How many SEO copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb [...?]

[Via iamcal]

NFL football is coming home! Almost three decades after first appearing on Channel 4, the NFL is returning to its original station in a new deal to broadcast Sunday Night Football. Channel 4 will air the league’s premier match-up at 1 a.m. every Sunday night, with the game kicking off at 1.20. The new season will begin with the Dallas Cowboys’ trip to arch-rival Washington Redskins on September 12. [...]

I used to enjoy following the NFL back in the 1980s when Channel 4 gave the sport its first mainstream UK TV coverage. I stopped following the NFL once Channel 4 lost the rights, primarily because when Channel 5 took over the contract their coverage initially centred around their live game show in the wee small hours. I could have recorded the shows to watch during the week, but somehow I just never got into the habit. In fairness, it may also have been that the generation of players I’d become familiar with when I first encountered the sport in the early 1980s was starting to retire and I felt less of a connection with the teams than I had a few years earlier.

It’ll be interesting to try to follow the sport again in the age of the internet. Back in the 1980s the Channel 4 show early on a Sunday evening would show highlights from the previous weekend’s games,¹ but given the lack of coverage of the NFL in the UK mainstream media at the time it wasn’t a problem to avoid finding out the results over the course of the week so I could safely catch up on the action on a Sunday night. Now that it’d be trivial to find out the weekend’s scores online, will I have the willpower to hold out until the next highlights show? If I can’t wait, will I end up trying to seek out game highlights on YouTube in preference to waiting for a chance to see the highlights on Channel 4?²

[Via Phil Gyford]

1. There were exceptions to that rule, with extra mid-week highlights programmes during post-season play and of course live coverage of the Superbowl, but in general Channel 4′s NFL coverage existed in a time warp.
2. Of course, we don’t have full details of Channel 4′s coverage yet: it’s quite possible that they’ll put on a highlights show in midweek in addition to their live game coverage.

quickstart 10:57 am on September 2, 2010
In my hometown there’s a bar where the washroom signs say “Quarterbacks” and “Receivers.” Whenever I end up there, I always catch someone standing hesitantly in front of the bathroom, not totally clear on where they should be going or how exactly to take these signs. This is actually how I met the love of my life, when I informed him he was a quarterback – he’d been standing there for a while – he said, “I know. It’s just so offensive.”

[Via The Awl]

It was only when I read the text of this MetaFilter post that I realised that the damned thing doesn’t just look like a baby Cray, it’s binary-compatible with a Cray-1A too!

That’s a neat trick…

[Via MetaFilter]

I’ve been enjoying the summer movie blockbusters, more or less, and have been struck by a couple that veer off in a decidedly metaphysical direction. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve spent a while thinking about the last few scenes of one film in particular, which may rewrite or redefine the entire narrative you’ve just seen.

I’m talking, of course, about Toy Story 3.

The Toy Story trilogy is being hailed as one of the great film series of all time, on a par with the Godfather series or the original Star Wars movies. Both of those were weakest in their third acts, while Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece. But it’s also the one that pulls together a number of strings that have run through the three films, and threatens – right at its very end – to drag the whole edifice to the ground. And it’s all done with one line of dialogue, that almost everybody else seems to have missed. [...]

(Do I really need to add that spoilers for Toy Story 3 abound?)

[Via Yoz Grahame]

[ITV...], having paid £6 million for his services, devised a show for [James] Corden to front with his quick wit and personal charm and broadcast the results at prime time for the duration of the tournament. And with sapping inevitability, James Corden’s World Cup Live was truly, truly horrible, a cack-handed cross between Soccer AM‘s infantilism and TFI Friday‘s Class A shoutiness.

Abbey Clancy was hired to do what Abbey Clancy does; the backroom boys worked out some skits about how Uruguay’s players had long hair and looked like girls; a polo-shirted audience whooped with well-marshalled efficiency. “Lovely stuff!” barked Corden, banging his cards on the desk. Somewhere in Britain, another library closed.

Ex-footballers with nothing better to do squeezed onto the sofa with sort-of celebs like Denise van Outen and Pixie Lott, the kind of people no one really cares about, without whom no TV show is commissioned (“Have you been watching the World Cup, Pixie?” probed our fearless host. “Well, I saw the England game,” giggled the vacant Lott).

[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth, it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

…

Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feel, would interfere with that.

– Susan Orlean, “Riding High,” in the 2/15 & 22/10 New Yorker

Nice work.

I wish the magazine industry would stop praying that the magazine-as-iPad-app approach will preserve their current business model and come up with some sort of central clearing house to which I could pay a reasonable sum every month in return for online-only access to a certain number of articles per month across multiple publications and publishers. I’m never going to be able to justify paying for subscriptions to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books and a good dozen other print publications every month² but I’d be happy to pay a few pounds per month to an online library service³ for pick-and-mix access to their contents.

I appreciate that the various publishers would much rather have me signed up as one of their subscribers than get the occasional slice of my subscription when I feel like reading an interesting article here or there, but the net result of their current strategy is that they get not a penny from me. I can’t be the only non-subscriber who would send some money the publishers’ way if only they’d let me, can I?

1. Not available to read in full for free online.
2. And I don’t really want the paper copies of their products cluttering up the place.
3. Perhaps £5, maybe as much as £10. It would depend upon the number of magazines available and how easy it was to browse and access the individual articles.

For 15 years, I’ve been doing most of my writing – aside from my two books – on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can’t link!

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article’s links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I’m unfamiliar.

There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” post. [...]

This first post suggests that some of the studies into the relationship between reading, comprehension and hyperlinks cited by Nicholas Carr weren’t looking at hyperlinks as they’re used in the vast majority of web-based writing today. I look forward to seeing where Rosenberg takes the argument in his next two pieces.

Tomorrow, in the next post in this series, I’ll examine some of the ways links are being misused on the Web today – driven not by some abstract belief in the virtues of hypertext but rather by crude business imperatives. Then, in the final installment, I’ll make the case for good linking practices as a source of badly needed context and a foundation for trust.

For what it’s worth, when I read Nicholas Carr’s post experimenting with delinkification I did consider whether it might be worth adopting the idea, but concluded that it’s a technique particularly ill-suited to a linklog like this site.

If I were in the habit of writing longer think-pieces then my gut feeling – based, I’ll freely admit, primarily on the way I’ve learned to read pieces on the web since I first encountered it in late 1992/early 1993 – is that it’s much more helpful to have the link appear at the point in the text at which I discuss the material at the other end of the link than it is to require the reader to bounce between the text and a list of links at the end of the piece¹ to get the full sense of my argument.

The key, to my mind, is that it’s up to the reader to choose whether to hare off after my link as soon as it appears or to defer following it until they’ve reached the end of my argument. As long as I don’t style my link text in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to skim the entire sentence² I think that readers should be fine dealing with a few links scattered here and there throughout my piece.

1. Or in footnotes/endnotes, or in a sidebar. And yes, I do notice the irony of my placing this text in a footnote.
2. By which I mean, for example, styling the text in a way that jars with the surrounding, non-linked text.

The best joke ever in the footnotes of the JAH – indeed, the only joke of which I’m aware in the footnotes of the JAH – follows along those lines. Bruce Schulman was critiquing the original transcription of the LBJ audiotapes:

The few transcripts compiled by Johnson’s secretaries proved unreliable: one had Johnson refer to a “pack them bastards” waiting outside his office; it turned out to be the Pakistani ambassador.¹⁰

Note 10 reads,

“… As Beschloss notes, the secretary could hardly be blamed for the error. Packs of bastards were far more likely to appear in Johnson’s conversation than Pakistani ambassadors.”

“Taping History,” JAH 85:2 (Sept 1998): 571-578; on 574.