2008 September | Link to You

Writers Turn to the Internet for Support, Friendship & Advice

Posted: 27 Sep 2008

Riding on the fumes of potential, you take pen to paper or keyboard to monitor. Endless hours of creativity intermingle with apprehension, but your need to write engulfs your spirit. You swim high on the waves of excitement and trudge forward through the waves of doubt. Finally, your manuscript is complete.

Looking back, the process becomes a blur, it’s difficult to recall the point at which your first draft transformed into your final draft, but it happened. For a moment, you allow yourself to be still and bask in the glory of your completed manuscript. But only for a moment. Now a new process must begin.

As if going from concept to page isn’t enough, the aspiring writer must now bravely pass his or her cherished manuscript along for opinion. Opinion is actually too light of a word; the writer must submit to, and endure the critique. For those faint at heart, the critique can be a frightening experience, rearing its ugly head of self-doubt to the highest position. But ultimately, it’s what makes you stronger, better at your craft, and prepares you to for the next phase on your quest to publication.

Family and friends only hinder the critique process. Although supportive, their opinions are bias and counter productive unless they are professionals. So where do you turn if you are not fortunate enough to have a local writing group or personal mentor in your life? The modern writer turns to the cyber world.

As you make your way through search engines and dodge pop-ups ads in pursuit of an answer, message boards and writer’s forums abound. Your ultimate goal, to find that band of brothers and sisters, bound together in their somewhat solitary pursuit of a writing career. A nameless group of competitors hooked together by modems, monitors, keyboards, nicknames, and electricity, generously willing to share advice. A group you can trust.

I have found such a writer’s haven. A speakeasy filled with poets and prophets, editors, agents and journalists. A space where the published and unpublished exist together. By invitation only, I secretly found the backdoor into this cyber club. Over two hundred members and growing strong, this forum has everything from professional guest visitors to idle chatter. A place to receive feedback on your work, ask questions, share information, make contacts, friendships and share your successes and defeats.

Now that the secret code to this cyber club has been lifted, Backspace The Writer’s Place is open to the public. Why not click open the door and lurk for awhile? After you get to know the posters, reach out for some feedback on your work. Then you can move to the next phase with confidence. For after the dreaded critique process, you must endure another hurdle, the query letter. Why not tackle it with the help of your new cyber friends at Backspace?

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Do I Need an RSS Feed?

Posted: 22 Sep 2008

RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS provides headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.

Benefits for Publishers

1. Avoid Spam Filters

Statisticians estimate that 70% of the email transferred each day is spam (unsolicited email). With that statistic, even opt-in users risk losing valuable messages in the cesspool of spam. RSS feeds effectively nullify spam as an issue. Requesting feeds allow users to maintain complete control over the content they view. Users can easily opt-in and out of feeds that provide content of interest or importance.

2. Expanded Reach

RSS allows publishers to reach a number of new and different markets that typically are less crowded with competition. Many small businesses are often slow to adopt or learn new technologies, giving businesses that lead the way a competitive advantage.

3. Content Syndication

Syndication of feeds increases exposure.

4. Repeat Visitors

RSS is all about repeat visitors. Users who have previously visited a site often have a stronger connection to the site and are more likely to purchase or trust the information on the site.

5. Free web traffic

As the internet has evolved, many webmasters have found that what was once free traffic must now be paid for in order to sustain decent visitor statistics. RSS is in a unique position to bring free traffic because they are content-driven, and if they include interesting or valuable information, will pique the curiosity of web-surfers and entice them to visit a particular site.

6. Less Effort

Newsletters and E-zines undeniably bring visitors, but the effort involved in creating, distributing and maintaining a newsletter can be a burden. Maintaining the list, ensuring the list is clean, growing the subscriber base, updating and removing bad e-mail addresses, all take time. RSS feeds are not burdened with those issues. There are easy-to-use RSS feed creation tools that require little effort, allowing publishers to recycle content, often simply cutting and pasting into RSS feed creation software.

So,,,, RSS has potential to help companies develop strong relationships with consumers and creating brand loyalty with customers. While the world will not end tomorrow, nor will business come to a screeching halt if you don’t use an RSS feed, there are a number of reasons online businesses should consider using RSS feeds!

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Socially Aggressive

Posted: 18 Sep 2008

Society holds that when it comes to aggression, boys hit and punch, while girls spread rumors, gossip, and intentionally exclude others, a type of aggression that’s called indirect, relational, or social. Now a new analysis of almost 150 studies of aggression in children and adolescents has found that while it’s true that boys are more likely to engage in physical aggression, girls and boys alike take part in social aggression.

“These conclusions challenge the popular misconception that indirect aggression is a female form of aggression,” according to Noel A. Card, assistant professor of family studies and human development at the University of Arizona and the study’s lead author.

The analysis of 148 studies, which comprised almost 74,000 children and adolescents and were carried out largely in schools, looked at both direct aggression, which is usually defined as physical, and indirect aggression, which includes covert behavior designed to damage another individual’s social standing in his or her peer group. Conducted by Card and researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Kansas, the analysis appears in the September/October 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers suggest that the myth that girls are more likely to be indirectly or socially aggressive than boys has persisted among teachers, parents, and even other researchers because of social expectations that develop early in life and recent movies and books that portray girls as mean and socially aggressive toward one another.

Based on the analysis, the researchers suggest that children who carry out one form of aggression may be inclined to carry out the other form; this is seen more in boys than in girls. They also found ties between both forms of aggression and adjustment problems. Specifically, direct aggression is related to problems like delinquency and ADHD-type symptoms, poor relationships with peers, and low prosocial behavior such as helping and sharing. In contrast, indirect aggression is related to problems like depression and low self esteem, as well as higher prosocial behavior, perhaps because a child must use prosocial skills to encourage peers to exclude or gossip about others.

Source: Society for Research in Child Development

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Mobile Phones Help Secondary Pupils

Posted: 12 Sep 2008

Increased temptation to steal phones was one worry. “I thought, well, four of these smartphones are going to end up on eBAY tomorrow,” one teacher said.

That fear turned out to be misplaced but a few teachers remained concerned that phones could prove a distraction for some pupils. Allowing pupils to access school emails via mobiles would also pose data security risks if passwords were shared, they said.

Teacher unions have similar fears and have supported phone bans in schools. “Pupils nowadays come to school equipped with mobile phones, MP3 players, and portable games consoles when teachers would like them to just bring a pen,” Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teachers’ union, said last month.

Dr Hartnell-Young says that the teachers’ worries are understandable. “While the eventual aim should be to lift blanket bans on phones we do not recommend immediate, whole-school change,” she said.

“Instead we believe that teachers, students and the wider community should work together to develop policies that will enable this powerful new learning tool to be used safely. We hope that, in future, mobile phone use will be as natural as using any other technology in school.”

Source: University of Nottingham

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