Bad language, good blogs -- WTF

I used to work for an entertainment industry trade publication, written for people in the industry. For a fairly conservative paper, it had a liberal commonsense policy on swearing:

If the word occurs naturally, use it. If the quote includes the word fuck, use it. If there is no good reason to swear in print, don't.

"It's not a family newspaper," was the saying on the copydesk.

This worked out well. I think I set that policy ages ago, and I continue with it on my own blogs. I swear most days in my real life; not much while writing.

Certainly, curse words flow on TV these days. I believe I've heard the F-bomb dropped by announcers on CNBC and Fox Sports. Of course swear words are always flying around on HBO and Showtime. The "asshole" barrier fell years ago on network TV, by one of the cop shows.

But the news media keep things pretty clean. One reason: Cursing in publication or in a post often comes across as juvenile, even to readers who swear. Something about putting down the words in black and white. It feels off, like when some bozo uses all CAPS in an email. This, to me, is the problem with using "bad language." Of course, there are publications that swear to be hip, like the laddie magazine Maxim, which pulls it off.

I do think you can swear occasionally on a blog without becoming offensive to a general audience. The work will be judged in context and as a whole, at least by smart readers. Forget the middle ground: The hyphens in f--k don't accomplish a fucking thing.

This policy wouldn't apply on sites/blogs intended for younger readers, of course, but if you're writing for the big kids, WTF.

Here's another take on blogging and swearing.

Bad jokes and bloggers: Don't be an April fool

Coming home from a nice vacation always feels a bit weird. Among the reasons to be bummed is the inevitable avalanche of unopened email.

Most of us have spent hours wading through these aging e-messages. I go overseas for a month now and then, and upon return always set aside at least a day to sort it all out. This time, we were gone for only a week up in Big Sur -- but the email queues still were plenty scary.

I get a lot of SEO-related email, as requested from the top bloggers in that business. RSS is OK, but I do prefer email, perhaps just out of habit. I use a Yahoo email account for those subscriptions.

What struck me this time out was the amount of time-wasting material that flowed in from these "pro" bloggers. Taken day-to-day it's no big deal, but in a lump you can really get annoyed.

Our road trip coincided with April Fool's Day. Five days later, all that "fun" prank copy stunk like the beached dead fish we tried not to squash while hiking the coast.

Yeah, I'm a grouch and, yeah, everyone means well, but I'm not a big fan of wasting your readers' time.

One blogger devoted something like three screens' worth of copy to telling readers how to get along with Google. Stuff like, phoning the search engine engineers directly, stuffing a blog with keywords, linking out to bad neighborhoods and buying links in bulk. Readers got the joke in graf 2.

Goodwill goes a long way, of course. Shoemoney, the popular Net marketing guru, writes about wrestling now and then (yawn), and regularly posts pictures of himself wearing some company's T-shirts. I'm not complaining -- the guy gives away a lot of decent content. I do think off-topic posts are bad news when they're the blog's only entries of the day, though.

If you're writing for the public, be respectful of people's time, especially in the business arena. Injecting personality into a pro blog helps build audience loyalty -- lord knows I could use some more flare here -- but always keep in mind that goodwill is a finite resource.

That's this post's message, but if you have some time to kill, read on ...

Back to April Fool's Day: One clown decided to blog that Darren Rowse, who writes the excellent ProBlogger, had gone bankrupt and never had made more than $1,000 a month from blogging. Rowse then saw the libelous content on the Wikipedia page about him. An employee wanted to know if he'd be paid; a lot of people were confused. To make matters worse, the bogus post was time-stamped March 31.

Rowse reluctantly wrote about the incident today, also addressing spoofs in general:

"While it might be blatantly obvious to you and 99% of your readers that you’re not serious - you will fool someone. Perhaps they just read the title, perhaps the skim the post and don’t see the clues or perhaps they just believe it without question. As a result I tend to only play jokes that use my own name or reputation -- or would advise that if you’re going to involve someone else that you might want to check with them first."

Rowse isn't suing, apparently, making one joker a very lucky man. Also burned by this thing was fellow pro blogger Jeremy Shoemoney, who was falsely reported as arrested for riding a bike while intoxicated. Hic.

Rowse, for the record, has never wasted my time. Read him and learn.

And by the way ... thanks for your time.

Death provides lively copy for bloggers

Death doesn't faze newsrooms. For editors, the order of the day, every day, is gallows humor -- whistling past the old graveyard.

Newspapers, in fact, love death. Funeral notices -- aka "fun notices" in the biz -- are a profit center for papers small and mighty. Craig's List won't be taking that niche away soon.

Death also keeps readers coming back. Obituaries are among the most-read features for older readers, many of whom begin their day by viewing the parade to the grave of their age's leading personalities.

I've made a habit of reading all of the New York Times' obituaries and recommend them to you. The Times obits editors are notoriously picky about whom they include -- basically, the subjects must have changed the world in some way. The Times' obituaries are little history lessons, famously accurate and routinely compelling. You can learn about a lot about the world.

I bring this up because the truism that death makes good copy applies to blogs as well. There is nothing morbid about this, unless you make it so. A well-written appreciation of someone's life can be a shared experience for you and your readers.

On my DVD blog, I'd been looking for a good reason to weigh in on the Stanley Kubrick DVDs that were released as a pack late last fall. The Kubrick films made their Blu-ray debut at a busy time for DVD releases, and I only got around to "Eyes Wide Shut."

The news of Arthur C. Clarke's death sent me straight to the keyboard. I know little about the man or his writings aside from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Still, my DVD blog was able to connect with a story that had people talking -- and I provided something of value by quoting the man several times in a review of his most famous work.

So did you hear the one about the dying futurist and the sexy alien ... ?

Just started blogging? Be a rock 'n' roller

Unless you're famous or incredibly well connected, it's lonely work starting a blog. Especially before the search engines know you're there. The traffic comes in single digits, no one comments and there are only a couple of posts to show for all your efforts.

The temptation is to slide and wait for the action. It could be a long wait.

I think in the early stages it's important that new bloggers write as if they had a large enthusiastic audience.

We've all seen blog entries with something like, "What does it matter, no one reads this blog anyway." Ugh.

Story time: I remember seeing the rock band Dash Rip Rock long ago in a downtown L.A. club. They had to play after the headliner. Everyone in the audience left but five or six of us. Felt sorry for the boys. But that band played as if they were rocking Madison Square Garden.

Be like Dash Rip Rock.

Second opinion. Here is some advice from another angle, written by Maki of the blog Dosh Dosh: "The most important thing to do is to blog as if no one else was reading you." I highly recommend this blog for bloggers, which was incredibly useful to me in the early days and remains a favorite read.

It's time to do some work on your blog

When it comes to blogging, what a difference a day makes -- especially if it's the first one of the month.

I've adopted the policy of updating all of my blogs come the start of each new month. The previous post may be only a day old -- maybe even a few hours old -- but that item sinks into fish-wrap waters the second the month rolls over.

Maybe readers don't care. I'm betting they do. At the very least, it's good motivation to update -- and lord knows we all need that.

Don't have an idea? You'll think of something. I just did.

How to break into screenwriting

Wanted: Co-writer for high-profile Hollywood screenplay. No experience necessary.

Yep, it's for real. My friend Eric Estrin, left, has launched the "LA Observed Script Project," a collaborative venture that's partly an experiment and mostly a writing competition.

Estrin started off the project's screenplay "Right of Way" with a three-page setup. Then it was turned over to the masses. Wanna-be screenwriters are asked to submit a few pages. Each week, Estrin will pick the submission that best advances the story.

Brings to mind "Naked Came the Stranger," a sex novel written by a pack of journalists in 1969. Each writer contributed one chapter. Here, a different screenwriter adds on a few pages each week.

The first winning cowriter was Jerry Lazar, a journalist and magician who cranked out another three pages. Lazar is a man about town in L.A., but you don't have to be:

"Anyone who’s been part of a writers’ room knows how exhilarating it can be to work with a great team on an exciting project," Estrin wrote. "So picture LAObserved as the room and the whole world as the team."

The "Right of Way" story concerns an L.A. mayor dedicating to build a real transit system in that car-obsessed city. Yes, that makes the tale pure fiction.

"It’s going to be a drama, a darkish murder mystery filled with glamour, wit and big dreams, the stuff of life in Southern California," Estrin wrote in his screenplay-contest blog.

I'm thinking "Chinatown" on rails, but who knows what tone the script will take as it moves forward. Estrin seems open to radical suggestions: "If your vision goes off in an unexpected direction, and you can convince me it works in 1-5 pages, bring it on!"

Want in on the action? Next deadline for script submissions is Sunday.

Grammar police's most-wanted: bloggers

A couple of heavyweight bloggers recently had their knuckles rapped over subpar grammar skills. The debate, predictably, turned to, "If people understand what's being communicated, why does it matter?"

Of course, I march with the grammar goon squad on this one. Casual conversation doesn't requite good grammar, true, but writing for a mass audience does. (Copy editors sometimes have to silence their overzealous deskmates with, "Edit copy, not speech!" Even the correctors need a break from correction.)

Puny grammar always makes the writer look bad. If a blogger doles out information that's desperately needed, it’s a lot easier to be forgiving. But when his or her readers have other choices, the smart ones will wander off.

I can sympathize. I slept through grammar in grade school, dropped out of high school and then wrote for a half dozen years using D-student grammar and sloppy spelling. I got away with it because of my sighing editors, who wielded mighty pencils.

Somehow, I ended up teaching incoming journalism students. Motivated by fear of student revolt, I spent a couple of years studying grammar and spelling rules. (This was a lot more fun than it sounds. I have Aspergian traits.)

Before long, I found my writing was greatly improved, not only by the new clarity but by a kind of strength and confidence. Like being a play-by-ear musician and suddenly acquiring the ability to read and write the notes.

It is never too late to learn. I always recommend "The Elements of Style" as a starting point. Killer book, short read. Almost fun.

Google SEO guru talks links, anchor text, domains

I knew there was a reason I subscribe to email from Rambling About SEO. In an interview posted today, the blog managed to get some straight talk from Google's Adam Lasnik.

The Google search strategist puts out some choice information on topics often discussed by SEO bloggers. Here's a sample:

• Anchor text from inbound links: "Useful descriptive Anchor text can be great, not only for the user ... but helpful for Google to better understand what that page is likely about. On the flip side of things, (there's the) smell test, and that if something doesn't smell right, smells fishy; doesn't look or seem natural, that's going to certainly raise a red flag for us."


• Domain name wording: "I think people overemphasize the value of good domain names. ... I would say that while a domain name can be a factor in some ways how we view sites, how we view links; I would really say that it is relatively a minimal factor."


• Internal links: "What we found is that sites that have a lot of links, 200, 300, or 500, tend to have links that have not been strongly editorially vetted. We would rather see fewer links that the webmaster has actually looked over, and that they are maintaining to make sure they are still fresh."


• Dueling home-page file names: "If (the Googlebot) sees a page that is pretty much identical to something it has already seen, it will automatically make a determination regarding which page makes more sense, and it will run with this URL. ... In the vast majority of cases, it really has no negative affect at all."

Eric Enge asked the questions. Great job.

This is the kind of communication bloggers, webmasters and SEO providers need from Google, although I don't know why it usually gets done via random interviews like this and hints from Matt Cutts. The tea-leaf reading gets old.

Update: Here's an experienced SEO blogging about the same complaint.