Writing the Web
I guess everybody but me has figured this out, but blogs and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) provide all the web presence just about any normal person needs. I considered putting wikis in the list, but no — too geeky. It’s the blog and the personal profile, baby. They just work for people. No need to learn HTML authoring software; until recently, average people needed to learn that stuff to contribute to the web.
On a related note, when I’m emailed a document (usually a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet) to add to the intranet at work, I just email it to docs.google.com (formerly writely.com) where it is automatically converted to HTML, visit docs.google.com, touch it up a bit (I like a little color), publish it, and link it up somewhere on the intranet. True, I could have used Office’s "save as web page" function, but I can’t stand the HTML it generates and I have to locate the generated file(s) where our intranet server can see it. Once the file is up on docs.google.com, I can share it with the author of the document and try to coax him or her to use the docs.google.com version instead of the original Office file as the source, but, I don’t usually succeed for reasons good and bad. When I succeed, she or he can publish updates directly. Immediate turnaround for the author and no work for me.
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