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Sunday, 19 May 2002 |
Here is an example of a website that I wrote for a new web design firm.
Good writing for the Web is a skill that badly needs more promotion than it currently receives. When people come to a website they spend far more time reading the words than looking at the images or learning how to navigate around it. As Dave Winer keeps reminding us, the Web is a writer’s medium. And writing for the web is not the same thing as writing for any other medium.
This streaming presentation of screenshots needs the Flash 6 plug-in to be installed in your web browser, and weighs in at 190K, by the way.
11:03:17 PM 
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Here is a link, courtesy of Sydney-based Western Australian photojournalist David Dare Parker, to a British website of street photography.
Famous street photographers include Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, William Klein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, and many other luminaries of contemporary photography.
12:07:37 PM
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Whenever you are in a store or service bureau of any kind in Perth, you’ll notice they make constant use of one universal excuse for everything that ever goes wrong, or for some shortcoming or other. It is “This is Perth”.
“No, we don’t have more of those in stock. This is Perth.”
“Kodachrome isn’t available any more. This is Perth.”
“We don’t sell those kinds of books. This is Perth.”
“We can’t afford better computers for the school. This is Perth.”
Occasionally you’ll hear a slight variation on that refrain, if the speaker suffers from an affliction common to those who are addicted to Australian daytime soaps. It is “This is Perf?”
10:07:31 AM
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When I was first despatched from my home state to Western Australia as a child, the first thing I noted about the people here is how they had very different words and habits of speech.
Instead of calling sugar-enhanced carbonated beverages soft drinks, Western Australians called them cool drinks and pronounced it as kulldrink. They referred to stones and boulders as boondies and koondies, and a popular expression of joy was “Strike a boondie flat!” There’s more that are even more bizarre, but they escape me right now.
One of the most characteristic aspects of Western Australian speech in those days though was the tendency to answer questions with what I call the machine-gun Yep. The relative by marriage I wrote of in Well-meaning Voodoo Freaks is a classic machine-gun Yepper. Every question, if answered with an affirmative, gets a “Yep yep yep yep yep” instead of “Yes”.
Yesterday, during my habitual walk into the city, I passed three guys standing in a circle on the pavement and they were machine-gun yepping at each other fit to burst. One of them must have started the cascade off by asking a question that could only be answered in the positive. The questioner must have become so excited by his friends’ enthusiastic replies that he was set off as well.
The yepping continued as I walked past the three simultaneous yeppers towards the glistening spires of the crystal city.
9:25:01 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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