copywriting

From IndieWeb


copywriting refers to the act of deliberate (rather than informal) writing for a specific purpose and often an intended audience, both in content or in code like user interface labels.

On the IndieWeb, we typically refer to copywriting in/for content as just "content".

UI

Copywriting on indieweb user interfaces is particularly interesting, since an indieweb site primarily represents one person, rather than a silo which has an interface that represents lots of people.

IndieWeb Perspectives

Aaron Parecki

I have made a deliberate attempt to never put any third-person verbage on my site.

In contrast to posting content on silos where things like ActivityStreams verbage makes sense ("aaronpk replied to a post" or "aaronpk is attending"), this is content posted by me on my own site, so it should not refer to me in the third person.

Whenever I show things that could be phrased in ActivityStreams on my site, (posting a note, commenting on a post, RSVPing to an event) I try to find a way to indicate visually what the action is rather than with third-party verbage. This is accomplished with things like reply-context and multiple-reply.

RSVPs

This is made clear by the RSVP example here: http://aaronparecki.com/replies/2013/06/25/3/indiewebcamp. In this case, I did not want to put text like "Aaron is attending" or even "I'm attending", since that is not how I would naturally present this RSVP. Instead, I wrote a text comment back to benwerd, "@benwerd Sounds like fun! I'm in!" and visually indicated this post is an RSVP by placing the green RSVP banner in the top right corner, placed over the event.

When Ben displays my RSVP on his event page (http://werd.io/event/51c94deebed7de5c2386a1b4/unofficial-portland-post-indiewebcamp-meetup) he re-phrases it into the third person and renders it at "Aaron Parecki RSVPed yes". This makes sense because I am a third party as far as his site is concerned.

Quotes

See Also