Hypertext or Hypertypo

Speed, speed, everything today is about speed. Here in NYC, the NY Times actually has about four or five versions, from early to late, and apparently the only way to truly know what version of the paper you have is the number of dots on the top part of the front page of the paper.

And with all this pressure for speed comes typos. Years ago, you never would have dreamed of seeing more than a few typos in the entire Times, but now it's not that uncommon to find a couple in just one article. Fewer editors, faster turnaround, that's prime soil for typos.

And I'm certainly not immune to the typo scourge. Email is just so easy to type out and send out, and usually, of course, I give it a once over before hitting send, but even with that, I'm still suprised by how often something slips by. Three weeks ago, I noticed three typos in one short email, and the worst thing was, there was even a typo in the subject line (they were all accepted words, so they didn't show up in the spell check, just the wrong words).

The most frustrating one was in San Francisco, when Message Partners was out at Linuxworld. There was one hand-out I worked on, whittling it down until it was written and rewritten to within an inch of its life. And it was just a half page of large type, no more than 100 words, but as I handed the pamphlet over to someone, they took one look down and said, "What's smap? "

All of one hundred words, two sets of eyes scouring over it, but there it was: Smap. Smap instead of spam. Damn damn damn damn damn that spam!

And now that everything is going over to video, is there such a thing as a video typo? You know, I think that's what they call a blooper.