On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 07:47 -0400, Lars D. Noodén wrote: > On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Bruce Byfield wrote: > [snip] > > That means learning what makes a good story, and making sure that people > > like me hear about it. > > Strife. That's what the mainstream seems to tune into. Take the WWF > (wrestling) style face off with HD DVD (uses MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1 > compression) versus Blu-Ray (uses MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1 compression). > > OOo could shape something like that. Focus on the strife and discord > threatening to tear up the project over which is most important: that OOo > is open source or that OOo uses open file formats like OpenDocument. You > know the old "floor wax" vs "desert topping" style debate. ;)
Strife is one aspect of a good story. Human interest is another. But all good stories come down to explaining why readers should be interested in the topic. I came across a good example in Saturday's Globe and Mail. The article was about elderly people and the difficulty they found in giving up driving. The story focused on one man. If the story was just about that one man, I would have read it and thought that the article described a tragedy for the man and his family, but wondered why so much space was devoted to it. Probably, I would have skimmed. However, just about the point where I would have started skimming, the article began to show how the man was representative of a problem that is starting to get worse because of our aging population. That answered the question of why I should be interested, and kept me reading to the end of the article. That's what OOo needs to do. It's not enough just to announce new features -- readers have to know why they should care about the features. -- Bruce Byfield 604-421.7177 http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
