2001: A Space Odyssey

May 3, 2005

Bloggers vs. Journalists 1-0

Filed under: On Blogs

Bloggers vs. Journalists 1-0


Like Americans, even in Italian bloggers are -sometimes- better than journalists.
What happened here two days ago is something incredible:

“In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying “hidden” text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor (Italian). The uncensored report can now be directly downloaded (evil .DOC format, sorry)”

Wonderful :)

It’s awesome to see how technology is misunderstood. It’s widespread, daily used and not understood. People, specifically in censitive fields, will need to get courses to get somewhat up-to-date with technologies usage.

Small chapters for faster reading

Filed under: On Reading

In answer to:


Great! I have never thought about it before.
Yes, we can use a bookmark, anyway reading for pleasure is not alway easy if you have to work and/or study, and short chapters could psicologically help us to plan our reading time.
BTW, one thing I always loved are the chapter titles; not all books have a title for each chapter, but I think they are a delicious anticipation of what you’re going to read, like watching at the menu card at the restaurant. It’s like blog’s post, isn’t it?
The question is: why so many writers use long chapters? It could be a style choice, of course. Sometimes, the author could desire to give a specific rhythm to the story; it’s like movies: the director could choice to show the facts in a few minutes, or - au contraire - to give the spectator the time to reflect while they happen.
I do think there’s a rhythm in any story, and this rhythm should be given by the author. A pause in reading, sometimes, could be like a second of silence in a musical composition: it’s void, but important.
At the other hand, I think very often (not always) there’s no logical reason to trunk a story in a point or the other. Sometimes it really seems casual. What do you think about?
Another reason for chapters’ length could be a technical one: expecially when you are not famous, the editors use to ask one or two chapters to evaluate your work. Then, if you want to show your talent, you can’t give him just ten pages, even beautiful.

I love chapter titles too. I think in next years (10 or 20) the way to edit books will change according to blogs. We need the time to explore the concept and the way we’ll edit blogs; what’s the best way to do it. When blogs will get mature, I think that editors will incorporate some ideas in traditional books editing like chapter titles :)

Many authors say: think simple. Create short sentences with short and meaningful words. I thing that this “minimalist” vision could be applicable in a more global view: the chapters.