Web Worker Daily

As I sit down each day to do my work, the vast majority of which involves writing (articles, web site content, tweets and blog posts), I can’t help but think about the writing rules drilled into me by past English teachers. In most cases, their advice is still very pertinent, and I write better by adhering to it. But there are a few rules that would prove detrimental to my online work if I continued to follow them. Read the rest of this entry »

November is almost here, and that means it’s also nearly time for NaNoWriMo. That’s National Novel Writing Month, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the abbreviated term. It’s an event run by Office of Letters and Light, a not-for-profit organization that takes as its primary focus encouraging young people to write through various education-based programs.

The goal is for participants to write an entire 50,000-word novel, from start to finish, within the space of a single month. Sound challenging? It should, unless you’re Stephen King, who seems able to match that kind of production without even meaning to. It’s free to enter, although donations are encouraged to help the organization pursue its charitable goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing content for the web can take many forms, but a good number of those forms will probably involve an interview at some point or another. As a general rule, good interviews have three characteristics: One, they make you forget that someone other than the reader is asking the questions. Two, the reader leaves knowing something they didn’t before. Three, the reader doesn’t learn anything about the interviewer from the interview. The tips that follow should help you achieve these things. Read the rest of this entry »

Document collaboration with distributed teams can be a bit of a headache, as I’ve noted in previous posts. No doubt, if you’ve ever tried it yourself, you don’t need me to remind you. More tools are available than ever before for getting this kind of work done, but with a plethora of choices comes a conundrum. What kind of tool works best for collaborating on a single document? A specialized web app, a wiki, something like iWork.com that integrates with your word processing program, or a Google Docs/Zoho Writer shared document? I’ve yet to find a definite answer, but not for lack of trying.

Revizr is a new app that combines wiki elements with change tracking features that preserves the integrity of your original document, so you can see exactly what your collaborators have added (or taken away) from your copy. And it does so in an app that’s so easy to use, you’re actually using it the moment you visit its homepage for the first time. In order to manipulate your own documents, and work together with others, you will have to sign up, but if you’re just looking for a taste of what Revizr can do before you enroll, the trial is the site itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by: borman818

As a freelance online community consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to stabilize my income to reduce the ups and downs that come with having my own business. The most obvious solution is to manage your pipeline to make sure that you have new projects to replace the ones that are completing, but it’s also a good idea to have alternative income streams to complement your main client work and fill in any gaps.

In an ideal world, you finish one project on Friday with your next project ready to start on Monday; however, we don’t live in an ideal world, and even our best planning efforts occasionally go awry. While my client base has been fairly steady, I’m always concerned that I might have gaps. I would rather have plans to fill those gaps rather than being caught off guard and unprepared, so recently, I have been experimenting with alternative income streams that will generate regular revenue without relying entirely on client work.

This isn’t a new topic on WebWorkerDaily. Georgina recently wrote a great post with some of her recession avoidance techniques: saving more, managing debt and spending, and strategies for finding new work and staying motivated, while Anne Zelenka wrote a great post with 10 new ways to make money online, and Mike and Aliza followed up with 10 more new ways to make money online. However, I wanted to write about my personal experiences with alternative income streams. Read the rest of this entry »

The key to successful document collaboration, as far as I’ve been able to gather in my many attempts, is making sure that the process is as simple as is absolutely possible. People only seem able or willing to work together on text projects if it takes only marginally more effort than not collaborating at all. A newly open-to-the-public web app called doingText, which Mike Gunderloy took a brief look at when it was in closed beta, might be the best and simplest method yet, even beating TextFlow’s latest web-based tool.

They’ve since added some features, ironed out some kinks, and set up a multi-tiered pricing plan that offers something for everyone, including a basic free version that will probably be enough for most individuals. I wanted to run it through its paces now that it’s been officially released, and see if it really was as hassle-free as advertised. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to a few lucky opportunities at school, my transition from print to web was a gradual process, and a move that I made voluntarily. That’s not the case for a large number of writers currently making the same transition. The print journalism and publishing industries are in big trouble, with no sign of turning a corner anytime soon. More and more print publications are switching to the web, and finding it hard to deal with the fact that they can’t just move their existing content and keep on doing the same thing.

Likewise, writers can’t just keep producing the same kind of content for a different medium. The web, and its readers, demands a different kind of writing, delivered in a different way. It can hard to find the right mix, especially if you’ve spent your entire professional life writing one way, only to be asked to completely change that up. Here are some tips and resources to help get a handle on just what kind of change is required.

Practice Makes Perfect

It’s an old maxim, but one that doesn’t seem to lose its validity no matter how much time goes by or how many technological changes we may experience. If you want to learn something new, you need to practice it. For online writing, there are a number of different ways you could go about it.

First, there’s good ol’ rewriting. Find a source, or better yet, a number of sources of writing samples that resemble the type of working you’re aiming to do. Then try to produce a similar piece, maintaining the spirit of the original(s), but incorporating your own take. When you’re examining your sources, pay special attention to what they all share, and, when you’ve written your own version, look for things that your piece has that the others don’t. It may be a useful innovation, but maybe it’s something from print that’s extraneous to web writing. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of recent events brought the issue of working for free into sharp focus for me. First, there was the news via one of my close friends that a popular blog, whose content I very much enjoy, solicited only unpaid submissions, only offering a “byline” as the motivation for would-be posters. It surprised me, considering the source, who would seem well able to pay contributors.

Second, the same issue came up at a recent installment of #editorchat, a weekly group meeting held on Twitter for professional writers and editors hosted by @milehighfool and @LydiaBreakfast. The question was whether writers ever did work just for the byline, exposure, and/or clips for their portfolio, and what people thought of that kind of activity. In general, the group was very averse to it, because it encourages publications to seek free submissions instead of paying writers. Read the rest of this entry »