It’s as easy or hard as writing for a printed magazine. Who said writing was easy anyway? A writer colleague of mine once said that a story doesn’t exist until it’s been read. It’s the reader who decides what works and what doesn’t. Same with the Web. And I think people have showed that they can read stuff off of a screen as well — once they have decided to read something.

The question’s not how to write for the Web, it’s more about whether you should write for the Web at all.

More about this on Tuesday, after the Finnish Custom Publishing Day.

Edit: here are the slides.

Edit 2: NY Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”

Got this link from a friend of mine today. Excellent piece (by Garrison Keillor), and an idea I can subscribe to.

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I have quite a few feeds in my FeedDemon but often I just read the blog entries and skip the comments. The other day, I did visit Malcolm Gladwell’s site because he posed a question about Enron there, and I wanted to see if somebody had answered him.

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This from The Guardian:

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

More here and even more here.

Anybody know if there’s a way to count the total number of words in several Word documents (without opening them all and adding them one by one)?

No, I’m not going to write about some site every day, but this is pretty good.

Old Version:

We believe that every computer user has the right to use a version of the product that he or she is most comfortable with, not the one dictated by the software developer, so we provide access to the files that are no longer obtainable.

Currently including 1355 versions of 125 programs.

Trust is hard. Being afraid is easy.

Today, I interviewed an executive at Swedish Vattenfall, about an incident they had a nuclear plant, and their analysis of it. He said all the right things, they are doing all the right things (investing more money, adding staff, easing up on the pressure on people there, etc.) and yet, they’re not going to get recognition for it.

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I’m working on a story about the cultural differences with the concept of time and I was wondering if you’d have some ideas. How does the Western concept of time differ from the Eastern one? Are the Germans always on time? Who’s always late? And so on.

Leave your ideas in the comments. Thanks!

I always thought that Finns were the only nation in the world where the crew cut was still alive and kicking dandruff. In fact, I still do. I think it’s because of the structure of Finnish hair: straight as an arrow.

What does that tell us about Finns? Well, for one, that they talk sraight, that they care less about style and more about how easy it is to take care of hair, and that they are fascinated by discipline. Not only that, Finns love discipline.

Well, maybe you can’t tell that just by looking at the number of crew cuts in Finland, so you’ll just have to trust me on this.

I take this knowledge with me to Gävle tomorrow when I go to meet Leif Boork, former Team Sweden head coach, and now coach of Brynäs in the Swedish Elite League. He’s known to be a straight shooter who runs a tight ship.

He’s got Sweden’s most famous crew cut.

This is me:

And here’s my story, neatly inside a pdf file. Enjoy.

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