del.icio.us/hal990/web2.0

In case you’re not familiar with del.icio.us, it’s a site where you can collect and share bookmarks. Simple, functional and useful. Very Web 2.0 in it’s own modest way.

Of course, any attempt to create a definitive Top Ten list of Web 2.0 examples is probably futile. Certainly subjective. But we think these examples showcase a lot of different looks, functionality and audiences, including Last.fm, Skype and the Genetic Engineering News. All good.

BTW - there’s actually 11 links, not 10. It’s one louder, isn’t it?

As usual, Gino offers sound advice, summarized here:

1. Start with a strong headline.
2. Write about what you know. If it’s a gig for a corporate blog, educate yourself.
3. Keep in mind the interests of your audience and how they might find you with a Google search.
4. Include calls to actions too – think “nothing asked, nothing done.”
5. Good copywriting style means writing for “lower-literacy users.” [Hilarious, but true. We always say “Write how regular people talk.”]
6. Write in an “inverted pyramid style” with your most important content in the first one or two paragraphs.
7. Split long posts into shorter chunks. Use bullets, numbering and breakouts whenever it’s apppropriate..
8. Use strong page titles.
9. Put your main points at the beginning of sentences. This helps with scanning and saves time. [We also advocate the use of subheads to aid scanning. Face it - that’s how people read stuff on the web]
10. Use Links

Read the complete article here.

Wow! Who wouldn’t want a free breakfast? (Of course, I stay at an economical Fairfield Inn that already has free breakfast.) But how about $1oo? What’s that about?

Yes, I opened.

This subject line is good in so many ways. It promises personal information (”Your account”) plus gives an incentive to open (”Free Breakfast + $100 Bonus”). It even includes a specific dollar amount which is proven to lift open rates.

Note that the word “Free” managed to pass through the spam filter. Note also that the writer resisted the urge to use an exclamation point.

The subject line is the most important component of an email. This line answers the call. Tip of the old chapeau to the anonymous scribe!

1. Why a Privacy Policy is important

Here are three reasons why a privacy policy on your website is important:

a. INCREASED REVENUE POTENTIAL - Some people won’t give you any personal information or buy products and services from you if you do not have a stated privacy policy on your website.

b. BENEFITS THE COMMON WEAL - The organizations that adopt a privacy policy, the more the cyber-anarchists are marginalized. A privacy policy is real - if you have one on your website, you can’t tell a judge “you didn’t know.”

c. IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO - Nobody likes spam, snooping, phishing or trafficking in personal information.

2. How to write a Privacy Policy

We only have one piece of advice about writing a privacy policy:

Write in plain English

This will not make the lawyers happy, but a privacy policy is meaningless if it’s written in legalese. The concept of a privacy policy is to protect the rights of the viewer. Stuff in legalese seems to protect the rights of the website owners. It kind of defeats the purpose.

State your principles in broad terms. Keep it short. If the attorneys are really crawling up your kilt, include a link to a downloadable pdf that lists the “full privacy policy.”

3. Privacy Policy Generator and other resources

If you search for “privacy policy,” you’ll see a lot of links to companies that sell cyber-encryption programs and secure email software, etc. The best site that we found which addressed the needs of online copywriters in crafting privacy policies was at the Direct Marketing Association.

The DMA’s free online Privacy Policy Generator lets you enter some data and check off a few boxes to create an html web page for you to view or email to yourself. You can edit the text and post it on your website.

For more info on privacy issues, follow these links:

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

Wikipedia: Privacy policy

BBB online Sample Privacy Notice

One interesting thing about Web 2.0 is dynamism, that is, easily and instantly updatable content. Many creative warriors in corporate settings are beginning to use Web 2.0 functionality as a basis for dynamic content.

From polling to videoblogs and shared calendars, a movement is afoot among forward-thinking businesses to bake some Web 2.0 goodness into their sites. The UGC all comes from their own staff (not from consumers). In effect, programs like Wordpress become a personal semantic publishing platform.

The Web 2.0 consumer sites are great (we’d like to mention one of our favorites, Last.fm).

But the real power of Web 2.0 is the democratization of content creation. We’re starting to see that in mid-cap regional businesses like Womble Carlyle and Spartanburg Radiology.

Web 2.0 is here and it’s more than just MySpace.

We got to thinking about this because, once again, Florida is in the news for bungling an election. This time, 10,000 votes weren’t counted in an election decided by a margin of 369. The reason? The ballot was confusing and apparently a high margin of voters skipped the contest in question.

Good grief.

Online copywriters and designers are well-versed in the tradecraft of creaing registration paths, sign-ups, polls, eCommerce and all manner of interactive content. Not too hard to imagine that any competant design shop could create, test and polish a friction-free ballot with very low user drop-off. Naturally, the language would be beaten into shape by a qualified online copywriter (don’t you designers even think of horning in on our patch).

Other issues most certainly surround electronic voting - security, paper printouts - even a national standard is uncertain.

Yes, our taxpayer dollars, hard at work.

But it’s 2007. We have the technology to address all of the above concerns.

So, dear election officials: outsource it. Hire Hewlett Packard, NCR and Online Copywriter (or anybody else you like as long as they are not related or a love interest). Hire Google or Paypal or eBay or Amazon. Hire Online Copywriter (did we mention that already?).

Creating an effective national electronic ballot is well-within our scope of knowledge as a nation and long overdue.

The consensus seems to be that verbs are okay in many instances as link text, even advisable in some circumstances. We officially volunteer to help update the W3C specs on the language of links.

However, our endorsement of verbs has some limitations. For example, we noticed this week that gerunds don’t seem advisable. What’s a gerund? Here’s what dictionary.com had to say:

The English -ing form of a verb when functioning as a noun, as writing in Writing is easy.

This presents some challenges for the online copywriter. We find ourselves often re-working sentences to avoid the gerund form. For example:

You can find out more by contacting us.

Not so good. This is better:

Contact us to find out more.

To sum it up about using verbs for link text:

• Verbs are fine as link text
• Avoid the gerund (-ing) form.