I filed five articles with Stockholm Universiy yesterday. They were articles intended for the new English-language website the unviersity is launching later this year.

Each piece was a profile of a researcher or international student working/studying at Frescati.

I enjoyed the work as it was interesting talking to people from different walks of life. Hell, I’ve never learned so much about cell biology in my life before.

Personal development aside, it is interesting to see the university working hard to build its international profile by commissioning a series of articles and profiles in English. I haven’t noticed the other Swedish universities like Uppsala, Lund or Gothenburg being so proactive.

It’s easy to imagine why educational organizations are targeting the internet as a way of developing their brand. You’ve got to have a strong internet presence if you’re going to get your message out. Even if you’re a university. The days of solely publishing a nice brochure are gone. And you don’t just need a brochure-website with a few nice pictures and informative text either. You need a site that’s living and shows the audience how it is to live, work and study at your university.

Interviews and profiles are a good way of doing this. You give people involved in the organization at a variety of levels to talk about the work they do and their experiences.

Add to that, writers (and project managers!) who are increasingly cognizant of targeting keywords for search engines, and you’ve got a major commitment to developing a living, growing web of text that might just bring people back to you.

I would never have imagined 20 years ago when I was starting university that one day I would end up writing copy to promote a university in the form of journalism. It’s funny peculiar how the world of words is changing.

There’s an absolutely fascinating discussion going on in the Norwegian blogosphere. Jan Arild Snoen takes Norwegian broadsheet Aftenposten to task for printing an article by journalist Tine Helen Aasen in its new magazine Innsikt [quite literally, lnsight]. The article borrows large amounts of text from a piece published the UK’s Observer on February 10, 2008.

Snoen lists point for point over twenty pieces of information Aasen has lifted from The Observer. Such is Snoen’s detective work that he even tracks down a quote Aasen gives taken straight from the Evening Standard:

Innledningsvis siteres London-kokken Aldo Zilli, som var en av de første til å slutte med flaskevann. Ingen kilde oppgis, så man kan jo forledes til å tro at Aasen har snakket med ham. Men alt han siteres på er hentet fra en artikkel i Evening Standard

[...London chef Aldo Zilli, who was one of the first to stop selling bottled water, is quoted. No source is given so you would be forgiven in thinking that Aasen had talked to him. But every word he says is taken from an article in the Evening Standard - My translation]

Olav Anders Øvrebø, freelance journalist and university lecturer at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, also mentions the incident, and is baffled that Aftenposten hasn’t commented on the matter.

I think there are a number of issues worth noting here: first and foremost, papers don’t have time to verify every piece of copy that comes across the newsdesk. Especially when it cuts across cultures and languages. No doubt Ms Aasen was trying to earn her crust and perhaps let her enthusiasm for the story, and the difficulty in tracking sources down, get in the way of solid journalistic praxis. But , let’s face it, she’s not the first journalist to recycle the news. I see this almost on a daily basis in the Swedish press. Often I read something in the British press which surfaces in DN or SvD a few weeks later.

I think the other issue here is that this demonstrates just how the Net (or bloggers!) will find you out if you’ve been a bit of a silly bugger.

Still, I wonder what The Observer make of it all? Especially Lucy Siegel, author of the original article.

Most people only skim read web pages, they don’t read them. If you don’t believe me, take it from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen.  He notes that just 11% of people will actually read a whole web page word for word to the end.

To combat this, your website needs to be tightly edited to convey your message as simply and effectively as possible.

Lengthy paragraphs will send your visitors clicking away from your website, so you need to tailor your text for the best response.  Or to put it another way: on the web ‘less is more’.

Because web users scan the page, instead of reading word by word, divide your information up into blocks that can be easily read. Successful web writers use headings and subheadings to partition content…

If you only learn one thing about web writing, learn this: the Web requires your writing deliver “joltage”. A zip, a kick that grabs your reader by the throat and holds their attention. For a few seconds at least and then they’re gone.

Fiction writers by comparison have all the time in the world to cajole the reader along. Journalists writing for a newspaper have to grab a reader’s attention but even that’s a gentle stroll in the park compared to web writing.

Yup, web reading is a 30-second smash and grab: you get in, get the info you want and run. If you’re going to be a successful web writer you need to remember that. And don’t just remember that; make sure it permeates every line your write. Every time you write.

As Crawford Kilian puts it: “Computers condition us for high joltage. A ‘jolt’ is an emotional reward that follows a prescribed action ... We feel deprived if we don’t get some sort of jolt at regular intervals, so we go where we hope to find more stimulation which, on the Web, means web sites.”

I’ve noticed that one of the hardest things Swedish speakers of English seem to grapple with when writing is how to be polite. It’s hard enough when you’re speaking to someone from a different culture, but all that wonderful paralinguistic stuff like a wink or a smile can help immensely. Trouble is you don’t have that kind of help when you’re emailing.

Here’s a real life example of a very impolite email I once received. I don’t think the sender intentionally meant to be rude. It was just one of those instances where a Swede writing English focused on the message but forgot the niceties that English requires…