Guardian Launches open platform tool:

Guardian a leading news paper in UK is planning to bring its contents open source due to the vast capabilities of internet.

The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it “into the fabric of the internet”.

Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will allow users to build their own applications in return for carrying Guardian advertising.

A content application programming interface (API) will smooth the way for web developers to build applications and services using Guardian content, while a Data Store will contain datasets curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use.

Emily Bell, the Guardian News & Media director of digital content, described Open Platform as a “new chapter in our history and a new foundation for the future of our journalism”.

She said that Open Platform would allow Guardian content “to be woven into the fabric of the internet” as people outside the organization saw the value of adding Guardian content to their projects.

Text to voice feature opposed – Kindle’s face lawsuit from Book Publishers.

“Was your mother a lawbreaker when she read you The Little Prince or Green Eggs and Ham?

That’s the question raised Tuesday by the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers. Paul Aitken, the group’s executive director objects to the text-to-speech feature on Amazon’s Kindle 2 digital-book reader. Aitken told The Wall Street Journal: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

Wow. If a computer can’t lawfully read a book out loud, do human beings have the right? Amazon and Aitken could not be reached for comment.

Well, mothers of America, never fear. You most certainly do have the right to privately perform copyright work, says Ben Sheffner, a copyright attorney. Sheffner, a well-known copyright advocate, says the issue of whether Amazon’s Kindle infringes on intellectual property is not as cut and dry.

Amazon’s technology enables a computer voice to read text aloud to owners of the Kindle 2, the next-gen version of reader.

Sheffner said it’s unclear whether the text-to-speech feature could be considered a public performance. Under copyright law, if someone profits from, say, a public reading of a copyright work without authorization, they are breaking the law. Someone could argue, said Sheffner, that the Kindle’s speech feature is a public performance because it enables scores of people to receive audio of a book. Sheffner added that the counter argument would be that the feature is only enabling lots of different private–and therefore legal–performances.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he doesn’t see how the speech feature violates copyright law if no recorded copy of the book is created. Book publishers often license audio books separately than the text versions.

“The only right really that might be implicated is the so-called public performance,” Zittrain said. “But what I want the thing to do is to read to me in the car. I don’t see a copy being made so I don’t see how this can be Amazon’s problem.”

The debate could be academic. If the book publishers don’t like the feature, they can refuse to renew their licenses with Amazon in the future. And my colleague Ina Fried raised another point. Why would Kindle owners choose a computer voice when they can hear a recording of the author or a professional actor reading the book?”

How to find copyright free contents?

Writing online copies is not always easy. Also its difficult to find references for contents. When you find references most of them are copyrighted. So how do we find copyright free contents.

1. All contents on government sites copyright free so you can use them , rewrite , distribute them without any problems. Freedom of information act gives all users rights to use copyrighted information without any offence.

2. Find sites / blogs that offer creative commons license, creative commons gives you rights to use the content / modify / distribute with proper attribution.

3. Getting information from old book and brochures is an effective way. I’d suggest reading up on copyright law, finding some obscure texts that appear to be well beyond their copyright expiration date, and scanning them. Realistically, old tourist brochures and the like are unlikely to result in someone chasing after you. Be careful, of course, and do a bit of online research to be sure that an old book hasn’t been reissued with an updated copyright. By evaluating the materials you find, you can assess the probability of a copyright issue down the road. You could probably find a very inexpensive student to scan, OCR, and proof for you. I’d also choose texts with clear, easily scan able text that are unlikely to cause OCR errors. If you buy some cheap old books, you could even cut the pages out for sheet-fed scanning.

Web’s Influence on offline copywriting:

I am sure writing offline is completely different from writing for internet. For internet we need to consider both users as well as the search engine crawlers. Writing for search engines need to be a bit aggressive we need to make sure relevant keywords and phrases are included in our copy. Users don’t look for keywords or phrases in contents they are just looking for quality information.

Compared to online readers’ offline reader are much higher. So it’s important to make sure our writing style for offline world is not changed. Personally I have found that my writing style in the offline word has changed somewhat. As the result of constantly thinking about succinct, keyword-driven content – as opposed to padding out articles when I used to write off-line in the ‘old days’ – I have to be constantly aware when I switch mediums. In many ways, writing offline has helped me to focus on sticking to the subject at hand. Now I am using more sub headings and sub titles even if I write for offline media. I got this habit mostly from writing for websites I feel this is a significant change.

There are areas I have improved writing for the web. When writing for web I need to be more aware of the keywords that need to be included in my copy, this help me to include relevant concepts when writing offline.

Quality copywriting suggestions:

People dealing with the web world often come across the statement, “Content is king”. A good content has immense important in the web world. People browse through Internet to extract information. And information on a site is the content it offers. The more useful and informative content a site has, the more popular the site will be. A website with keyword-rich content and concrete information can certainly drive targeted traffic. And the more the traffic in your site, the more is your publicity and sales.

Some of the secrets of quality content writing are:

1.Make sure that your website content is compact and understandable. Avoid writing superfluous content as it irritates the website visitors and drive them away from your site.
2.See that your content is original. Originality matters in web writing.
3.Browsers prefer glancing over an article rather than reading it thoroughly. So, it’s better to break up your content into heads and subheads, and summarize the basic content in through them.
4.Interactive language makes your content more interesting. It also helps you to reach your website audience more easily.
5.Proofreading is essential to make your website content flawless. It helps you to get rid of typo errors.

I hope that helps.

How fast can you write a sales letter?

A delicate question that needs a lot of thinking before one can answer it. I feel the speed depends on various factors. How long is a piece of string? What’s the product, what’s the price point, how competitive is the industry, how effective are the competitors at selling their product, what are the unique selling points of the product, are these reflected in the site, does the product have clearly defined and understandable features and benefits, is the benefit tangible, are the audience likely to be in the early or late stages of the buying cycle?

Writing for products is an other major challenge. Depends on how much information I have on the product. If I know the product by heart I could write a good sales letter in 15 minutes. If I don’t know anything about the product at all, nothing of its use, purpose, USP, brand etc. I could not write it in two years.
If all of the stars were in alignment, and the wind blowing in the right direction and the tides out, it could be done in 30 minutes, if the stars aren’t in alignment etc, it could take a weeks work to get the right text. I write copy all the time and the time it takes to complete really varies. Some days I am right on the mark and can crank out awesome sales copy in a couple of hours. Other days I have major writer’s block and couldn’t do it in 2 days.

Things you need to know before writing a pitch letter:

Writing a pitch letter is not easy being a copywriter I have tried various methods in copywriting to get the best pitch letter but I failed numerous times. But after a lot of failed attempts I was able to bring about a perfect solution for writing pitch letters

Before writing a pitch letter make sure you identify the problem people hire copywriters not just to write contents but to highlight the problems they have. So when you write a pitch letter start with the problem your client might want you to solve. Then as you proceed find a solution for the problem. The solution should come from you, you can come up with good solutions in writing when you are well aware of the industry and the copy you are writing for that industry. For different industry you need to have different ideas.

Once you get a solution you need to prove that you are trust worthy for the solution people want credibility they are not ready to listen to anyone and everyone. Also when you write a pitch letter make it look professional don’t just write something like a resume you need to be formal obviously you are not applying for a job right?. Finally good pitch letters always have free stuff give away free stuff and I am sure you will get best benefit from you pitch letter. People are always obsessed of free stuff and I am sure free stuff always works.

What’s an article worth:

Articles are not just some contents written to impress search engines. Traditional articles especially for commercial websites were written by expert copywriters who have years of experience in writing sales letters. Articles are not valued based on size or money but its based on quality and appeal to end users. If a copy for your homepage impresses 100 users then you are sure to pay higher price for that copy than a copy that every user to your website hates reading.
Cheap articles are everywhere. There are forums like sitepoint where cheap copywriters advertise their writing for 0.01,0.02 cent per word. I have tried few of those copywriters and I never got the quality I was looking for most of them were just paraphrasing from other sites. None of them had any sort of creativity in their writing, good creativity is very important for good copywriting skills. There are sites where freelancers offer cheap copywriting if you are just looking for a filler then you can look out for articles from places like elance.com , getafreelancer.com, rentacoder.com , freelancer.com, odesk.com etc. Remember all these places are good places but the articles written by the freelancers here are always of low quality.
Most good professional SEO writers will be writing for themselves, and will inevitably make more money through consulting on SEO than they will writing articles for someone else so its not easy to find good article writers. If you get a good article writer I am sure they charge atleast 50$ per article. There are people who write for magazines charge 150$ per article, its difficult to give a price for an article. Article price is purely based on the type of article you are looking for and from the type of people you are looking for.

Website traffic tips from a copywriter point of view:

Well you know we are a popular Search engine optimization company we are aware of all the best methods when it comes to getting traffic (Quality traffic ) from search engines. But there are few things I like to share in copywriter point of view.

1. There are some quality blogs that offer a section for each post like recommended links. You can use it to your own advantage if they have recommended links section they will also have an area to submit links find the form and submit your links there in most cases if you have a good blog that blog owner will accept your links. Not all bloggers will provide recommended links section so if you find one use it to your own advantage.
2. If you are good copywriter you should also know how to comment on other’s writing especially in other copywriting blogs. So if you know a blog that Do-follow links ( no-follow links are not counted by search engines ) make sure you do a decent comment with your URL in signature or in your name. This link will count as a back-link to your website I am sure of this.
3. Linking to other blogger websites is an effective way to gain your reputation if someone clicks the link on your website and goes to the other blogger website it will show in their referrals or track backs and they will see that you are happy to link out and they will do the same in future. Also track backs in do-follow blogs provide additional backlinks so linking out always benefits your blog.
4. Participate In social media sites like twitter, digg etc. People are watching what you talk make friends there in twitter add as much friends as possible follow them if you click follow they are sure to follow you too. The more followers you know more people notice what you write and this inturn helps in marketing your writing and you can reach a lot of people this way.
I have more ideas in copywriter point of view which I will share in future.

Word of the year

Have you ever heard of this before. I am not sure whether its ideal to discuss this topic here or not but this phrase catches me a lot. Every year Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary website decides the Words of the Year based on the popularity of that word for that year and how often it comes up for that year. The word of the year is chosen by voting system where people tend to chose the words and the word that gets most vote is decided the word of the year.

Here is the list of words that got featured for word of the year till year 2008:

1990: bushlips (similar to “bullshit” – stemming from President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 “Read my lips: no new taxes” broken promise)

1991: mother of all (as in Saddam Hussein’s foretold “Mother of all battles”)

1992: Not! (meaning “just kidding”)

1993: information superhighway

1994: cyber, morph (to change form)

1995: web and (to) newt (to act aggressively as a newcomer, like Speaker Newt Gingrich during the Contract with America)

1996: mom (as in “soccer mom”)

1997: millennium bug

1998: e- (as in “e-mail”)

1999: Y2K

2000: chad (from the 2000 presidential election controversy in Florida)

2001[1]: 9-11

2002[2]: weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)

2003[3]: metrosexual

2004[4]: red state, blue state, purple state (from the United States presidential election, 2004)

2005[5] : truthiness (popularized on The Colbert Report)

2006[6]: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)

2007[7]: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)

2008[8]: bailout (in the specific sense of the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.)

LOL both 2007 and 2008 say recession related words as the word of the year we know we are now facing unprecedented crisis due to subprime crisis which started in US and spread to the world. World is facing tough times now and I hope 2009 will have a similar word. There are also lists for words of 20th century words of last millennium, interesting right I hope you will have your own ideas which words should be highlighted. Please share in comments your word of the year suggestions for 2009.