“By God, I think the devil shits Dutchmen”: why @samuelpepys is the future of history writing

There’s nothing quite like opening Twitter to do a bit of boring marketing and finding something like this in your feed:

Samuel Pepys’ diary is amazing: salacious, intimate, packed with war and whoring, farts and fires, booze and bitchy gossip. And now it’s on Twitter. Possibly the best thing on Twitter. Possibly just the best thing. Ever.

The Dutch have burnt the British ships at Sheerness, the King’s mistress has threatened to dash her baby’s brains out in Parliament unless the King acknowledges he is the child’s father, and Samuel Pepys has lured a girl called Peg up to his room, but he can’t get it on with her because some other bloke is hanging about. It’s confessional blogging at its  finest, given glorious immediacy by being live on Twitter.

Really readable, entertaining diarists have historically been few and far between – James Boswell, Chips Channon and Alan Clark spring to mind, but not many more.  That’s going to change. The ability to record daily events in a manner that others find entertaining is no longer an unusual hobby, but an essential social skill. Around a quarter of the people in Britain keep some sort of online diary, whether it’s a blog, a Twitter feed, a Facebook account, or regular boring emails to a huge list of friends about how the family are and what they did on their holidays. We are a generation of diarists, and the digital natives who grew up with the social web write very, very good ones.

A single illuminating quotation is often the best tool a social historian has for bringing an era to life. Age of Austerity, David Kynaston’s brilliant depiction of post-war Britain, is structured around evocative moments from ordinary people’s diaries: “Oh for a little extra butter”, “Jolly good, as a whole”, Christ, it’s bleeding cold”.

The David Kynaston who looks back on our era won’t have to dig so deep. Future historians will portray life in the early 21st century not as 900 pages of elegant descriptive writing, and diligently researched quotes, but by building feeds of the finest, funniest and most typical of our contemporaries, and releasing them day by day.

@samuelpepys is the shape of things to come.

What’s your favourite word?

In David Lodge’s effervescent farce Small World, the unspeakable Robin Dempsey gives northern author Ronald Frobisher a computerised analysis of his style.

The angry young novelist’s favourite adjectives, it turns out, are ‘grease’, ‘grime’ and ‘grey’; direct speech for male characters is signalled by a blunt ‘he said’, while women gasp, sigh, whisper urgently, or cry passionately; his female leads have biblical names beginning with the letter ‘R’; and so on. Crippled by this awareness of his own style, Frobisher endures six miserable years of writer’s block.

Small World was written in 1984. I dread to think what would happen to the poor bloke if he had the tools currently available.

Check out, for example, the terrifying Analyze Words, which takes your Twitter feed and tells you how cheery you are.

Might as well just change my handle to @miserableoldman.

There are the ever-present Wordles, which everyone seems to think are just the cutest thing. Except that if you actually wrote most of the copy for the website…

…you find yourself sitting there going ‘Underway? But that’s a horrible word. I can’t possibly be using it that much.” Then you look and you realise that it’s all over the internet, everywhere you’ve ever typed into a CMS.

The 5 most boring pieces of advice for web writers

I’m getting this tomorrow:

I have some high hopes for it – but it’ll probably turn out to be the same balls everyone writes about web copy.

There are 1001 blogs out there telling people how to write for the web. Some are great, but the vast majority their time giving budding bloggers, editors and copywriters the same 5 bits of advice:

• be brief
• be relevant
• be accurate
• have catchy, intriguing titles
• for the love of God don’t try to write with any kind of charm, grace or wit! Do you think this is the 19th century and you’re Charles Bloody Dickens? People on the internet have a gnat-like attention span! Imagine you’re writing for a 7-year-old who’s mainlining Sunny Delight and who is constantly being distracted by pop-ups of kittens on skateboards! KITTENS! ON SKATEBOARDS!

It’s all probably true, but I wish just once in a while, one of these bloggers would mention the  sheer joy of the eccentric,  irrelevant, mysterious, rambling and extravagantly sesquipedelian prose that is the glory of the web.

Blogging – a cure for British diffidence

There is a type of social commentator who lives off predicting that the internet -  and especially Web 2.0 – is leading to a ‘lack of empathy’, and making people ‘more isolated’.

And who knows, perhaps there is something missing from online friendships for people like, for example, Americans, or women, who are quite capable of talking about their feelings (even when sober!), hugging each other without embarrassment and striking up friendships just by meeting people and chatting to them.

For us awkward British men, however, Web 2.0 has been a miracle of empathy and intimacy.

Just this last week, I’ve discovered that two old friends are also bloggers, writing the kind of witty, heartfelt and personal blogs that the medium was built for.

The strange thing about it is that, all three of us coming from the same middle-class English background, we’ve seldom talked in any kind of depth about anything that actually mattered… the odd manly arm around the shoulder if something dreadful happened, a couple of gruff, awkward questions, and then back to taking the piss out of each other and arguing about politics. God forbid we might actually talk about our emotions. What if it led to (shudder) an Uncomfortable Silence.

So to follow the progress of Ben’s alien, or to discover details of Behind Blue Eyes’ relationship with his father has been a real revelation. I feel closer to them, and, knowing I’ve read it, they hopefully feel a little closer to me.

Because no-one is ever obliged to read or respond when you blog (or Tweet, or post on Facebook), there’s no risk of the kind of  awkwardness that takes place talking face to face or on the phone .

And for the uptight British male, that is a little social miracle.

The Times paywall: a massive ecomms fail

All our newspapers are screwed unless they can figure out some way to make money from the Internet. So while many regard The Times paywall as a ‘Canute-like‘ step, I’m happy to see it as a courageous experiment and hope it’s a step towards sustainable online journalism.

I will, however, lay into them for the laughable ineptitude of their emails.

Email marketing for a membership organisation (which is essentially what The Times is becoming) is as close to a pure science as anything in the history of selling. Given a big enough list and enough time, there is nothing that can’t be split tested, measured and optimised. If you try hard enough you can sell veal to a vegan – or a £100-a-year online  newspaper subscription to people who used to get it for free.

The first email you send is the one with the highest opening rates, the email that those excited new members leap to open, to click the links, to discover how their expensive membership will add an alluring glamour to their lives that will be the envy of their friends.

For Times Online, as tens of thousands sign up for their 1 month free trial membership, this is surely their chance to show that when it disappears behind its paywall, £100 a year will be a genuine bargain: great content.

Fail to pay, those emails should be saying, and you’ll never again be able to read some of the finest writing on the web. No more lines like “A dish so cruel I weep not only for the animal that died to make it, but also for the mushrooms”; no more glorious worship at the feet of the mighty Moran, or eye-gouging rage at that unputdownable idiot Liddle.

So what did the Times send to the hundreds of thousands who signed up for their free trial?

This crime against copywriting, proofreading and design:

(Click the image to read the whole thing, but I absolutely guarantee you won’t get past the second paragraph without having to prop your eyelids open).

This is an email which speaks volumes about The Times’ lack of commitment to an  integrated online offering, whether they’re using the word ‘exclusive’ in both sentences of the second paragraph, missing a capital letter off  ‘Gordon Ramsay’s maze’ so it looks like they’re referring to some kind of sweary culinary labyrinth, randomly swapping the word ‘and’ for the ‘+’ symbol, or thrilling their new subscribers with phrases like:

“As a temporary member you don’t have a membership card so you won’t be able to participate in any offers that require you to present it but please enjoy all the many other offers and extras available to members on the site.”

I appreciate that email was not the first thing on their minds during one of the most ambitious online launches in the history of News International. But someone, somewhere should have been thinking about it, and the fact that it was clearly left to an inexperienced middle-manager speaks volumes about Murdoch’s organisation, and its ongoing failure to ‘get’ the internet.

Hold your nose: it's the Daily Mail's disgusting keyword strategy

In my last job, we had a search engine specialist who would send me lists of keywords to include in titles and URLs of web pages I was writing. I’d put them on Post-It notes,  and stick them to my computer, and the computers of bloggers I edited, as a clear reminder of what we needed to shoehorn into our copy.

I don’t know what the Post-It notes in the Daily Mail office look like, but here is a little taste (bolded in the link) of their keyword strategy:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277769/Fury-job-centre-advertises-phone-sex-workers-willing-pose-naked-webcam.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280783/Lessons-rape-porn-pupils-aged-11.html

The ability to conjure a perfect headline out of mundane events has always been one of the most entertaining and impressive feats of good tabloid journalism.

But there is surely a difference between the art of catching the eye of the passer-by with some bold block capitals and a daft pun, and building a keyword strategy around people who might be typing into google ‘rape porn pupils aged 11′

Can we really say there is a moral element to something as mundane and analytics-focussed as a keyword strategy? Well, it’s not hard to imagine how the Daily Mail might spin the story if they discovered that a rival paper was chasing the kind of readers who might stumble across this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1198485/Rape-abortion-incest-Is-CHILDREN-read.html

What am I going to call my new blog?

The biggest question of all for online copywriters  is “How much do I fanny around with my copy in order to hit those keywords?” It’s a question that reaches its zenith when you’re naming a blog.

Once your blog has a name, you’re stuck with it for life – if it won’t SEO or no-one can spell it, you’re screwed. On the other hand, if it’s a really horrible name you’ve chosen just for the sake of search, you’re equally screwed – and a depressing, lowest-common-denominator marketing drone to boot (obviously, in my day job as a lowest-common-denominator marketing drone, I’m a bit less picky).

If I were writing a blog about Irish literature, would I go with my instincts, my joy in language and my love of (some) James Joyce, and call it ‘nicens moocow‘? How would anyone ever find it?

But if I call it Joyce-Yeats-Irish-Literature-Novels-Poetry-Blog, I’d clearly just be in it for the Amazon affiliate program and any reader with even a vague understanding of the Web would immediately be prejudiced against me.

So, in my new blog about language on the internet, I’ve taken the approach of most (but not all) of my favourite bloggers, and made the title a stupid pun (cf Speak You’re Branes, No Man is an Iland). And then absolutely STUFFED the copy with keywords.

Enjoy!