August, 2006

No me llames extranjero, porque haya nacido lejos
o porque tenga otro nombre, la tierra de donde vengo.
No me llames extranjero, porque fue distinto el seno
o porque acunó mi infancia, otro idioma de los cuentos.

No me llames extranjero, ni pienses de dónde vengo
mejor saber dónde vamos, a dónde nos lleva el tiempo.
No me llames extranjero, porque tu pan y tu fuego
calman mi hambre y mi frío, y me cobija tu techo.

¡No!
No me llames extranjero,
traemos el mismo grito
el mismo cansancio viejo que viene arrastrando el
hombre desde el fondo de los tiempos,
cuando no existían fronteras, antes que vinieran ellos,
los que dividen y matan
los que roban, los que mienten
los que venden nuestros sueños.

Ellos son los que inventaron esta palabra: Extranjero.

Dell doesn’t think like their users think. When you go to their website, the first question they ask is what kind of buyer you are: home, small business, large business, etc. I don’t know what I am! I guess I’m a small business, but home systems are usually cheaper, and I usually like to buy top of the line PCs, so maybe I need the Big Business section. This distinction is completely lost on me.

I want a PC. What difference does it make whether I’m a home buyer or a small business buyer? I suspect that they are asking me this because they want to charge businesses more than homes, and large businesses even more. To defeat their system, I choose “home.”

Dell has what is probably the most visitor-centric site of all the computer manufacturers. For years now they have built a homepage that holds back on saying, “Look at us, we’re great.” Instead they devote a significant part of the page to an area where visitor can self-select.

The design and text on the page immediately recognizes that some people are looking for home computers, while others are looking for networks for local government offices. Both audiences and more are addressed. The Dell.com page says, in effect, “Yes, you’re
in the right place. Yes, we can help you. Yes, self-identify and please click here so we can help you find exactly what you need.”

If you want to share an anecdote or story from your life, pretend the readers weren’t there. Because they weren’t. “You had to be there” never makes a joke funny.

Readers crave your anecdotes and stories. They really do. So give ‘em the whole megillah. Instead of, “The party was a riot!” or “I’m depressed today,” carefully explain why. Elaborate. Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both.

Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they’re going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven’t showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. One–liners won’t suffice.

At the same time, you don’t want to over–explain yourself. Understatement can be thunderous, or humorous, or heartbreaking. Or all three.

Google is undoubtedly having an impact on the evolution of the English language. I’d be surprised if the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary don’t have a secret threshold number of hits needed for new words to become official. “Blog” was recently added (3.7 million Google hits). I’m sure “Findability” is next (3,690 Google hits). Google is changing authority in ways we don’t fully understand.

As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.

And in the context of e-commerce, I’m fascinated and encouraged by the ability of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Epinions to empower and inform consumers, increasing pressure on companies to build better products.

Interestingly, these reviews are driven by participation economies that reward the Top Reviewers^AM with attention and trust. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner^AM, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.

[Inside Friendster] there have also been Fakesters, evidence of how contemporary Americans crave connectedness. Users composed profiles for their pets (and then connected their pets), their colleges (and then connected to their alma maters) and household odds and ends (and then watched the conversation that developed between “salt” and “pepper”). To Ms. [danah] boyd it was interesting not only because people played with identity, but also because of the range of reasons they did so.

Apparently Friendster management could conceive of only one reason: to subvert the site. So it began terminating the Fakesters. That set off a Fakester revolution, complete with a manifesto: ”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all fakesters and real people are created equal.”

Why do people use Google Maps? Because it’s just so nice to use. Microsoft’s Terraserver gave users access to high resolution satellite images many years before Google Maps did the same. (In fact, while attempting to be clever, I inadvertently terrified my to-be roommate: I used the service to view an aerial photograph of his home and asked him some leading questions about the stuff in his backyard. It took until the second quarter of college before he even talked to me, and then only warily.) But, it wasn’t until Google rethought online maps that the security and privacy issues of such a service came into the national conscience. Why? Because whereas Microsoft had given access to satellite imagery, Google made them accessible.

[Bracket Notation for Editing is] simply three sets of square brackets. The first set denotes deletion, the second set denotes addition, and the third set denotes a comment. It’s easiest to explain by example. Let’s start with a simple sentence plagued by two typical errors:

An editor might revise the sentence to: