While doing a perusal of new social media service offerings, I found (via Social Media Examiner) Back At You, a “self-service marketing platform” that helps you create, run, and analyze social media campaigns at a reasonable price point. It’s a good idea, so I spent some time on their site.

When I came to their blog post of August 29 (the most current post when I visited), I was amused to find the following sentence regarding inviting Facebook friends to a fan page: “Don’t overdue it as you might upset your friends for being solicitous.” In addition to the inadvertent misspelling of “overdo” (perhaps the blog post itself was overdue), I expect the writer meant something more along the lines of solicitation. Being solicitous is a good thing: it means showing interest or concern in something or someone or being eager to do something. I wouldn’t mind if a Facebook friend posted solicitous messages on her wall. Solicitation, of course, means asking for or trying to obtain something; or, as my police officer friend would tell me, it means offering one’s or someone else’s services as a prostitute.

The more proper terminology here, I think, would be commercial, something like “Don’t overdo it as you might upset your friends for being too commercial.”

Despite some missteps in spelling and usage, I would recommend taking a look at Back At You’s services. After all, they’re not selling copyediting tutorials.

I’m also working on implementing a new theme for this blog, something cleaner, only because I feel the need.

Briefly, for those not familiar with the term, content curation is, according to David Meerman Scott, “…the act of pointing your followers to content from other people. …Essentially the idea is that you find things that interest you and share them.” Retweeting; using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to share an interesting blog post, news article, or video (that you did not create) is curating content.

In retrospect, it’s the inevitable development of the real-time, overwhelming nature of digital content—the constant river of information that threatens to overflow your memory banks. Rubel calls this the “Validation era” of the Internet, when users are seeking the “signal in the noise” and “hold[ing] on to only those pieces of information and people that are most important to them online.”

I’ve long thought that the main value of the Internet, and particularly social media, is the ability to find and share good information. I like telling people about my pet’s foibles as much as the next person, but as entertaining as that might be, they’ll likely find more value in my sharing an article or post on marketing or book design or even the latest doomsday craze. At least that might affect them personally, unlike my quail’s latest attempt to eat an ant.

UPDATE June 14, 2011

Turns out there is quite a commotion about the use, or misuse, of the word curate. A nice comment on the topic can be found on Grammarphobia; Jim Crawford of Crawford PR has a particularly potent post on the subject, where he also targets monetize. While I usually fall into the prescriptionist camp of editors (versus descriptionist—a lively debate that people outside of editorial circles are missing out on), I must admit that perhaps I’ve become lazy and am accepting new word usages without thinking through their implications.

Of course, I’ve also decided that in most cases the term web, when referring to the World Wide Web, need not be capitalized, and that’s really moving into strange territory for a copyeditor who generally swears by Chicago and AP.

For the past two years, my partner and I have been mulling over our website redesign/redevelopment, coinciding with a rebranding initiative and a general rethink of our design/publishing services business and where it should go. If you run a small service business, you know how overwhelming this kind of process can be, especially while trying to keep up with client work, which always (always) has to come first. My partner researched content management systems (CMSs) for websites; we talked with several other people who work with CMSs, including our good friends Djuka and Bob S. who kindly showed us the power of Joomla; and we did a lot of reading, online and offline, trying to find the best solution for our needs, and subsequently for our clients as well—web design was one of our new service offerings, and we wanted to include a framework that was flexible, maintained, relatively easy to learn, and, preferably, open source.

It will come as no surprise to those of you who are already Drupal fans that we found Drupal and became, well, enamored with it. Our enthusiasm for the CMS itself, the plethora of modules and functionality that can be brought into it, and the amazing community that surrounds Drupal can’t be understated. We’re working on two websites now in addition to our own that are Drupal based, and, to coin a phrase, we’re lovin’ it.

I still consider myself a newbie in the world of Drupal with my partner being much more versed, but I’m enjoying this foray into web design and development in a way I hadn’t thought possible coming from a print design background. It’s a well-timed foray, I think, as our company also moves into the realm of app and e-book development.

We are still doing print design, of course, especially book design—that’s our specialty, and we do it well, if I may say so. But there’s no need to limit yourself as a designer to one medium, and I find that there is a synergy of sorts between the two, with web development activating a different part of my brain than print design and making me rethink (there’s that word again) the logic of the layout.

If you’re interested, check out Drupal through the link above or learn more about the history of Drupal from the founder, Dries Buytaert. Just so you know that Drupal websites are in good company, here is a compendium of websites built using Drupal, including Fast Company, the New York Observer, Popular Science, and Penn State University.

As life has settled down, I have been trying to catch up on my industry reading. I finally had a chance to read David Koretz’s Online Publishing Insider post (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=130356), a noteworthy observation on technology and what damage it may be doing to us as a society and culture.

Koretz reminds us that “long-form” journalism, the feature stories of investigative journalism once sure to be found in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, is vanishing. Many, if not most, of us skim the headlines on news aggregator or social media sites (Koretz notes that Facebook surpassed Google for the first time this year as the number one traffic driver to news sites) and continue reading only if we are intrigued (or bored); the accompanying stories are often short and written using short words and a limited vocabulary. When was the last time you read a news story online that provided you with context and background? That required you to, heaven forbid, scroll down? That required you to think?

Magazines are still publishing in-depth pieces (fewer as budgets decline), but your average daily newspaper does not delve into subjects as it used to—the management, editors, reporters, and staff are too busy struggling to keep the paper alive, and are desperately trying to figure out what they need to evolve into for the paper to succeed financially and otherwise. Who has the resources to pursue an investigative piece on local government? Likely not your daily paper, once the vanguard of such investigations. I see, as others in journalism do, a future where the daily paper is more and more like the news aggregators online (perhaps it is available only online) and the publications doing long-form journalism will be niche publications with niche audiences and subject matter.

How things will really fall out is, well, up to us and whether we want and are willing to support investigative journalism and community journalism as well as the daily news feed. So far, the answer seems to be that we’re not, which is a crying shame.

Koretz also brings up information of interest to me as a book publisher. While I would like to know the sources, Koretz cites two particularly startling statistics, the first of which I had not encountered before. He writes:

The average American now watches more than 1,800 hours a year of television, yet 80% have not read a book in the last year. It’s beautiful irony that we created a culture that likes watching authors be interviewed on TV, yet doesn’t like reading the books they write.

Maybe deep thinking no longer matters. Maybe we are a culture that prefers to be entertained rather than informed. Maybe everything that is important can be said in 140 characters. Or, maybe we should stop and think about whether we want to live in the world we dreamed up.

Consider this: 42% of college graduates will never read another book for the rest of their lives.

As publishers, this will transform our businesses — and as a society, harm it irreparably.

To me, this is another offshoot of the fragmented attention span we have acquired as a culture—people don’t read because books are, well, long. They also take time to digest, at least the good ones do, no matter their length. If you still read books, you are among the notable 20 percent of the population who relishes the time it takes to read good writing. Heck, you probably still read your daily newspaper.

I’m not sure that we will become an Asperger’s syndrome nation as some have warned, but without a doubt, our use of technology and media is changing, and we are changing with it in ways that are not altogether healthy.

We tire of everyday things—the things we see, the things we do on a daily basis become mundane. They lose the power they once had over us to command attention, and we begin to think that others must be experiencing the same lack.

So, too, do we look at our personal or business branding and think things like “we need a new logo!” or “our font stinks!” or “let’s use Pantone’s color of the year!” or even “let’s use Pantone’s color of the year from 2000 and be retro!”*

But good branding builds itself through consistency over time—consistency in look, consistency in performance—and everyone and everything involved with your brand needs that consistency. It reassures clients and business partners; it bolsters employees and owners. There is cohesion among its parts. A good brand is priceless, which is why it’s so very difficult to change any aspect of it.

So, it is troubling when a client approaches me and says, “I want to update our logo.”  Why? “It’s dated.” What makes you think that? “Well, I’m tired of it.” Ah. Are your customers? “I don’t know.” Didn’t you spend quite a bit of time and money to come up with that logo—the font, the colors? “Yes, we did.” Are you sure you want to go through that again? “No. I don’t think that’s necessary. I just want a new logo.”

The question that should be asked at this point is Do you feel the logo no longer reflects your brand? If there is no good, objective reason for the logo to be changed, revised, redesigned, or updated, then it should be left alone. Boredom is never a good reason to mess with a brand, even if it’s the CEO who’s bored.

There are good reasons to redo a logo: a new business strategy, new products or services. Redesigning a logo is much easier to do when a company is relatively young or relatively unknown. A local niche company that decides to expand its services into a larger geographic area and larger market certainly has a good reason to revise its logo, as does the small store that is considering opening new locations in adjacent communities. Sometimes the business has evolved beyond its brand and its logo so that, in reality, the rebranding or redesign is just playing catch-up.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that my company, Infusionmedia, is in the process of rebranding. There has been much reflection and thought—and intense discussions between my partner and I—over the last year and a half about the visual aspects of the brand and how that reflects where the company has been and supports where it’s going and how we’re going to get there. I was the designer of the original logo and chose the company colors that have been the visual part of the brand for over ten years, so some of the decisions have turned out to be more personally painful than I had expected. But we have come to a wonderful consensus between us on the new logo, and I am excited about our new visual identity and the new Web site that will portray it. Once we’ve finished with the new logo, I will humbly share it on this blog, along with the old one, and you can tell me what you think of them. I hope for good, positive thoughts, of course, but am prepared for others.

*Pantone’s choice for 2000 was, if you’re interested, “cerulean blue” or Pantone 15-4020 TCX; Pantone’s annual color predictions have been lightly lambasted over the years by such luminaries as the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/fashion/20COLOR.html); despite the potential hubris, the predictions continue to be made and the media continues to publicize them. The 2010 color is 15-5519—turquoise—which could lead one to think that the blues are especially popular at Pantone. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s been a difficult decade.

The Chicago Manual of Style generally endorses series commas, and you’ll find that many books are edited with that style in mind (as is this blog). I have a profound comfort level with the series comma because that’s what I was taught. Magazines and especially newspapers, however, often follow the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, which eschews the series comma in favor of saving space. In a publication that accepts advertising, the more text that can be fit in a smaller amount of nonpaid editorial space, the better.

I think many readers are being subconsciously taught AP style because so many people read magazines, newspapers, and their online equivalents in greater number and frequency than books. I also wonder if the public schools are no longer teaching the series comma in English classes, as I remember so clearly from my younger days. Certainly, many of my clients are mildly shocked or uneasy with the series comma. “Are you sure that goes there?” is a common question. Yes, I say, and then I explain why.

Of course, even AP style requires that a series comma be used when there is potential misunderstanding without it. Writers and editors who use AP style and who don’t fully understand the rules surrounding the series comma often err in these situations. If you use AP, it’s worth refreshing yourself on the stylebook’s comma rules.

In my wanderings around the Web, I’ve found an excellent resource for AP editing questions at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina. This article by Doug Fisher, from their August 2005 newsletter, is a wonderful reintroduction to the comma and its pitfalls: http://www.jour.sc.edu/news/csj/CSJAug05.html.

I especially like that Fisher references and endorses Bryan Garner’s exception to the comma after the year in an exact date. To explain, using Fisher’s example, a comma should be after the year (and the state) in this sentence: “Construction of the plant in Lima, Ohio, began on Aug. 16, 1984, and took six years.” The exception to the comma after the year is when the date or place is used as an adjective, e.g. (Garner’s example) “The court reconsidered its July 12, 1994 privilege order.”

No editor or writer should be without a good usage guide, and I am partial to Garner’s Modern American Usage, which you can find at the usual booksellers online and off. Garner has such a commonsense and thoughtful approach to English that I find myself reading beyond my original question, just enjoying the writing and the information. (I also used to read dictionaries as a child, so perhaps I’m just weird.)

(The title of this post is a play off the lengthy book titles from yesteryear and allowed me to introduce the comma in what is now considered an old-fashioned construction. See Chicago 7.132: “Old-fashioned titles connected by or are usually treated as follows: England’s Monitor; or, The History of the Separation or England’s Monitor, or The History of the Separation…”)

In the January 2010 issue of Golfdom, however, it looks like spell check ran wild without the proper amount of intelligent human supervision.

On page 4, this sentence managed to escape the proofreading process: “These people had one thing in common—they were shells hocked by the onslaught of a dreadful economy.” On page 16, we are told “Sewage plants typically discharge warm water that, during colder months—flu-season months—is particularly attractive to water foul and birds.” Given that waterfowl are birds and neither is particularly foul as a matter of course, this is truly a magnificent error.

But I’m not picking on Golfdom alone.

I am a fan of the writer Roger Zelazny, a giant in the New Wave movement in science fiction and fantasy that began in the mid-1960s. His Amber series, the first five books of which were published by Doubleday, are rife with typos and typesetting errors. (I don’t have the books in front of me or I would enumerate the errors as I did with Golfdom, just to make things fair.) I once thought that the errors may have been confined to the Science Fiction Book Club editions that I was initially introduced to, but I recently reread the series in its new reprinting, The Great Book of Amber published by Eos, and found a few of my old mistaken friends in its pages. Are they Zelazny’s fault in the writing of the books? I tend to think not, if only because many of the errors are obvious typesetting errors and typos; I must place the blame on the editor, the typesetter, and the proofreader (and whatever multiples of those positions there may have been in the process)—and the rush to get the books out and onto bookstore shelves.

What I would like to convey through the use of these examples, widely separated by time and type, is that we, as writers and editors, need to be more careful. We need to care, period.

The evolution of how information is distributed is truly making us a world of readers. We read e-mail, we read blog posts, we read tweets, we read e-newsletters, we read Web sites, we read text messages, we read e-books—and we read everything in the printed, three-dimensional world that we used to read, such as magazines and books (and print-on-demand books) and newspapers—though admittedly in declining numbers. Someone has to write what we read, and that writer needs to carefully craft his or her words so the message is understood. And after that, someone needs to carefully edit and proofread those carefully crafted words. (In the digital world, often that second someone is the same person—oh, the humanity!—and therein lies a problem we just don’t have time to get into today. If you see an error in this blog post, let’s just call it a case in point.)

That we so often don’t care, or perhaps don’t care enough, likely will be made evident in the next e-mail or text message you receive.

Why should we care? You know why. Because that momentary slip in grammar, that fumbled sentence, that typo left untouched affects how readers perceive the message and its author. It becomes somewhat of a bugbear—the eye is drawn to it, the mind puzzles over it, and the reader’s flow of thought is interrupted.

It is the final editor’s job to at least mitigate if not eliminate those interruptions. And that’s not because of the editor’s need to protect his or her reputation—few readers know who edits their favorite books or magazine articles—it’s because of the editor’s job description, which is to make the author look good.

I am, of course, well versed in human error, particularly my own, and understand that the world of writing and editing is anything but perfect, especially when you’re on deadline. But in both the instances above, all that would have been necessary is for someone (again, that someone) to, one last time, go over the proof, check the pages, scroll through the document. To be careful, and by that I mean to apply serious attention to doing something correctly.

Now, let’s hope I don’t have to eat these words on my next editing job.

I discovered their words of wisdom in the December 2009 issue of Irrigation & Green Industry in an article titled “Beware of Best Business Practices.” You can also find it on the magazine’s Web site at http://www.igin.com/article-1210-beware-of-best-business-practices.html.

The section of the article that really stood out for me is titled “Read” and includes a quotation by Jim Rohn, a motivational speaker, philosopher, and entrepreneur: “Poor people have big TVs, rich people have big libraries.” I could quibble with the use of the comma instead of a semicolon there, but the point is a good one. Successful people continue to learn throughout their lives, and no matter the venue—printed book, e-book, magazine, Web site, even seminar materials—learning includes reading. Text may be accompanied by images, it may be served to us in audio form, it may be on a screen or on a sheet of paper or in Braille—yet it, and the language of which it is composed, remains the most powerful learning and teaching tool we have as humans.

If reading will help us become successful, then it is indeed unfortunate that the statistics from Vee and Miller’s article reflect a rejection of reading in the United States: 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book in 2008; 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after graduation. Yet, as I recall, a USA Today or Parade poll from years back (don’t ask me for provenance; I don’t believe I can provide it) suggested that 80 percent of people in the U.S. wanted to write a book.

The disconnect is astounding, isn’t it?

If you’re into science fiction/fantasy and live within reasonable driving distance of Omaha, I encourage you to check out OSFest and OSFES. OSFest3 is a three-day event that will be held July 23–25, 2010, in Omaha, and I fully intend to go.

If you visit OSFES’s site, you’ll find links to several other area science fiction/fantasy and gaming organizations and sites. Being a fan of such things, I was impressed by the number and breadth available (and a bit appalled at my ignorance of them).