In the unfolding saga of inline links within posts and the decline in readability that these links bring about, Adriel Hampton’s post helped me persuade me more to this idea. Hamptom quotes from Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr writes,

(In a 2001 study) one group read (a short story) in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing. Another researcher, Erping Zhu, had people read a passage of digital prose but varied the number of links appearing in it. She then gave the readers a multiple-choice quiz and had them write a summary of what they had read. She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is itself distracting. … A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding.

In other words, the more hyperlinks that you embed within your sentences, the less readable your posts become because the brain must make a decision with each link whether to click it for more information or keep reading. After several of these links, your brain starts to take on more cognitive load. As a result, it’s easier to get sidetracked with tangents or to lose retention of the content.

Every time your readers see a hyperlink in your text, they have to pause and ask themselves whether they should click that link and follow that path, or just stay the course ahead.

For a more in-depth reading of Carr’s argument, see Carr’s article in Wired, “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains.” In that Wired article, Carr explains,

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm [for hyperlinked text on the web] was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

To paraphrase, because of over-linked text on the web, our reading habits have become more shallow. When reading online, we skip and skim. We read a bit and click a link, and read some more and click a link. This surfing and browsing results in a shallow reading experience.

The decline in comprehension presents one of the paradoxes of the Internet: Although the Internet presents us with vast amounts of useful, enriching information, at the same time it also shortens our attention span, reduces our comprehension abilities, converts us into shallow readers, and weakens the intelligence we have cultivated.

Since the STC Summit in Dallas, I’ve had heated discussions on this site about inline links, and Whitney Quesenbery and Caroline Jarrett have tried to help me see things another way. But it wasn’t until reading Hampton’s post, which omits inline links, that I started to see the improvement in readability that results when you remove the inline links. Stripping away all those inline links really did help me focus on the content.

Though I was adamantly opposed to the denunciation of hyperlinking on the web, and I fought against the abrupt and unargued dismissal of inline links during Kathyryn Summers’ and Ginny Redish’s Summit presentations, I am now coming around to a new point of view.

My only issue is in finding the best way to correlate the endnote links with the reference points the post. It’s confusing to guess how the references match up with the sentences in the post. For example, in Hampton’s post, my video interview of Quesenbery and Jarrett is listed at the end, but I’m not mentioned by name in the post. So is the list of links at the end a bibliography of suggested reading? Am I one of the “some bloggers” reference in the penultimate paragraph? Or are the endnote links more like related posts?

It’s not that difficult to correlate the endnote links with the post content. Having taught composition in college for four years, I know how to make a general References list — you just match up the author’s last names in the References list with last names in your sentences. But I’m guessing that doing it in a consistent and detailed way will be more tedious and require more effort than most people are willing to exert. Still, I’m going to give it a try in my posts for a while.

References Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains.” Wired. May 24, 2010.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.

Hampton, Adriel. “Usability: Are Your Hyperlinks Destroying Your Readers’ Brains?“ Gov 2.0 Radio. June 16, 2010.

Quesenbery, Whitney, and Jarrett, Caroline. “Embedded Links and Online Reading Accessibility: Whitney Quesenbery and Caroline Jarrett, #stc10.” Idratherbewriting.com.  May 7, 2010.

Photo by nozoomii on Flickr.

Author Home Pages

Not cited, but useful for reading more about the authors cited in this post:

• Carr, Nicholas
• Jarrett, Carolyn
• Hampton, Adriel
• Quesenbery, Whitney
• Redish, Ginny
• Summers, Kathryn

Lavacon is a yearly conference Jack Molisani puts together on professional development for technical communicators. This year’s conference focuses on social media. You can’t run a conference on social media without having a cool-looking social media driven website, right? So Jack contacted me to help make the Lavacon conference site more of a web 2.0 / social-media-driven experience.

Lavacon's conference website incorporates a number of social media features

Working on the Lavacon conference website has been the most interesting WordPress project I’ve ever done. Here are the main features on the Lavacon conference website that make it social:

• Lots of pictures of presenters. Every presenter has a headshot, and when you group these headshots together, the result is that you see . .. a lot of people. It’s a social looking experience. You don’t just have presentation titles. You have actual people grouped together. I forefronted the speaker’s images to centralize this idea.
• You can comment on each speaker’s session. Because each session description is its own post, you can add your own comments, questions, or feedback on each session. Prior to the session, you can ask questions; during the session, you can add comments; and afterwards, you can ask follow-up questions all through the session’s page. Here’s an example.
• You can like or dislike other people’s comments. If you want to second someone’s comment, you can express your like or dislike by clicking the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon next to the person’s comment  The most liked comments are aggregated on the Program page, but they also receive a count next to the thumb icon for the number of likes.
• Rate your interest in the session. Through the stars below each presenter’s name, you can rate the session. You can use the ratings in a variety of ways. Jack is using the rating system to gauge interest in the topics to determine room sizes (to start with). The highest rated sessions are grouped together on the program page.
• View current activity on the Live page. The Live page shows a map of the latest visitors for the past month. It also collects the latest tweets that have the word lavacon, and it shows all mentions of the word lavacon conference in the blogsophere.

I’m interested to see how this conference plays out as people start adding comments and ratings and other information. In other words, the site isn’t finished — it has only begun.

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In this podcast, Michael Hiatt at mashstream.com presents to the STC Intermountain chapter on documentation in the cloud. By documentation in the cloud, he’s referring to our move to the web of everything we do on the computer — the running of applications, the saving of our data, the way we access and interact with all the information. He covers at a lot of ground in this presentation, touching on web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, knowledge mashups, documentation mashups, lifestreaming, linked data, meshing, raw data,  and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Will Sansbury mentioned to me that one of his ideas with the Atlanta chapter site was to provide an example or template of how WordPress could be used for chapter sites. I got to thinking, why isn’t there a standard WordPress template for chapters and SIGs to use?

Further, in WordPress 3.0, WordPress MU and regular WordPress will be merged. This is huge, because it means you’ll be able to create child blogs with a regular WordPress install. Essentially we could have one site like stcchapter.org with dozens of child blogs, containing subdomains such as intermountain.stcchapter.org, wyoming.stcchapter.org, and so forth. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Will Sansbury and I gave a webinar to STC community leaders on chapter and SIG websites. Rather than giving a static, one-way presentation about theoretical concepts with web design, or boring people with technical details they probably didn’t care about, we held the webinar more like a design review workshop, not too different from a writing group workshop.

Although I spent three years in a creative writing program holding exactly these types of writing workshops, in which a group of people provide feedback on the story or essay someone submits, it never crossed my mind that designers probably sit around tables doing the exact same thing with websites. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you go from 5 authors to 47, all collaborating on the same documentation? This is the issue Anne Gentle wrestles with in her post Collaborative Authoring — Tools and Costs. She explores everything from Author-it Live to Drupal, Mediawiki, Alfresco, and SharePoint, including cost breakdowns for each tool.

Anne also cites research from Forrester about the rising trend of collaborative authoring:

37% of organizations surveyed in Forrester’s Q4 2008 enterprise and SMB software survey consider implementing a collaboration strategy important in 2009

My Thoughts:

I think collaborative authoring will continue to grow in the future. Large, expensive solutions may give way to more popular, open-source options. As more groups adopt open-source solutions, the open-source solutions will become stronger. Any time you have thousands of developers and users behind a platform, they create a surge of extensions and themes, hacks and tutorials, enhancements and workarounds.

No single project team can compete with the collective contributions of thousands of developers on a global scale. And just maybe — here’s a thought — the best platforms for collaborative authoring are those platforms that are collaboratively constructed themselves.

I read a blog post the other day that I can’t stop thinking about. In the Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt writes,

The main issue for me is between authoring static in-house documents using single-sourcing methods before publishing, or capturing information sources dynamically after publishing from online social networks, linked data sources, and knowledge mashups.

The myth of single-source authoring is that it actually has a life in the future and remains a viable goal for many information developers. With so many mega-trends against it—such as the belief that static authoring from a single vantage point from a single author paid by a single organization is a workable system—seems ludicrous. Instead, we should be looking to capture, sequence, and give context to the wealth of rich content already published in context from the Web. Collaborating with the many subject experts, authors, videographers, bloggers, tweeters, and writers coming together on the Web with shared interests will be powerful if it can be harnessed.

The myth of single sourcing

Michael undercuts the idea that you can create help from a single author working from a single perspective in a single point in the organization. To add to this scenario, usually that author is an outsider to both the environment and business processes he or she is documenting. Further, the author usually moves on to another project as soon as the software is released.

This morning I had a meeting downtown at SLC headquarters. I’ve become accustomed to wearing business casual clothes to work, but at headquarters, I have to wear a full suit because that’s the dress code. In an early morning meeting, I listened to several department leads explain my new project. It would involve extensive knowledge of cataloging and archiving techniques, a robust off-the-shelf system that had been customized, five main divisions or modules to conquer, each with their own resource leads, about 200 constantly rotating users complementing a core group of specialists, and an aggressive time frame.
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At the Intermountain STC workshop this morning, we talked about how to build an online presence. During my portion of the workshop, I facilitated a discussion using Twitter. With the dozen participants, all sitting in front of computers with Internet access, I told them to go to Search.Twitter.com and search for the #imstc hashtag.

I posed a question for them to answer via Twitter. They responded, including the #imstc hashtag. When you include a hashtag in your tweet (placing it anywhere), you can read an aggregated view of all tweets tagged with that hashtag at search.twitter.com. After everyone responded, we read through the responses out loud and discussed them a bit.

The question I posed on Twitter

When the discussion ended, I posed a new question for them to answer on Twitter and gave them a few minutes to respond. Then we read through the answers one by one, looked at trends and discussed them for a while. We did this about 4-5 times over the course of an hour. You can read the thread here.

The technique worked well because it required everyone to stay engaged. During most presentations, you can sit back and turn on your passive listening mode. But if you’re periodically interacting on Twitter to respond or analyze a question, it keeps you awake. And as a presenter, it’s a lot more fun when everyone is engaged like this.

I’m growing tired of presentations that are little more than lectures, so I’m going to experiment with more user-led techniques like this. Unfortunately, available wi fi at chapter meetings or conferences with participants who have computers or mobile data devices is pretty rare. But if you do have the opportunity, definitely try incorporating Twitter, even if only for Q&A at the end of your presentation.

Last week I listened to David Peralty give feedback to Jeff Chandler about his WordPress Weekly and WPTavern.com projects (see episode 75). David praised the community and visibility that Jeff had created through his weekly podcast and forum, in addition to his WPTavern.com site, but noted that he was aware Jeff hadn’t reached the monetization goals he hoped to achieve.

In other words, Jeff has done a tremendous job at creating a community and audience for his site and podcast, but he hasn’t found a way to make real money off his activities. If you monetize your online activities, you can then justify and devote more time to the activities to establish and grow your community.

But if you can’t make any money, it’s hard to justify spending so much time online. And if you can’t spend the necessary time online to build your community, your site or podcast won’t take off.

Although David was critiquing Jeff, I felt like he could have been equally speaking to me. I listened carefully, waiting for the key ingredient Jeff was missing. What was he not doing? What was he not seeing? How does one move from a hobby site/podcast that has a growing enthusiasm to one that makes enough money to sustain you full time?
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Google recently released Sidewiki, a new feature in the Google toolbar that allows you to add comments in a pop-out sidebar that appears beside every page on the web. It’s not a typical wiki — you can’t edit what other people write. You can only add another comment about the page. Read the rest of this entry »