Elements of Style for Weblogs? (What?)

Steve Kirks suggests a new Elements of Style for weblogs. [Scripting News]

My reply, for whatever it's worth.

6:46:22 PM    

Worse and worse.

VeriSign redirects error pages.

Criticism is growing over the company's surprise decision to take control of all unassigned .com and .net domain names, a move that's wreaking havoc on some filtering tools. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

6:42:04 PM    

What is the role of an editor? (A mild rant)

Dave Winer doesn't like to be edited. OK, nobody does. And if his comments were just in the context of whether a weblog should be edited professionally, I guess I wouldn't feel the need to respond. It may not matter if a weblog is a little rough. Most weblogs are a personal commentary and are understood as such by readers. In addition, weblog software is not designed for collaborative work. It would be really awkward to pass a weblog entry to an editor from an author prior to posting.

Other forms of publishing are a different matter. I write professionally, and I edit books and magazines, and I don't want to have a piece of mine published online or off if it hasn't been checked by an editor. Nobody is perfect, not even subject matter experts. When I was tech editing for Macmillan, I can't tell you how many bloopers were in the code submitted by experts. These were only caught because I went through and checked every line and ran (or tried to run) every bit of code or script that was to appear in print or on the companion CD-ROMs. I can't tell you how many subject matter experts can't write their way out of a wet paper bag -- the initial manuscripts come in disorganized, vague in some areas and absurdly over-detailed in others, and generally looking like a freshman essay. Dave may prefer "a few spelling errors and awkward sentences," but readers don't. A Big Name like Dave can improve the results (and his happiness with them) by finding an editor with whom he can work. It's a partnership, and if it's a good partnership and well-tended, the writer will look better and more credible, and will be understood better, than would otherwise be the case.

I'm still catching up on the Lydon interviews. Yesterday I listened to David Sifry's interview. It seems to me Dave bends over backwards to offend no one, so much so that he says ridiculous things. He argues with passion, over Lydon's objections, that the professional editorial process does things that the blogosphere can't. I don't think he's right about that. Having been edited myself, for a brief period, I can tell you for sure that some writers do better without editors, like yours truly. If you're saying something precise, and you mean it, there's nothing worse than an editor who knows bupkis correcting you so the readers will understand, and along the way changing what you said so that it no longer reflects what you think. I prefer a few spelling errors and awkward sentences. But Sifry says blogs at best are commentary, not news. I think Dave should do some of the fact-checking the blogosphere is so famous for. We do indeed report facts on weblogs, as much as they do in the professional press, where I regularly read fiction posing as fact. For example, yesterday in the venerable NY Times I learned that Clay Shirky is a software developer. Huh? He's a commentator. Now I wonder if Clay told them he was a developer and they didn't check it out, or if it was a misunderstanding and they didn't bother to ask Clay if he was a developer. Either way, as we know well, such an error wouldn't last very long on a well-read weblog. [Scripting News]

9:53:16 AM