seanmonstar

It’s version control for writing!

Game journalism is an oxymoron. There’s no point in reading more than one game news site, because they all say the same thing, literally:

In mainstream news outlets it’s a scandal when someone is caught plagiarizing work, and the writers usually lose their jobs. In gaming news when someone is caught plagiarizing work it’s Tuesday.

As Ben Brooks points out, many mediums are free, and show ads instead. He suggests mediums (specifically, writing) should ditch ads and ask viewers to pay directly. My feeling on the matter is that the best option is a mixed one.

Mediums should provide their content, free of charge, but showing tasteful ads. Mediums should probably also offer a way for users to directly pay for the content they enjoy. If they pay, it’s imperative that the ads be removed. Paying and having to view ads is just dirty¹.

This article by Marco Arment made me think about what things I’ve created that would last. The software I write likely won’t be used in 10 years, but I sure hope some of the articles I’ve written could be. I looked through my archive, and found a small number of articles that meet that description. I thought it’d be fun to share them again, here.

• Good Things Come to Those Who Ask
• Enthusiam Starts at the Top
• A Less-Random Generator
• Tablets Will Replace Everything

There’s a few more articles that I’m rather proud of, but I’m not as sure they would be useful to someone in the 2020’s.

Shawn Blanc:

By making an intentional decision to not pursue a real-time schedule with my site it allows me the space to think and breathe and therefore write things which are more thought related than they are time-sensitive.

It’s why I’m subscribed to far more feeds where the author write longer opinion pieces, despite likely being irregular. I value well crafted opinion over breaking news. I only need the new “broken” once. In my experience, if it’s important, I’ll hear about it somewhere soon enough. If it’s not, I didn’t need to know about it anyways.

My regularity has greatly dropped since changing jobs, but I as it ebbs and flows, I’d rather write the same way. Hopefully, you come here for my opinion. The news is elsewhere.

Bloggers, as we writers who produce work primarily for an online audience are called, often are quick to write and lazy to edit. I am certainly guilty of this more often than not. Perhaps it is the immediacy of the publishing instrument we use. Perhaps it is a more forgiving audience that has far more important things to do then shoot you a typo correction or critique of style. That said, I often go back to look at pieces I have written in the past. If I see a typo, I correct it. If I see a way I could have said something better, I do so.

It can be fun to open up an old article and read it, since it’s no longer fresh in your mind. Often times, I’ll find all sorts of spelling and grammatical errors that I just have to fix. Like Patrick says, a smaller number of people will see the article after it’s fixed, but at least it’s better.