The Late Newcomer

Well, as we were meant to post our old ones (and I lost mine with the last attempt at a blog due to an unfortunate altercation involving the last account), here's week 3's lecture.

WHAT IS TEXT?
Well, it appears text is:

• Fast!
• Flexible!
• Having Complete control!
• Portable!
• Searchable!
• Absolutely Dominating online!

Couldn't be more true for the last one, the web would have to be completely remade to get anywhere near as much popularity as it would with text, I literally can't see how you can create one without text.

And speaking of text, this brings me to the next picture, what I believe is a must-have when it comes to writing a news story. 

This is a modified version of *cough* today's lecture. The point it makes is simple: When creating a story, USE THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTS THE MOST FREQUENTLY. Then, use quotes, supporting details, i.e. in essence, don't say s*** unless you can show what supports it.
Finally, use the general background. This is in because it's necessary, to clear confusion and to get a better picture of what's happening.

An example of this was used in the lecture (see below):

British and Italian hostages murdered by captors in special forces rescue bid in Nigeria

A British hostage has been killed in a Special Forces operation to free him from al-Qaeda aligned kidnappers in Nigeria.

This follows the pyramid exactly: The opening statement shows what's the most important: Who is it, what's happened, where did it happen? The rest of the story goes on to give more details, giving the name (Chris McManus, when it happened, why it happened, and what happened after.

See here for the story.

But text can't be as simple as that one pyramid. Which is why the lecture continued!

Text is also:

• Story content
• headlines
• standfirst
• Captions
• Pull quotes
• Break-out boxes
• links

Any decent news-paper/website includes all of these The lecture showed an example, the website of The Australian: it showcased a headline over Unions mulling a levy to fight Abbott, Captions for each story, content for each boxed story before linking each one over to its own page on its own story.

And it appears we perceive text as even more important than photographs! Apparently we look at and register text before the picture! Is this true? I tested it out on family, and found that no, it wasn't. They immediately always saw the picture first. What did you see?

See the photo HERE. note: slightly strange, includes slight nudity.

Well, I thought it was a decent story.

Text is (of course) the majority of our social web, the Web 2.0: Emails we send, blogs we post, tweets we send, Facebook updates we create, comments we leave, all of these rely on text. Forums apply to this as well.

Our blogs appear to be exponentially expanding (what isn't lately on the Internet?). a 2010 edition of the Sate of the Blogosphere found that instead of a community, blogging is now becoming mainstream. The rate of blogging also increased, with more blogs this year than there were last year, as well as over half of them believing blogs will be the primary source of media in five years (3 years from now). Personally, I believe this to be an exaggeration, but the more you that read this, the more I'm proven wrong.

TechCrunch advertised a story in which a man seemingly sold his company for $1000 in at least 3 ways: on its website, on Twitter, and on Facebook, 3 highly effective means of mass communication.

Finally, text is: 

• Metadata
• Excerpts
• and Tags

The lecture recommended WordPress Excerpt for text such as this, which I trust to be well-informed due to having Excerpt in its title.

Thank you for your reading, I hope you enjoyed it.