About my Writing [en]

[fr] Mon écriture souffre généralement de trop de parenthèses, de tirets, de phrases trop longues et... de mots, simplement. Ça m'ennuie mais j'avoue que je suis paresseuse lorsque j'écris: pas de relecture, pas de réécriture, j'écris et je publie, voilà c'est fait.

After reading Bird by Bird, I am now reading On Writing by Stephen King. And it’s making me think about my writing.

I’m a lazy writer. I don’t proofread, I don’t edit, I don’t even plan much outside my head. I just write. It’s never been a problem for me.

Reading King (and in parallel, Anne Lamott’s Rosie, which is so beautifully written it makes me want to drop everything and write my life away) is making me think about my style. There are a certain number of things I do that bother me, and that I don’t seem to manage to do differently. (Though, as I said, I’m a lazy writer — if I actually put a little effort into changing things, maybe I would.)

As you’ve certainly noticed if you read this blog, I overuse dashes and parentheses. I always have. I think it’s because my way of thinking is digressive. I start on something, and have to add some little explanative digression before going on. I do that when I talk, too. I start a sentence or an explanation, stop mid-way through, and add some extra background information that’s needed to understand what’s left of the sentence or explanation.

Anyway, I’m not trying to find excuses. It annoys me that I do that, and I think it probably makes what I write more cumbersome to read than it could be.

Another thing I’m guilty of is long sentences. Sometimes I feel they just want to go on and on and on and on and then I catch myself and chop them in half. I also think I use too many words. I’m not a very concise writer. I ramble. Like I’m doing now.

So I’ll let you go and read something else while I go and write a shitty first draft of something that I’ll never show anybody.

Are there any of my bad writing habits which bug you when you read me?

Something Strange [en]

[fr] Petit épisode étrange: pleine d'élan pour bloguer, je mets sur slinkset mes dernières idées d'articles, et pof! mon élan se casse la figure. Je n'ai pas tout à fait identifié ce qui s'était passé. (J'ai quand même blogué, hein.)

So, something strange happened to me a bit earlier. I went to bed yesterday with a huge drive to blog, ideas for articles, wrote them down in Evernote, got up this morning ready to blog, dealt with some domestic issues, and set to work.

Blogging drive intact.

Before I actually started writing, I decided that I would add my latest article ideas to the list on slinkset that people can add to or vote on. So I copy-pasted, went through my old post list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and… As soon as I had finished doing that, my blogging drive went *poof!* almost down to nothing.

Well, I didn’t bow down, picked a topic or two, and blogged happily — but still, I’m intrigued. What made my blogging drive deflate? I can think of two things:

  • taking the list from private to public
  • going through the complete list (overwhelming)

I thought I’d share this little episode with you to see if you had any insight, dear readers.

Another Video: Relevance and Curation of the Real-Time Web [en]

[fr] Une autre vidéo de moi en train d'essayer désespérément de dire quelque chose d'intelligent en réponse à des questions perplexantes, avec un cerveau grillé.

Also last December, I was interviewed by Cathy Brooks about relevance and curation of the real-time stream. In the Paris Metro, this time!

So if you enjoy watching me struggle on video while trying to answer questions, knock yourself out 🙂

Disclaimer: I was exhausted and my brain was fried — actually, we all were… see if you can spot Dana at the beginning of the video (it was during LeWeb’09).

(By the way, am I missing something, or has it become impossible to embed a YouTube video under 500 pixels wide? My layout only fits 500px, as you can see…)

What Proportion of Ideas Do I Carry Out? [en]

[fr] Moi, en train d'essayer péniblement d'évaluer quelle proportion de mes idées je réalise.

That is the question that was put to me by Siegfried at the TEDx conference in Geneva last December. So here I am, struggling to answer.

Tips For the Stressed and Anxious [en]

[fr] Une série de conseils (basés sur mon expérience personnelle!) pour les stressés et anxieux. Top de la liste: s'assurer qu'on dort, mange, et bouge assez (c'est la base). Boire des tisanes de fleur d'oranger. Prendre un bain chaud. Méditer.

Twice a month I write up an article chosen by my readers. This is the second. Vote for the next one!

After years of learning to deal with my stressed and anxious self, here are a few ideas and tips I’ve found help me get through those moments. It won’t replace therapy of course, but it can help!

  • Make sure you have your basics covered (this is your top priority): enough sleep, enough food (preferably more or less balanced), and physical exercise (go for a walk!) — regular hours if possible.
  • Drink orange blossom infusions (“fleur d’oranger”). It’s a relaxing infusion — 4-5 cups a day, and one 30 minutes before going to bed if you have trouble sleeping. I’m a fan ever since drinking those saved one of my exam sessions.
  • Take a warm bath.
  • Lie down, close your eyes, and concentrate on your breathing for 10-20 minutes, without falling asleep, and without starting to think about stuff. When thoughts show up, just let them fly by as you concentrate on your breathing. (This is kind of basic meditation.) Once or twice a day.
  • When stressed, identify the main stressor (if it’s procrastination-related stress) and get it done with. Things usually get better after that.
  • If anxious/down, go for stuff that makes you laugh (it helps the brain switch gears): lolcats, comedy movie, fun friends, comics — whatever does it for you.
  • Sometimes (specially if you’re more down than anxious), watching a scary movie / thriller can do the trick. Anxiety is often something we do to ourselves (need that adrenalin-drug!) so getting a shot through artifical means (the movie) can actually help relax about other stuff.
  • Head out to the countryside/lake/mountains. Look at nature around you — it helps regain a sense of proportion.
  • Watch the Eight Irresistable Principles of Fun video (a few minutes).

Of course, these are very general tips. They are not magic recipes, either: sometimes we’re stressed or anxious for very good reasons, and it’s normal to be uncomfortable. But these ideas might help make things a little bit better or bearable when it’s rough.

Got any tips that work for you when you’re stressed or anxious, and that you’d like to share? The comments are yours.

Where Does Tumblr Fit in? [en]

[fr] Tumblr est un outil génial pour rassembler et republier les choses sympa que l'on trouve en ligne, agrémenté d'un réseau social à la Twitter (non-réciproque) qui nous permet de suivre sans difficultés les publications des personnes qui nous intéressent.

Last night on the way home, I was telling a friend about Tumblr. I have a blog there, Digital Crumble, and really really like using it. Many of my friends do not use Tumblr, and I realize that some explaining is not useless.

Tumblr is great as a scrapbook (scrapblog!) of content seen online. Not to say it can’t be used for original content, but that’s not where it shines (in my opinion) and I personally hardly ever put original content in Digital Crumble.

For me, Tumblr is somewhere between Twitter, Buzz, and WordPress.

One reason many people do not get Tumblr is that until you get an account, you do not know about the dashboard. The dashboard is the Tumblr equivalent to the Twitter stream. It is a neverending page of posts by people you have chosen to follow. That’s the big difference between Tumblr as a blogging tool and WordPress: Tumblr is really built around the following/being followed dynamic of Twitter and Buzz.

Here are two zoomed-out shots of parts of my dashboard page so you can see what it looks like:

Tumblr Dashboard Tumblr Dashboard

Two things make Tumblr great for collecting non-original content:

  • the “reblog” button on each post in the dashboard
  • the bookmarklet.

If you’re familiar with Twitter, the “reblog” button is like Twitter’s “retweet” button (but the Tumblr reblog button was there way before Twitter’s retweet one). See something you like in your dashboard? You can “like” it, of course, but in a click of the mouse you can reblog it, publishing it to your tumblelog and pushing it along to your followers. A lot of the content in Tumblr is visual (photographs, design, videos…) — which is pretty cool.

When you stumble upon something interesting online, you can hit the Tumblr bookmarklet, and a pop-up window allowing you to instantly publish what you’ve found to your tumblelog appears. Tumblr makes a guess as to the nature of the content, too: video, link, quote, photo. Hit publish, and get on with your browsing. Tumblr takes care of the rest — including a link to the original source.

Share on Tumblr

A lot of the things I post to Digital Crumble come from the people I’m following on Tumblr. Aside from that, I also reblog a lot of quotes from things I read online. If I’m reading something interesting, I have just to highlight the paragraph I want to save/quote, hit the bookmarklet, hit publish, and it’s on Digital Crumble. Let’s say it’s the web 2.0 equivalent of when I was a student and painstakingly copied out quotes and paragraphs from books I was reading into a small notebook. 😉 (Here’s an example of a recent quote I captured like that.)

What makes this all the more precious is that you can afterwards easily search through your Tumblr Dashboard or your own postings to bring up snippets you’ve saved. When I’m doing online research for a blog post or article, I’ll stick all the interesting snippets in Tumblr, which means I then have them handy (with link to the source!) when I’m writing up.

Finally, what I like about Tumblr is the playfulness of the community. It’s fun. It doesn’t feel too serious, or like the geek/intelligentsia quarters. I think that for non-bloggers who do spend time online reading and browsing without feeling the urge to crank out pages and pages of original writing, it’s a great publication platform to start with.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

Skywhales [en]

[fr] Voici un merveilleux court-métrage d'animation (11 minutes) que j'avais vu à la télé il y a des années de cela, sans jamais pouvoir remettre la main dessus, puisque je n'en connaissais pas le nom. Regardez-le si vous ne l'avez jamais vu.

I saw this lovely short animation film many many years ago on TV, and didn’t know what it was called. For years I’ve regretted that I had no way to track it down and watch it again. But today, thanks to the magic of the Internets (merci Robin!) I now know that it is called “Skywhales”, and was directed by Phil Austin and Derek Hayes in 1983. And it’s on YouTube.

If you have never seen it, I urge you to do so now. It’s 11 minutes long. Watch it to the end.

I would love to have this in higher quality to watch it on my big screen. If you have a copy or know where to find one, please let me know.

Client Phone Calls: House Rules [en]

I have recently become aware that I am developing a certain number of “house rules” for my phone calls with clients (particularly first-contact phone calls). I thought I’d share them here with you in case they could come in handy to other freelancers:

  1. I don’t give rates on the phone
  2. I don’t agree to new things
  3. I don’t talk about what I’m doing with a contact to a third party within the same company unless my contact introduced me to them.

I’ll detail the whys and the hows of these below, but first of all…

Me and phone calls

I often describe myself as a phonephobic. There are situations where I’m perfectly comfortable on the phone (with friends, for example), but anything that hints of administrivia or relationship tension just makes me go ballistic if it needs to be dealt with by phone.

There was a time when I would walk into town to the offices so I could deal with admin stuff face-to-face, rather than pick up the call and get it done in five minues.

To be fair, I’ve had my share of traumatizing phone experiences (when I was a scout leader as a teenager, and all through my adult years). I also worked as a phone interviewer (surveys) for a couple of years when I was a student — so I’m not completely incompetent either. I’m not exactly sure why I am so scared of phone calls, but I am.

If you’ve had me on the phone you probably have no idea of this, because I cover it up, but it translates in me procrastinating a lot when I need to call people back, and agonizing for days — weeks — when I decide I need to cold-call somebody.

Still. I don’t like it, but I’m functional — however, I need to take into account that I feel under pressure on the phone and take steps to make things easier for me. (Less blunders = happier clients, in the end.)

Not giving rates on the phone

First of all, let me say that as a freelancer in a pioneering industry, determining how much to ask for the services I offer has always been a bit of a headache. From undercharging (way too often) to overcharging (a few times), I’ve done it all. Convincing people they need me is not too much of an issue, but actually asking for money is where I more often than not start sliding down into the pit of self-deprecation.

I’ve been doing this for four years now, and I’m much better at it than I was. I’m actually even starting to consider myself pretty competent, to say the truth. But even with the worst of the pricing-angst behind me, offering services for which there is no real fixed market-price to a wide variety of clients means that pricing is not simple. (Think Oracle and Intel on one end of the spectrum, and struggling artists and newbie freelancers on the other.)

Recently, I realized that I was much less likely to undercharge (or overcharge) if I had a little time to calmly think about my pricing, without the client breathing down my neck on the other end of the line. (Well, my clients aren’t actually that bad, quite the contrary, but given my phone anxiety, that’s quickly what it feels like.) I asked around a bit, and discovered that quite a few of my colleagues had a “no money on the phone” policy. By e-mail is fine, face-to-face is fine, but not on the phone. If your client is going to go green (or speechless) when he hears your price, chances are you’d rather it not happen on the phone. And if your prices are right, then that’s what’s going to happen.

So, unless you’re going to systematically undercharge, keep the money talk off the phone.

I make exceptions when the service is very well-defined and there is no hesitation about the price. For example, if a freelancer calls me up because he wants to spend half a day with me to make his website, I’ll give the price on the phone.

But even that is not without danger: I have given freelancer prices to small companies in this kind of situation, because I didn’t have enough information at that moment to realize what kind of client I was dealing with. And it’s always very unpleasant to have to send a follow-up e-mail saying “actually, it’s more expensive than I told you”. And it’s even more unpleasant to be stuck with work you’re undercharging for.

Not agreeing to new things on the phone

I’m easily enthusiastic about new projects, and that does give me a tendency to bite off more than I can chew. Again, as there are few things more unpleasant than saying “Oh yes, great, let’s do that!” and having to follow up with an e-mail the next day (or worse the next week or the next month) explaining that you overcommited and have to back out.

This can also help manage scope creep for existing projects.

When I was a teenager, my dad showed me these cards they were distributing students at his school. They were guidelines to help them decide when to say “no” to something. One of the guidelines was something like “If you feel under pressure to say yes, then that alone is a reason for saying no.” Taking a little bit of time to think about something on your own or by talking to a trusted friend cannot hurt. Don’t fall for the “now or never” ploy.

Third-party calls from the same company

I am not a fan of triangulation. I know from first-hand experience that it does not make for happy relationships, and do my best to not fall into that kind of trap with my clients.

If my client is a company, I usually have a single point of contact. If my contact puts me in touch with other people from the company so that I can do my job, that is fine. But if I receive a cold call from a third party from inside the same company, asking for information about an ongoing project, I will not discuss it without checking first with my contact.

In practice

These three guidelines I have are actually there to allow me to make decisions or deal with situations without being under the pressure of having to give an immediate response to something. I think the phone is particularly pressure-inducing because silence is less acceptable than if you’re face-to-face.

I think if you’re somebody who tends to be anxious in this kind of situation or agree too quickly to things, it helps to have these predefined guidelines for what to do in certain set situations — particularly with first-time calls with clients (and, I would tend to argue, for subsequent calls as well; can you tell I don’t like the phone?)

If you have other guidelines for your phone calls with clients, do share them in the comments.

Here are a few useful lines I try to keep handy. Do you have others?

  • That sounds really interesting! I’d like to sleep on it a bit and get back to you in a few days.
  • I’m afraid I don’t give my rates on the phone. I’ll send you an e-mail with my rates by tomorrow.
  • That sounds reasonable. Let me think about it and give you an answer by the end of the week.

And as a final note, yes, I know that my clients are reading this too. I don’t mind being comfortable about my shortcomings. And I’m not interested in entering professional relationships (or any, for that matter) based on power-play. Which is, let’s face it, the only kind of situation where talking about this kind of stuff in the open could be harmful for me.

Seth Godin on Benefits of the Blogging Process [en]

[fr] A force de se concentrer sur les bénéfices qu'il y a à avoir un blog (= des articles publiés), on perd de vue les bénéfices du simple acte de bloguer -- de l'utilité pour soi de cet exercice d'écriture.

Take 90 seconds to listen to the following video:

I found it thought-provoking. It reminded me of the fourth principle in my journey out of procrastination: find pleasure in the process rather than only the goal.

What Seth Godin says here is how beneficial the act of blogging is in itself, independantly of the impact of the published post on others. You know, the therapeutic effect of writing, and all that.

I think we’ve lost track of that with all the focus on the benefits of blogging as a finished product (the published post). The process of blogging is actually what is the most precious in this whole story.

Harry Joiner, who wrote the post where I found this video, says the following about his own blogging practice, which I think is worth quoting — also as food for thought:

My point is this: For a while last year, I began to think that — for me, anyway — blogging was simply a means to a marketing end.  It was about being #1 on Google for my primary keywords, and once that was accomplished — what was the point of blogging more?  After all, I had a company to run.

Turns out I was wrong. The primary benefit of blogging is to develop and maintain a teachable point of view on something of value.  It’s about learning to communicate more effectively.  And as Seth says in the video above, “to contribute something to the conversation.”

Happy blogging!

Blog, What Happened to You? [en]

When I’m asked what the difference between a blog and a website is, I usually make this drawing to explain it.

Difference between a blog and a non-blog website

It’s not perfect, but it helps. With a “traditional” topic-based website, you have a site structure which looks like a tree, with different pages on different topics. With a blog, you have a succession of posts organized chronologically (inverse chronologically, actually) on one page. Then each post has its page, and it’s archived forever in the back-office.

The two models tend to blend — more and more sites have characteristics of both.

There are two trends, however, which irritate the hell out of me. (If I know you and you’re doing this, please don’t take it personally — I don’t hate you for it. Really. But it annoys me.) They are:

  • the blogazine
  • systematic teasers or partial posts on the main blog page.

Prepare for the rant. I’m putting on my flame-proof underwear.

Blogazines

First of all, let me say that there is nothing wrong with making a magazine with a blog CMS. But Lord, why do blogs have to try to pretend they’re all magazines? It feels like bloggers are trying to make themselves look “high-profile”, because top “blogs” like TC, RWW, etc. are actually magazines. They might have started out as humble blogs, but they are not anymore.

“Media-blogs” are a special breed of blogs. Their content is there to generate revenue directly, through advertising and sponsorships. That has an impact on their content, and on the place they try to occupy, alongside old media. Why would everybody want to look like one? Dressing like a movie-star does not make you be one — and why would everybody want to be mistaken for one? If you’re a geek or a businessman or an entrepreneur, why don’t you just be that? There’s nothing wrong with being yourself and making you approachable.

There’s nothing wrong with having a blog that looks like a blog.

Coming to practicalities, there is a real concrete reason for me, as a user, to not like it when one of the blogs I read turns into a blogazine: very often, this transformation goes with the disappearance of the “main blog page”, the page which gave blogs the place they have in the publishing world of today, the unique stable page which you could go to at any time, confident that you would find the last 10 or so things the blogger you were reading had written.

The blogazine goes with excessive categorization and silofication of blog content. And I think that’s a real shame for most bloggers who take that route. Hey, even if all your last posts are on a big mixed-up main blog page, you can still point people to individual categories if you like. That’s what category pages are for, right?

Partial posts

People put forward all sorts of good reasons to display only partial posts on their main blog page (or archive pages) — roughly the following:

  • improved SEO
  • more page views
  • increased scannability

Until somebody shows me convincing data for either of these three claims, I am going to simply say “bullshit!” (and I’m remaining polite). I’m going to put the culprits on the stage one by one and tell you why I think my reaction is justified. I don’t have any research to back me up (am planning to do some though, so if you want to lend a hand, get in touch) but I do have some reasoning which I believe holds together.

Improved SEO

I have to admit I’m biased against SEO. For me, most SEO aside from “markup your stuff properly (be search-engine friendly) and have great content” is a pile of rubbish. I mean, there are some very obvious things one needs to do for SEO, but they are “common sense” more than “secret tricks”.

If a search engine is doing its job correctly, it will pull out the page that is most relevant for the human being who typed the keywords it based the search on. Make it good for humans, roughly, and it’ll be good for search engines.

When SEO gets in the way of the human experience, I have a big problem with it. And partial posts on the blog page does get in the way of a good reader experience. Why do I know that? Because of what I call the “closed door” phenomenon. A link to click, like a folder to open, is a closed door. You don’t know what’s behind it. You don’t know if it’s worth your while. Chances are you won’t click. Chances are you won’t read the rest of the post.

Even if you know the post is going to be worth it, to read the ten posts on the home page of such a blog, you’re going to have to click on each title (all ten of them), and open them in different tabs, or go back and forth, and maybe get lost in the process.

The original blog format puts all the articles neatly one beneath the other. You start reading at the top, scroll down as needed, and before you know it you’ve read the ten articles.

So, if it really does improve SEO to display only partial articles, I would say that the problem is with the way the search engines work. We should never be creating bad user experiences for the sake of SEO.

(I’m aware that what I claim about the “bad user experience” of partial articles on the main blog page needs to be demonstrated. Working on it. Get in touch if you want to help — or if you can save us the work by showing somebody has already done it.)

How exactly are the partial articles supposed to improve SEO? Well, as you can tell, I’m no expert, but based on what I’ve heard it has to do with duplicate content. Yeah, Google is supposed to penalize duplicate content. And of course, if you publish whole posts on your main blog page, and in your archives, then you’re duplicating the content from the post page — the one you want people to land on directly when they put the magic words into the search engine.

Only… I remember very clearly, in 2007, when Matt Cutts was asked about duplicate content on blogs. (And Matt, if I’m misremembering because it feeds my theory, please set me straight.) He didn’t seem to be saying that it was really a problem. And for what it’s worth, make a note that he’s providing complete posts on his main blog page — not excerpts.

The way I understand it, the duplicate content penalty is a weapon in the war against spammers and link-farms and splogs etc. Having 2-3 copies of the same post lying around do not make your blog sploggy.

Enough for the SEO.

More page views

What can I say about this? First, the reason people obsess about page views is because of advertising. If you’re rewarded for each ad impression, the more pages are viewed, the more money you get.

Sure.

But this begs the question: how much are you willing to sacrifice of the user experience (see above) for a few dollars? Most advertising revenue on blogs is miniscule.

People imagine that “more page views = more articles read”. Nope. I can read ten articles on your home page for only one page view if you publish whole articles. So of course, if you switch to excerpts only, you’ll see an increase in page views. But it doesn’t mean you’re being read more. Don’t be fooled. (This would need to be proved, of course — but the so-called proof that the excerpt method increases page views is worthless in my book, because it’s measuring something that isn’t really meaningful, unless your purpose in life is to sell ads on your blog rather than be read, which is your right, but in which case maybe I’m not going to be that interested in reading you anymore.)

I don’t care about my page views. I just want people to read my articles.

Increased scannability

This one is easy to deal with. Of course, it makes it easier to scan the articles on the first page, if it’s kept short by trimming the articles. Personally, I’m all for a display option that will allow you to see just a list of post names, or a list of post names plus excerpts. Feedly allows this kind of thing.

But do you want to be read, or scanned? Do you want people to read the first two paragraphs of your articles, or the whole articles? Do you prefer to have them scan more headlines, but click less to access the whole articles?

Again, the choice is a non-choice as far as I’m concerned.

The blog is not dead

For the last years, we’ve seen the “blog is dead” meme pop up regularly. I was recently interviewed on this topic by the Swiss National TV — just to show you it’s still around. Aside from the rise of Twitter and Facebook, the rise of the blogzine is often cited as proof of the death of blogs.

Bullshit. The bloggers are still there. We’re still there. We’re not going anywhere. (I need to write more about the so-called death of blogs.)

Now, please go and get rid of those partial articles on your blog pages.