it time to stop writing headlines that end in question marks? I’m going to break Betteridge’s Law and say, unequivocally, yes.

Jason Fried in Why is Business Writing So Awful?, a good post on caring about the words you use to describe your product:

Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler - “stuff” that takes up space on a page. Words expand to occupy blank space in a business much as spray foam insulation fills up cracks in your house. Harsh? Maybe. True? Read around a bit, and I think you’ll agree.

I’ve had quite a few questions about my reading/sharing/writing workflow in recent months, so I thought I’d write down what I do just in case it has some broader appeal. In this post I will outline the process and tools I use for reading on the web (and taking action on the good stuff). We all have to find our own way on the web, of course, but maybe there’s something here that resonates.

First, it’s important to say a little bit about why I spend so much time tweaking and improving this workflow. All of the process work is just a means to an end. And the end is to never stop learning new things. I like how Michael Schechter puts it in Finding Your Passion For Learning:

Today, I read more than I ever have before. Today, I crave new topics to dive into. Today, I love learning more than I have any time of my life. While I’m not always the best at learning what I should, I’m continually discovering and constantly seeking new ideas.

I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. I read so much because I’m incapable of keeping my curiosity at bay. What ultimately drives me is a need to get better at what I do because I know I still have so much to learn.

So, let’s get to it. My workflow has two main phases, and I’ll discuss each in detail:

1. Inflow is about the process of finding and reading good articles on the web.
2. Outflow is about choosing the most appropriate ways to save and/or share the good stuff.

Inflow

As the old saying goes: Garbage In, Garbage Out. We are in a period of constant content bombardment, and unless we find ways to focus only on things that are worth our time, we’re going to be lost at sea. The process for disseminating good content is actually pretty easy once you get into a groove. It’s finding the right things to read that is the constant struggle. I use two main sources for finding things to read, and both requires continuous tweaking.

RSS feeds

RSS is dead, apparently. Well, maybe if you have 80,000 followers on Twitter and only care about major tech stories that’s true. But I don’t have that many sources following me, and I care about too many off-the-highway things to be able to rely solely on Twitter for news. If I only relied on Twitter, I most likely wouldn’t see posts from authors I love who only post infrequently.

I use Reeder on Mac and iOS devices to keep up with the feeds I subscribe to. I spend quite a bit of time adding new feeds and removing feeds I’m no longer interested in. I organize feeds in folders like Design, User Experience, and Coding. I also have two folders with must-read blogs that are always at the top: Favorite tech and Favorite Design and UX. These are the folders I make sure I check in on if I don’t have a lot of time. There’s a lot of churn as I learn more about what I like and read - I add and remove feeds in these two folders all the time.

Twitter

I envy people who treat Twitter like a river they can just dip their toes into every once in a while. I get nervous if I miss a few tweets, so I’m not able to follow more than about 250 people. This isn’t personal, it’s just how I choose to use the service. I like the way Chris Bowler puts it:

One fact that I do my best to keep in mind is this: there are two very different ways to use Twitter. Option A is as a social tool to interact and joke around with others, to connect. Option B is to use it as a source of sharing information, usually in the form of links to content or pithy blurbs of opinion.

Some people like the service for one, but not the other. Some people manage to strike a lovely, harmonious balance between the two. The catch is that ”” in my opinion ”” we mostly want to follow folks who use the service in the same way we do.

I use Twitter mostly for Option B, so those are the kind of people I follow. So, even though I do a little less shuffling on Twitter than I do on my RSS feeds, I do make some changes once in a while to adjust the type of content that comes into my stream. I also use Twitter lists extensively, mostly to keep up with people who are Option B users but extremely frequent updaters (and therefore too noisy for my main stream).

I use the official Twitter app on Mac, and Tweetbot on iOS devices.

Outflow

Once I see an article in RSS or on Twitter that might be interesting, a very specific workflow kicks into gear as I decide what to do next.

Read it later

If I don’t have time to read an article right away, I use Instapaper to save it for later reading. From RSS, Reeder has easy shortcuts to send articles to Instapaper. On Twitter I just favorite the tweet, and then there’s an If This Then That Recipe that automatically sends the link in the tweet to Instapaper. I could send the link directly to Instapaper from within the app, but I like to save the entire tweet so that I can credit the source if I end up doing something with that content. Attribution is really important to me.

Read it now

I usually spend about 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night just reading and catching up. This happens either in Reeder, or in Instapaper.

Save permanently

Whenever I read something I like, I save it to Pinboard immediately. Both Reeder and Instapaper have Pinboard integration, so this is a really easy process.

I have a paid archive account on Pinboard that enables additional features like full-text search and cached copies of articles. Seriously, everything in this workflow revolves around Pinboard. I’d be lost without it. It’s a safety net of epic proportions. I go there to look for articles I vaguely remember reading and suddenly need, and it’s constantly in use when I’m writing longform pieces (like this one). If there is such a thing as a hub in this little process of mine, Pinboard would be it.

(Yes, I’m a fan.)

Do something

Once an article is in Pinboard, I do one of four things with it.

1. Do nothing

If it’s just an article I’m saving for reference, or a new method I want to try at work, I move on and don’t do anything else with the article. I might come back to it later when I’m writing something or in need of a refresher on a new design technique, but I’d say I do nothing more for about 50% of the articles I save to Pinboard.

My Pinboard saved links are all private, but if you’re interested you can get access to the private RSS feed by becoming a member of Elezea.

2. Share on Twitter

If I think an article will have broad appeal I share it on Twitter. I usually do this with Buffer. The main use case for Buffer is to queue tweets for sending at specified times, but I use it mostly with the handy “Post now” link in the Chrome bookmarklet as well as the iPhone app.

I use Buffer as my tweet app of choice because it’s the only one I’ve found that allows me to send an article’s title and custom bitly-shortened URL from Chrome or mobile Safari directly to the app for easy posting.

The only exception to this is when I read something right away in Reeder and want to share it. Reeder has really good Twitter integration with custom bitly links as well (only on iOS though - for some reason the Desktop app doesn’t allow you to use your bitly Pro account, so you can’t track your links easily).

3. Share on Tumblr

If I want to share a short quote or photo that’s not directly related to what I write about on this blog, it goes to the B-sides. I use the standard Tumblr browser bookmarklet for sharing.

4. Share on Elezea

If it’s something I’d like to add some thoughts to it goes on this blog. There’s probably an 80/20 split between quick link posts and more substantive articles like this one. I don’t know if that’s the right split, so I’d love to get some feedback - let me know if you’d like to see more/less of something.

My writing workflow is probably worthy of a post on its own, but in short, here are the apps I use:

• I use MarsEdit to post to Wordpress. For link posts there’s a very handy browser bookmarklet that grabs the currently highlighted text and adds all the information you need to just start writing.
• Instapaper recently added support for Simplenote, which in turn syncs with nvALT on the Mac. So more and more I find myself highlighting something in Instapaper on iOS, creating a new Simplenote text note, and then completing the post in nvALT on the Mac.
• I use iA Writer for longer posts.
• I write exclusively in Markdown. I use MarsEdit to post Markdown directly to Wordpress, and the PHP Markdown plugin converts it to HMTL on the site. This means that I almost never see the Wordpress Dashboard. Which is awesome.

And that’s it. Reading through this again, it suddenly looks complicated. So if you have any suggestions to improve the process, please let me know via email or on Twitter.

Here’s to learning.

Maureen Johnson on the current state of eBook pricing:

It’s coming down to a lot of bedrock issues about how you VALUE things in general. What’s the VALUE in paying more? What should electronic items cost if the physical value is largely held in the device? How do we maintain a thriving literary life in the face of these new developments? Is this a sign that publishing is an outmoded business of “gatekeepers,” or is this a rallying point to stand up and say w’re willing to pay more for things that are of value to us? 

There is no word other than delightful to describe this post. Ok, maybe informative will do as well. Also, it could do with a little less screaming in all caps. Other than that, it’s perfect.

Jon Mitchell in Websites Have to Get Better:

Read-later apps are competition for noisy, ad-ridden websites. They represent a simple fact: Users hate our sites.

Websites should think of Instapaper as competition. People are spending their reader-experience (RX?) dollars elsewhere, period. They don’t want to pay publisher sites with impressions on ads they don’t value, so they pay Marco Arment for a better reading experience. If publishers want to get those RX dollars, they have to deliver a great experience Instapaper can’t provide. It’s pure and simple competition.

I agree with the conclusion that web sites have to provide better reading experiences. But I don’t agree with the causal relationship being drawn with Read Later apps.

First, the main purpose of Read Later apps is revealed right there in the name: they’re for reading things”¦ later. So even though some people probably use the Instapaper web view to read articles immediately without ads, my guess is that most people use it to save articles for later reading.

What the DVR does for TV shows, Instapaper does for articles. And just like with a DVR, you get to skip the ads - but that’s just a wonderful, added bonus. The real benefit is having a place to store and watch/read all the things you want to get to without being bound to the time and place where you first discovered it. This means that if major ad-supported sites start to provide better reading experiences, I won’t suddenly stop using Instapaper. The need to save articles for later reading would remain. This brings me to my second point.

The reason web sites have to provide a better reading experience is not because Read Later apps are their competition, but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s how you show that you value and respect your readers.

From Game of Thrones: How HBO and Showtime make money despite low ratings:

On the networks and basic cable, shows are a delivery vehicle for advertising””and if a program doesn’t attract a big enough audience for those ads, the consequences are clear: It’s pulled from the schedule, and a new show is dropped into the time slot. On those channels, viewer is just another word for person who sees a commercial.

This is contrasted with the subscription model that premium channels like HBO and Showtime use:

The premium networks are in the business of selling subscriptions. A Showtime spokeswoman told me that the channel’s goal is to satisfy subscribers and to entice non-subscribers to sign up. They keep their customers happy by allowing them to watch original TV series, exclusive movies, and sports programming whenever they want to.

I’m pretty sure you know where I’m going with this, but the situation is analogous to what we see in online publishing today. Ad-supported sites aim to rack up all the “eyeballs” in the world so that they can be resold to advertisers. Subscription-based sites aim to satisfy their readers by providing great content that will, in turn, entice more non-subscribers to sign up.