Going through his portfolio, my sarcastic side trying to find something that will somehow justify for my mind why a person's writing is so good that he gets paid for it consistently. Flip through, see [0]
A picture of a boy playing in a puddle with a Washtub on his head, with the caption:
"The joy of being five.
You've got just 365 days to capture it".
Ok, now I get it. (goes to my soon to be 6 daughter and gives her a huge hug, and wish I have taken more pictures, and telling my wife I just got something stuck in my eye)
For exactly that reason. The job of a copywriter is to find the 'essential truth' in an image that could as banal as a five year old playing with a washtub.
That essential truth has to be something that a large number of people can 'get' within two seconds on reading it and require no further context or explanation.
And it has to be patently non-obvious or cliched. It's not enough to say 'they grow up fast.' There are also tricks of the trade in the way he has structured the sentence that you're probably not even consciously aware of - such as the punchline of 'capture it' being left to the end of the sentence so you have to read the whole thing to understand it.
Or the simple, evocative 'The joy of being five', which brings to mind all sorts of associations and sets the context for the punchline. 'Imagine what it's like being a child' doesn't have the same impact, does it?
If that sounds simple - try doing the same with a random image from Google Images or something you've seen in the news. You'll find that it's not easy. Copywriting is an art like any other.
I love 'Comedy Writing for Late Night TV' by Joe Toplyn which is a 'behind the curtain' look at writing for late night TV and what makes certain lines 'work' and what doesn't. It's writing to be funny, but the principles you write to be funny are actually fairly similar to those you just use for good copywriting generally.
I liked his 'Surprise Theory of Comedy', used by the line above in fact.
A lot of great writers end up writing for comedy shows - if you end up in a writing team you get both the promise of a regular paycheck and a constant creative challenge creating lines around new news stories. The 'magic' of copywriting is really knowing maybe twenty really useful mental tools inside out, and executing on them the best way possible.
What you tend to find with copywriting is that everyone recommends the same seven books - Cialdini, D&AD etc, I guess like with programming where everyone suggests you read Code Complete - but a lot of them are quite long in the tooth, and have an annoying tendency to just hold lines up and say 'here, this is great copywriting', rather than really break down what makes lines work. That said if you're really brand new to it I'd recommend Hey Whipple, Squeeze This as a good starter for 10.
Online, ComedyWire is probably one of the best examples I've seen both for seeing great writers at work and practicing yourself. It's kind of like Hacker News for Comedy - people submit lines in response to news stories and the best ones get upvoted.
Being not-very-emotional, I always figured that "they grow up too fast" wouldn't hit me, but it has. There is so much more I wanted to provide my son (the oldest, age 7). I wish that I could just put his growth timeline on pause and continue to get to enjoy him, at least until I feel like I've gotten the TODO at least half-way cleared out.
7 years gone by, 7 more years and he'll be 14. Half of his childhood already slipped through the hourglass and I barely noticed it. Can't take it.
Same story with his siblings. It seems that no matter how much time you spend with them, it will always feel like it evaporated, and there will always be stuff you wanted to do but couldn't get to. I don't expect that to change, but the sadness in that slippage is profound.
I hope the future, where they're all old people, is somehow competitive with the present. Hard to conceive how that could happen right now.
I was introduced to that song through the Ugly Kid Joe cover when in my teens, and it could make me cry then. Now, with my own children, I might just weep if I listened to it in its entirety.
Being a wordsmith, not a code smith, the view that words are just content to be monetized is wrong. This guy uses words to evoke emotions as novelists and poets have done for centuries and that has value.
That image is an absolutely fascinating historical artifact. He's describing (in a related paper) the essence of web sites in detail in 1965.
It's difficult to even imagine how few people were thinking of such things when they were so far removed everyday life and culture.
Tim Berners-Lee I thought was much more well known for starting a revolution with the world wide web. I hate to say but the web seems a bit less of an insight when you know that Hypertext had already been so well established for almost 25 years.
The one that really blows my mind is Vannevar Bush -- July1945 - "As we may think" - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... If you can look past the way he describes technologies of the day, there's an amazing amount of foresight in how access to information, its modalities and interconnectedness would become critically important.
- Automatic, redundant cross-network storage of all documents (a built-in Wayback Machine)
- A micropayments system for content creators to sell access to what they create
- Strong identity built in (a necessity if you want to also have payments built in)
... and much more.
Xanadu is (in theory anyway) a much more sophisticated system than the Web is even today, never mind the Web as it was when TBL first designed it. Back then it was so much more crude than Xanadu as to barely merit comparison.
But in a way that was TBL's genius, because, while the Web was much more crude than Xanadu architecturally, it was something that could actually be implemented with the early-'90s technology he had on hand. Xanadu, a much grander vision, was so much grander that it has defied fifty years' worth of efforts to implement it. (Back when Wired was worth reading, they ran a good piece on the state of those efforts circa 1995: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ It's still defying implementation today, more than twenty years later.)
So we ended up with the Web we have, which kinda sorta works except for all the ways that it really doesn't. (Paying content creators, for instance.) Ted Nelson saw all those problems coming, all the way back in 1960, and he tried to come up with a system that would head them all off. He hasn't succeeded (not yet, anyway!), but you have to admire both the vision and the attempt.
I favorited your comment so I can point people to it who have trouble grasping "worse is better". This is a much better example than clos vs scheme or linux vs microkernels.
Though when dealing with people who reject "worse is better", remember that some people may not grasp the idea, but others may grasp it very well and just consider it a bad thing - a problem to work around.
I mentioned "Worse is Better" on this site a few days ago and received this comment:
> "Worse is better" has nothing to do with it. Stop saying it every time anything you think is bad comes up. It's incredibly arrogant, the way people basically spam "worse is better" like they're in Twitch chat every time C, Unix, HTTP, or anything else that they perceive as imperfect comes up.
You're not being offensive. It's an important, non-obvious, under taught engineering principle. I understand the phenomenon he's describing and it's unfortunate he can't tell the difference.
Great point on TBL. Maybe it's a matter of style rather than greatest insight. Many great thinkers and theorists have died before there work is fully realized, and some are just pragmatic geniuses like Edison who can see the path to making things happen.
Both styles can offer so much to humanity, but I'd bet most entrepreneurs would go with Edison as a cofounder before Nelson.
The Xanadu site is worth reading. What a brilliant mind! The practical way to realize that vision, given the constraint of legacy content, could be graph databases.
I'm surprised that anyone could believe it required insight. Having lived through that period, nothing about it seemed insightful or surprising at the time. The only time I remember being surprised was when I saw a UPS truck with their URL painted on the side, in 1993. I remember thinking it was a couple of years ahead of time.
Great idea. My only suggestion is to have SEQme sort of symbol attached to the link that indicates that it expands the text and does not link to other material.
This sort of expanding text is used heavily in hypertext-based interactive fiction,[1][2] but I haven't seen it used outside of that before. Nice work!
Here's a long-term AI/ML goal - interpolate between Simple Wikipedia and regular Wikipedia article on the same topic and use StretchText to allow the reader to decide their level of depth.
I want this for learning faster, summarizing a page, but it's hard to teach something (to me). Like have it pull all the text in plain text, you read the page and pull the information that is new/important to you. Which this is subjective/different per person, but if the "AI" is unique to you then I think that would make sense.
But for this to work, you'd have to have a history/scope of your current knowledge.
Its rare that you come across a unique personal pitch tactic with this much selling power and focus. For me, this was one of those rare occasions where it actually happened. This guy seems very good at what he does.
There's a lot of randomness in what gets traction on a site like this based on whether or not the story clicks with the first few readers. A few people seeing it and upvoting it early can be the difference between it getting momentum and going on to be successful or totally dying. If the first few people don't upvote, the post loses more and more momentum and dies quickly (even if it was good content).
It's sort of like a job interview at a big tech company. Being qualified isn't enough. Lots of good people get turned down based on random factors like who got assigned the interview or what random screening question they got asked. But they might apply again later, get a different interviewer or question and get an offer.
The second one links to the very same URL (and actually came first). What's also interesting is that HN didn't block the 2nd one at all; they should've kept the first one only.
We do what our friends do and upvote what is already upvoted. When the two identical links got posted, the first few drive-by voters opted for the first rather than the second. Other late clickers simply upvoted what was already upvoted. The derogatory term for that is "hivemind" and the effect is fairly common on Reddit or any other social media with anonymous users.
The word 'freelance' captures the dreamers who want to fire the boss. This seems like potentially a story of how someone did this so it arouses curiosity.
There are W3C recommendations on photosensitive epilepsy; the key recommendation is to keep the flash rate of any large area of the screen below 3Hz. This recommendation follows broadcast television standards. The flash rate on this site is 2Hz, so it poses a relatively low risk of triggering PSE.
Thanks for that. I'm clearly bad at estimating the frequency, since I thought it was probably below the threshold recommended. Glad to know I was wrong.
I've been doing freelance writing for 4 years now.
It truly is about presenting those small wisps of childhood joy through simple stories. Unfortunately, only small projects are fit for that, as corporate staff generally loathes any risk or anything different from the "standard".
For example, I was once asked to do a Christmas video for a plumbing company and was shown the last year's version, which was simply shot after shot of the company's staff saying their names to the camera.
I decided to write an actual Christmas carol about a mouse that got stuck in the drain due to broken dishwasher hose on Christmas Eve and got saved by the company's employees. Though the client praised my writing skills, she said the script got rejected because the higher-ups didn't appreciate the thought of mice in customers' homes.
Trifling bug report (but in this sort of thing it's worth getting the details right): one of the versions has "fewawards" instead of "few awards".
[EDITED to add:] Er, I was assuming that this was posted by the person who wrote it and that the latter is therefore reading this. But it looks like it wasn't, so maybe he isn't.
Fascinating and educational to see all those variations! Reminds me a little of 99 Ways to Tell a Story by Matt Madden: http://mattmadden.com/comics/99x/
I haven't read 99 Ways to Tell a Story, but when I read Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style about a decade ago (in English translation) I was delighted by it. Though I have not reread the book recently, 2008-me would heartily recommend it.
I've noticed that exercises in style (in writing or in visual art, comics, video games and what have you) and practices like constrained writing and their analogues in other media seem to resonate with a certain type of computer/math nerd. It affects even those who would rather not associate with anything described as "literary". I think being a nerd predisposes one towards enjoying a kind of formalism in art.
I could refer to this when writing cover letters. First line in my most recent cover letter "I was ecstatic..." fail... My eyes were popping out of my head when I came across this listing.
edit: following through the progression, it would not be hard to emulate this and get responses but then the problem comes back to your actual competence. Thanks for sharing this is helpful.
edit: would probably help to dissect this for visible-progression, but the pattern seems to be:
feel free -> if you need -> hello I'm -> then more and more dictating, not so much choice, you need to choose me.
Perfect example of a clever functional component to convey your business / sell yourself.
One usability note: I would turn 'less / more hard sell' either side of the slider into links that move it forward/back as keeping my mouse pressed down on the slider reading through all the options was a little cumbersome.
Just love the website content and slider. So wish that many more sites were like this. We could all save time by reading the one sentence version and move on.
I really like it. Might have to mimic your style for an editor friend of mine. Do you incorporate this style somehow into your business cards (if you have any at the moment)?
Good idea for business cards like this. Could leverage multi-design printing such as Moo's Printfinity[0] (allows for a different design on every card).
A little anecdote, a few years ago I posted a link to her site here. Moments later the traffic from Hacker News took down her site and she took to Twitter to complain about the "Hackers" that brought her site down.
Is there a way to DDOS your self on purpose? I want to bench mark my servers. I saw that there are some tools, damn... need to refer to some old forum threads...
Thanks, I was wondering how you get that "Build/Passing" thing on the GitHub.
I'm also not sure if Apache is outdated, like I should really move to NGINX or Node/Amazon, I have yet to configure overflow handling (forwarding traffic in the event of a server not being able to handle it all) I was looking at public cloud before, kind of interesting, said something like $0.010/ or maybe $0.10/GB not sure if that was storage or bandwidth but yeah. I also wonder how hard/how you should create quick "copies" or "images" of your application and then be able to forward traffic to that.
Give him a break. He's a copywriter, not a designer. Come on! Although, I'm sure there are plenty of used car salesmen who would love for him to put cats wearing helmets riding on skateboards through explosions on their website.
Downvotes: I've worked in advertising for over 10 years. Most copywriters try to avoid the direct yes/no questions in headlines. For effective headlines, go scan the cover of a Cosmopolitan magazine.
I hit the downvote on your comment before realizing what you meant, and I agree, the slider is a little subtle, even on a desktop. I think it might go better at the top, before the text.
Common, we're not here to get advertising, even if it's well done, I really don;t care about your skills, your supposed talent, and you B&W website. You might want to think you're special, but I still want to see something I could think of of special..
btw nice hack : getting ~400pts on a saturday night, with this kind of uninteresting content. Growth hacking is good only when you've got something edgy to sell
"The joy of being five.
You've got just 365 days to capture it".
Ok, now I get it. (goes to my soon to be 6 daughter and gives her a huge hug, and wish I have taken more pictures, and telling my wife I just got something stuck in my eye)
[0] http://getcoleman.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/1_Jessops-B...