Let’s start off with Kindle’s price: $399.  For that amount of money, a person could buy four complete (and fancy) sets of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.  And after the initial purchase, things don’t get any better – e-books for the Kindle cost $9.99 apiece, which appears to be a little more expensive than the average paperback.

Valleywag’s Jordan Golson compiled a whole list of other areas in which Kindle falls short.  Some are realistic, others aren’t, but battery life is a biggie – a real book never needs to be plugged into a wall for two hours.

Admittedly, as writers, perhaps Golson and I aren’t the most objective sources on this issue.  Still, Mary Jane Irwin and Rob Beschizza checked out the actual Kindle product page on Amazon, and discovered that it’s not doing too well, earning just 2.5 stars based on 348 reviews.  Even “Elvis Presley: Paradise, Hawaiian Style” scored better than that.

New technology is often appealing, yet Kindle has done anything but catch my interest.

Well, if you made it through my needlessly wordy intro, congratulations, you have more patience than the majority of web readers. The library requires patience; the Web demands speed.

Aye, there’s the rub.

It’s the same for marketers. Like writers, marketers sell ideas with words, but all too often their would-be patrons miss the message for fear of wallowing in a bed of fluff. It’s soft and cushy, but not necessarily productive.

Back in 1997, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s answer to "How Users Read on the Web" was simply:

"They don’t."

Then why bother writing for it? Well, it’s not so much user don’t read, it’s that they don’t want to, and I’m breaking every rule of web writing as we speak just to illustrate a point that should have been in the first paragraph:

Keep it simple; keep it short; keep it direct.

Nielsen updates this morning, ten years to the day of the revelation that Web readers don’t read, with some advice on introductory text on Web pages, or what he calls "blah-blah text." 

When writing that first impression paragraph, writers often focus either too much on dazzling the visitor with prose or providing too much information in an intimidating chunk of text that is likely to be skipped anyway as the user homes in on what they came in search of in the first place.

Those intros, true, serve a specific function in SEO – often what searchers will see in the search results as a description of the contents found on the site. Even then, sorry to disappoint you, they are scanning the words rather quickly.

"Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase," says Nielsen, curt as always.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some introductory text, or that it shouldn’t be well written, only that it should be pruned until it’s neatly shaped and says only what it needs to say to be clear – at a glance – what is to follow. If it’s 45 words of fluff, cut it to 25 words of meat.

Include only, says Nielsen:

·    What? (What will users find on this page — i.e., what’s its function?)
·    Why? (Why should they care — i.e., what’s in it for them?)

And as for me, I’ll go back to my love of words and place them where I dare; I write words for those that love them as much as I do.

Just don’t expect to find The Quarterback Of Chicago among Francis Bacon’s William Shakespeare’s comedic works. No matter how much you think otherwise. Sorry, Mike.

Finding details about Super Bowl XLI is as close as the nearest search box on Ask. It’s another contribution to what director of online information services Gary Price calls the “information at your fingertips” approach.

We discussed the latest updates to Ask’s Smart Answer capabilities, when we weren’t comparing the merits of various delicatessens that aren’t located in New York or Chicago. He gives Shapiro’s a thumbs-up, and I’ve got good memories of Chick & Ruth’s. (Hey Gary, does Shapiro’s have a 112-oz milkshake?)

Along with the details of the just-completed Super Bowl, Ask has Smart Answers for the other interesting part of game day – the commercials. Some people find them more fascinating than the game, and a query on Ask for Super Bowl ads brings up a Smart Answer connected to a page at iFilm listing commercials and advertisers.

While Indy fans enjoy their day in the warmth of the Super Bowl victory sun (hey Mike, did you catch Peyton Manning picking out his MVP Cadillac? He wrote in “loaded” above Escalade after he checked that off as his choice. Man, that was a hoot.), Bears fans probably wanted to get as far away from the game as possible.

The other Ask Smart Answer updated in the mix should do that quite nicely. Gary noted a couple of resource additions to the Smart Answer for Shakespeare now have a couple of new supplementary resources available.

One connects to the library at the University of Victoria in Canada. (Look, Mike, they’ve got The Comedy of Errors, how appropriate. I wonder if “2nd and 1″ is in there.)

As a nod to the upcoming President’s Day holiday (if you’re a government worker that is), Ask also tweaked the Smart Answer for Abraham Lincoln to include a link to a new collection of digitized works about and by the 16th President. Gary provided some context for the Open Content Alliance’s collection of Lincoln works at his Resource Shelf website.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Google released a tribute to William Shakespeare, the wordiest wordmeister there ever was (until Faulkner came along, anyway), on the 50th anniversary of Manhattan’s Shakespeare in the Park.

The bard now has his own webpage equipped with Google Book Search that allows fans (and downtrodden teenagers who don’t speak Elizabethan verse) to search within Shakespeare’s “oevre.” Click here for a definition. Wordy literary types, you know?

The page is in tab form with genres like “Comedy,” “Tragedy,” “Romance,” and “History,” so Shakespearean scholars can get lost in quotes like:

Each tab highlights a list of works and provides quotes from them. Users can browse through the plays or be directed to where they can buy a copy.

Read Google’s disclaimer in a really fast radio lawyer voice:

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