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Maine Creative Services – Page 24 – Affordable web design and SEO copywriting for small business

If "Web site" is two words, shouldn't "webcast" be, too?

Should “blog” be capitalized? Does the title of a blog go in italics (like a book title) or inside quotation marks (like a magazine article)? Is “login” one word or two?

Are you sure there’s no period in Dr Pepper?

Nagging little questions like those can really slow down anyone’s writing or editing. But there’s an easy-to-use reference book that answers those questions quickly and easily, and helps you write with more authority and confidence.

With over 5,000 A to Z entries, the Associated Press Style Book is one of those indispensable resources for writers of all kinds — including business people who write proposals and reports. It defines usage, spelling, and grammar, and makes the difficult job of writing a little easier.

It will be reissued (or should that be “re-issued”?) in a new, updated edition in July. If you write or edit anything from a company newsletter to a blog, keep one of these 400-page reference treasures at your elbow. For less than fifteen bucks you’ll quickly finds answers that will let you get back to churning out the words. (Oh, and keep you from looking like a doofus.)

Dan Santow thoughtfully listed some AP-approved standards of spelling and usage in his “Word Wise” blog, a portion of which I will shamelessly reproduce below, along with a few parenthetical comments of my own:

  • blog
  • broadband
  • byte
  • CD-ROM
  • cyberspace, cybercafe, etc. (One word, no hyphen)
  • dial-up (So that’s where the hyphen went)
  • DVD
  • e-mail, e-book, e-commerce, e-business, etc. (Yup, still hyphenated after all these years)
  • Ethernet
  • GIF
  • Internet (A proper name, so it’s capitalized)
  • intranet (A generic term, so it’s not)
  • iPod
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • JPEG
  • Listserv
  • login, logon, logoff (nouns)
  • log in, log on, log off (verbs)
  • megabyte, megahertz
  • podcast
  • screenshot
  • the Web
  • URL
  • VoIP (Lower case “o”)
  • Web-based
  • Web log (Two words, although”blog” is one. “Web” always gets an upper-case “W.”)
  • Web site (Not “website” or “Website.” Two words.)
  • webcast, webinar, webmaster, webcam, etc. (Only one word. Go figure.)
  • Wi-Fi
  • World Wide Web
  • Yahoo (not Yahoo!, no matter what the Yahoo people say)

Thanks, Dan!

PS: Another favorite of mine is the Wall Street Journal’s Guide to Business Style and Usage. Many corporate clients seem more impressed by citing, “This is how the Journal does it.” And now I see Amazon is selling used copies of this 2002 gem for as little as $1.50 each. Go get one!

Ignore customers? Game over, Sony

“Pride, politics, and an overabundance of technology can blind you to the simple truth of what consumers want.” Thus reads the obituary — er, article about Sony’s Ken Kutaragi in Business 2.0. Kutaragi, the onetime genius behind Sony’s videogame consoles, will step down as head of the company’s games division, no doubt to be shuttled off to a darkened corner office somewhere.

Stepping down? “Carried out on his shield” is more like it. PlayStation 3 has been bruised, bloodied and bested by little Nintendo and its bestselling Wii. Sure, Sony’s technology was superior. But it was slow and expensive and not particularly good at doing its main job: games.

“For Nintendo, the number 3 company in the videogames business, it’s a David-vs.-Goliath turnaround. For Kutaragi’s team, who ruled the roost of this industry for 12 years, it’s a shameful final defeat.”

Sony’s biggest gaffe? Ignoring what its customers really wanted — to play games. Instead, as writer Chris Taylor put it,

“Kutaragi was too busy thinking about how to push the company’s other technologies. The PS3 was to create a vast installed base for Blu-Ray DVD… but gamers complained that the speed of the Blu-Ray drive was too slow when doing what drives in consoles are supposed to do: load games.”

Lesson: Ignore customers at your peril.

Do you work for money — or happiness?

Tim Ferriss has written a terrific book that explores the imbalance between work and happiness. The 4-Hour Work Week challenges the notion that we have to wait until we’re 65 before we can shake off the yoke of work and start enjoying ourselves. For most people, Ferriss writes:

“…the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.”

I agree that the most important ingredients of happiness are the “holy trinity” of time, income and mobility. Or as Ferriss puts it, “Gold is getting old.”

“People don’t want to be millionaires — they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.”

In other words, the freedom to pursue your passions while you work, essentially, part-time.

Ferriss’s solution, briefly, is to extricate yourself from a physical presence in the office, outsource as much of your work as you can, then use the free time to pursue your passions through mini-retirements.

The New Rich… abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.

Ferriss calculates that your dream lifestyle probably costs a lot less than you think. No wonder the book has become an instant Amazon best-seller. (As I write this, it’s #7.)

This is the book I wish I’d had with me twenty-five years ago, when my wife and I decided we’d put our quality of life ahead of career advancement. After much soul-searching and research, we decided to take a big risk. Our plan: Locate and buy our “retirement” home first, while we were still young enough to enjoy it, then figure out a way to make a living.

We left Los Angeles and moved all the way across the country to the coast of southern Maine, where we bought a charming old farmhouse on a couple of acres of land. We didn’t know a soul in the entire state. I had a modest contract with CBS Radio to write and produce short features, but that was barely enough to live on. We had zero job prospects. But we were both smart and hard-working, and after a few false starts things got rolling.

In the early ’80s, of course, we couldn’t do it Ferriss’s way. There was no Internet, no email, no outsourcing. Heck, a fax machine was an exotic, expensive investment.

Frankly, our lifestyle decision has been a real roller-coaster ride for us, equal parts exhilaration and fear — but very little boredom. It’s been a grand adventure, and neither of us regret it at all.

I remember as a kid hoping I’d never get trapped in a boring, dull life. Boy, did that ever come true!