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Clay Shirky’s Web Presence

April 6, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

A couple of days ago Clay Shirky put up a blog post on his WordPress blog that got a fair amount of play. I don’t have anything to say about the post itself because I haven’t read it, for reasons that I will explain momentarily. I do have something to say about Clay’s blog, however, and it’s something I first noticed last year, when another of Clay’s posts was being bandied about.

What caught my attention then, as now, is that the man who wrote Here Comes Everybody is making some odd choices in presenting himself and his thoughts to the public. To see what I mean, pop over to Clay’s blog, where you’ll find a minimalist, two-column WordPress template, with one nagging concession to form over function. (And I say this as a decidedly form-follows-function person, which is going to be driven home in embarrassing fashion in the following paragraphs.)

Specifically, Clay’s desire for a streamlined look prompted him to use justified text in his blog formatting — meaning spaces between words are varied on a per-line basis, so each line is the same length, regardless of the words in the line. Like this.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: blogs, format, text

The Writer’s Prompt Copy

November 24, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

Are you a writer? Are you planning to do a reading or a podcast? Will you be using your published or hopefully-to-be-published text as a part of your presentation?

If so, take a minute to consider what you’re going to be doing and how you’re going to do it. On the what front it’s tempting to take your text (fiction or non-fiction) and use that as your script. I mean, what else would you use, right? Right.

Except…that may not be the best choice in terms of how you connect with your audience. What you’re doing when you give a reading or put a podcast together is presenting your work, but it’s also a performance, and performances have their own requirements. Even if your audience is very nuts-and-bolts about the subject matter, and even if your text is very matter of fact, you still run the risk of presenting your information in a boring way. And boring is generally not good.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: book tour, literary, reading, text, writer