Short story

Kristin at Metblogging Seattle sums up the local newspaper scene with one great sentence:

"What would Seattle do without both the Times and the P-I to report on important celebrity news?"

She's been updating her online coverage of the two papers reporting on themselves (and their joint operating agreement) throughout the day. It's (gasp) real news reporting.

So, will I now cancel my P-I subscription and get all my news online?

Not yet. A friend of mine is going to be a guest star on the new season of Paris Hilton's "The Simple Life" and I need to keep up with the celebrity gossip...

Sounds familiar

I will always remember a writer friend from college who teased a musician we both knew with a comment to the effect of "gee, women never want to come over and watch me write."

As a writer, I'm often envious of the attention musicians and actors get for their live performances. But an amazing experiment, conducted earlier this year by The Washington Post, turned all that on its head.

What if you took one of the world's most acclaimed concert violinists (a strikingly handsome man, to boot) and had him busk solo in a Washington, D.C. Metro station? Would people notice or appreciate the extraordinary quality of his performance? Or would they hurry past, oblivious, yammering on their cell phones?

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony, predicted that perhaps 4 out of 100 people would "recognize the quality for what it is," adding "Maybe 75 will stop and spend some time listening."

What do you think?

Here's what happened. And here's a link to the entire 45 minute performance.

20 slides in five minutes

A little bit about the communications aspect of the presentations at last night's Ignite Seattle. (I'll write more about the presentations themselves when the Ignite folks post the videos.)

Let me start by saying that all the presenters were experienced and skilled. So what I'll be writing about is how folks dealt with the constraints of making a five-minute speech when the 20 slides they had prepared were being automatically advanced every 15 seconds.

Scott Berkun, unquestionably one of the most polished of the speakers, stepped outside the box by simply giving a five-minute speech. His graphics-only slides ticked off the time, moving from 20 blue squares to none by the time he'd finished.

Chris Heuer of Social Media Club also finissed the 15-second rhythm by using very general photos of people at meetings. Since his slides illustrated the very top level of his presentation on face-to-face communication, they matched anything he was saying.

The rest of us attempted to stay in sync with our slides, sometimes with amusing results. In one or two instances, people found themselves tapping their feet while waiting for their next slide; more often, a slide would beat the speaker to the punchline. I admired the very calm, very articulate fellow who looked at a slide he wasn't ready for, looked back at the audience, and said "I'm just going to give my talk," and went on to ignore his slides.

If you are planning to present at Ignite Seattle and will be grappling with the unusual 15-second slide format, here are a few tips:

• If possible, pick a topic that has logical steps, so you'll never get out of sequence. Jordan Schwartz's presentation on the "hive mind" concept and how you can set up a beehive your backyard flowed perfectly because his slides and his speech were telling a linear story. (By contrast, Candance McNaughton's presentation on natural medicine Health Hacks and mine on Workplace Survival issues covered bullet points we could have presented in just about any order. A few times we had to turn around to look at our own slides to see what point was next.)

• Time the comments you'll make with each slide. Make sure they're only 14 or 15 seconds, and edit relentless until they are! Once you've got them down to size, I found that chunking them into three phrases worked. I saw the slide image, it sparked the first phrase. The second phrase was a transition, and the third phrase was either a punchline or moved us along to the next slide. Each 15 seconds of text had a rhythm like a waltz, so I was ready for the next slide instead of jarred by it.

• Practice til you own it. I had the speech function (part of Mac OS X) read the speech to make sure it was really 5 minutes long. The computer voice is a bit slower than mine, but I also realized I'd take up a bit of time here and there ad libbing or reacting to the audience. I then recorded myself giving the speech (to iPod via an iTalk mic) and went for a walk and listened to the speech a few times. When I got back I printed out the Keynote slides six to a page and tried to go through the speech using only the slide visuals as cues. When you can do that, you're ready to go.

Come fly with me

Thursday night is Ignite Seattle at the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

The event starts at 6:30 with the crafting of paper airplanes, followed by a competition to see who can send his or her creation winging through a target hoola-hoop onstage.

The updrafts of hot air begin at 8:30 with Ignite Seattle's rapid-fire 5-minute presentations, guaranteed to put any long-winded pundits into a fatal tailspin.

As one of the dozen or so "speed speakers," I'll be whipping through a few of my tips on Workplace Survival. Thanks in advance to the people I've worked with who have provided me with so many colorful anecdotes for the talk!

Hate, hate on the web

The back-and-forth of the recent verbal threats and harassment against blogger and tech guru Kathy Sierra is evolving into some more reflective commentary. For those of you who have a Salon subscription, I recommend the essay "Men who hate women on the web."

One of the thoughtful and wry observations Salon editor Joan Walsh makes in the piece:

"And what does it mean that women writers have to drag around this anchor every time they start to write -- that we reflexively compose our own hate mail, and sometimes type and retype to try to avoid it? I can honestly say it's probably made me more precise and less glib. That's good. But it's also, for now, made me too cautious. I write less than I would if I wasn't thinking these thoughts. I think that's bad."

That really struck home with me — the part about composing your own hate mail. It's so easy to do! If a woman is overweight, she'll be called "a fat ____"; underweight, she's "a scrawny ____." Old? That would be a "wrinkly ____." Well-educated? "Ivory Tower ____." Under-educated? "Trailer park ____."

And on we go. If someone like Kathy Sierra (who looks like a model for the J. Jill fashion catalog, and is one of the strongest writers in the blogosphere) comes in for this sort of abuse, it's not hard to imagine what could happen to the rest of us!

Perhaps I'm reading the wrong blogs, but it seems to me that the 20-somethings active on the web, men and women, have been oddly silent during this discussion. Is this dynamic absent from their web experience? Is this discussion so "old school" that it's irrelevant to them? I'd be curious to know.

Customer support that really sucks

OK, try and beat this one:

J2 is a fax service you can use from your computer on the road. I used it during my travels in January and February, was not hugely impressed, paid for the second month of service, and then decided to cancel my account.

But, searching all my account options and their website, I couldn't find any way to cancel.

I finally emailed their Customer Support with a request to cancel, and they wrote back the following:

We have received your e-mail request to cancel your account. However, please be advised that we require your request be confirmed by calling us at 1-323-817-3218, or by visiting out Live Chat service, at [URL removed] where a Customer Service representative will assist you in the cancellation process. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Please note that your account will remain active until your cancellation request is confirmed by Customer Service.

[Name removed] j2 Customer Support

Of course, it was at this point that my blood began to boil. This email was from Customer Support. She didn't need me to be confirmed by Customer Service; she needed me to be high-pressured by Sales.

I called the (long-distance) number, followed the annoying system of convoluted prompts, finally found an option for "inquiring about cancellation." I thought that was an odd turn of phrase, and I was right to be suspicious. The automated message told me that if I wanted to inquire about cancelling my account, I had to use the Live Chat service on the website.

Rolling my eyes, I went the Live Chat page, logged in with my account information, and waited for the Chat screen to load. And waited. And waited. And waited. (My browser hung, and continued to hang on repeated tries.)

So I called the phone number again, but this time I selected Technical Support. The fellow who answered (a very pleasant person who had trouble understanding English) got my account information. He told me that my service didn't have any Chat, just conference capabilities. He didn't seem to know anything about the Live Chat service mentioned in the email and the phone system.

I then told him that I was trying to cancel my account. This sent him off to talk with a supervisor. He came back and offered me an extra free month of service. I stuck with my guns and told him I wanted to cancel. More chat with the supervisor. Then he came back and told me that my account would be cancelled and I would receive an email to confirm that.

Note, by the way, that all this had to be conducted via two long distance phone calls that I had to pay for; I suspect the two calls cost me as much as a month of service from the company.

Bottom line: I'd rather hike four miles in a blizzard to fax something from Kinko's than ever do business with J2 again.

Blogging and threats

It's not uncommon for a blog (and a specific blogger) to attract nasty comments, even death threats.

For that reason, many personal bloggers simply turn off the Comments feature on their blogs. However, professional bloggers and people whose blogs are part of their business marketing don't have that option; comments (as many as 100 on a good post) are a key part of the blog's value. (For an example, see the comments about my recent post on TrenchMice; the post raised questions; the commenter addressed them.)

As a rule, most sites use the comment-moderation feature (part of their blogging software) to handle off-the-wall comments. For instance, when someone posts a comment on Writer Way, I receive an email notification and log in to Blogger to read the comment and publish it. On rare occasions, I choose not to publish it. (The comment may be "comment spam" promoting a product and having nothing to do with the Writer Way blog, or it may contain what I consider to be offensive language.)

"Offensive," of course, is a matter of taste.

Recently a group blog run by several leaders in the "A-level" blogging realm allowed several comments to be posted, some of them with photos, that contained extremely crude smears about a well-known blogger and expert on user-friendly design, Kathy Sierra. Some of the comments waxed enthusiastic about ways Kathy could be killed.

It all sounds like some high school kid's MySpace slambook, but, no, this was really appearing on a blog run by well-known tech types. Who apparently were having a collective Lord of the Flies flashback.

My initial reaction when I learned about this (from reading Kathy's blog post) was simply to resolve never to have anything to do with any of those folks. I was truly appalled to learn that one of those involved with one of the blogs that tolerated the offensive comments is Jeneane Sessum. She's a prominent member of the women's organization BlogHer (where I'm a member).

But I then read Bill Humphries' blog; his remarks ("It's Not Funny") point to Liz Henry's call to action. Liz is right. Behavior like that at unclebobism.wordpress.com (which replaced the original offensive blog, meankids.com) is comletely unacceptable. Liz writes:

"Kathy rocks for speaking up. She rocks for calling this out and exposing it on her blog. She rocks for calling the cops and the FBI, and for saying so. She wasn't shamed into silence or afraid of being called 'too sensitive' or 'humorless', two things which often stop women from speaking up."

Liz's post goes on to focus on the tone of woman-hating that characterized the attacks on Kathy Sierra, but I don't think that's the only key issue -- I've seen sexual slurs and threats used to attack male bloggers on political blogs. For me the crux of the matter is the issue of blogging community standards and the need to shore them up.

I urge other bloggers to post about the Kathy Sierra situation and to talk with their non-blogging friends about what's going on. If the mainstream press reports on this situation, wouldn't it be great if they could also report that the blogging community has taken a strong stand against a tiny minority of foul-mouthed bullies?

Can you spot a bad adverb?

You'll find out if you listen to the delightful Writing Tools: The Musical by Roy Peter Clark of Poynteronline.