Monday Reading List

Facebook Launches New Mobile Web Standards Initiative, Easier Payments for the Mobile Web - Silicon Filter

During a special lunch-time event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Facebook's CTO Bret Taylor introduced a number of new industry-wide initiatives for the mobile web. Facebook is also working with a number of other vendors to define better web standards that can be implemented across devices to ensure that users can get a consistent mobile web app experience across devices. The Core Mobile Web Platform, as this new group is called, will work to ensure that there are very specific mobile web standards that developers can expect to be available across devices and mobile browers.

Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments of Writing & Daily Creative Routine  - BrianPickings.org

COMMANDMENTS

• Work on one thing at a time until finished. 
• Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’ 
• Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 
• Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 
• When you can’t create you can work. 
• Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 
• Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it. 
• Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. 
• Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude. 
• Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 
• Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy - Brainpickings.org

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:  

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it. 8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.