Dreamwidth was created as a replacement for the blogging site LiveJournal and has gained many former Tumblr users. Both sites censored content that Dreamwidth is more than happy to allow. Dreamwidth is a text-based social media platform focusing on posts and comments, giving users the ability to post content and make friends.

Navigating Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth describes itself as an open-source social networking and content management platform based on the LiveJournal code. Unlike many similar platforms like facebook or Tumblr, Dreamwidth users cannot repost and can only share links, keeping the feeds from cluttering up with reposted material. Dreamwidth has attracted a wide variety of users, with an avid fan fiction community and many others looking to share adult content that might be censored on other platforms, though users can voluntarily add content warnings.

Users have icons, and posts can vary from facebook-style life updates to art. User freedom comes at the price of basic packaging, with a plain aesthetic. There are a variety of different communities with a range of interests. Users have control over what others see, and some journals are locked and require permission from their creators for access.

How They Snagged Tumblr Users

Many users started coming to Dreamwidth when Tumblr started censoring NSFW posts. Even for those who don’t seek to share adult content, Tumblr’s censorship filter has caused issues, with many posts falsely flagged as inappropriate. Paige Leskin lists Dreamwidth as one of four main replacements for Tumblr. Dreamwidth even has a post welcoming former Tumblr users to their site.

Replacement for LiveJournal

While LiveJournal had several problems, inconsistent censorship was a big issue. Abe Hassan, a former LiveJournal employee discussed the problems they had in controlling inappropriate content: “We should’ve taken more of a stance on what ‘sexualized’ meant, and moved in the direction of community standards, like what [image sharing site] Flickr had, rather than freedom of speech.” The lack of consistent standards led to angry users who became increasingly dissatisfied with the site and the lack of clear rules.

Unlike Hassan, Denise Paulucci, who formerly led the LiveJournal support team, went in the opposite direction and sided with user freedom. Paulucci describes LiveJournal’s downfall: “We wanted to be the mom-and-pop corner store of social media, but we sold to somebody who didn’t understand that. And that’s where Dreamwidth comes in.”

By selling to a company that focused on advertising, Dreamwidth was forced to curtail its user’s freedom. This sudden shift in expectations contributed to LiveJournal’s demise. This led Paulucci and Livejournal software engineer Mark Smith to found Dreamwidth as an alternative that lacked the censorship LiveJournal was trying to implement.

The transition from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth appears so natural there are even posts on LiveJournal about how to use Dreamwidth, including one post by user ljlee covering how Dreamwidth’s mood indicators work and how to create your own custom mood theme. 

What’s Different About Dreamwidth

Covering the exodus from Tumblr, Sean Captain writes about what makes Dreamwidth unique, quoting Paolucci: “Our user base is very, very appreciative of the fact that they are our users and not the product that we’re selling.”  Since Dreamwidth is user supported, it has been able to avoid relying on adds or engaging in mass data harvesting. However, user freedom comes at the cost of limited finances, especially compared to major platforms like Tumblr. Dreamwidth has no video platform, and the site focuses more on facilitating the very sort of text-based posts that might come under fire by advertisers.

In the war between users and advertisers, Dreamwidth sides with the users. Whether the users will be able to back them up with the needed funding is still unknown. For devoted users, a plain platform is the price for freedom.

Poetry is a difficult subject to entice students to immerse themselves in. Poetry is often neglected throughout elementary and high school, as well as in teacher-education courses entirely. Digital poetry can be taught in so many unique ways that cannot be done with an old poetry textbook. Allowing students to find and create poems that resonate with them encourages students to discover the diversity of poetry. The accessibility for digital poetry is at an all-time high, as is every form of digital media. Most schools in America issue their students electronic devices. At this rate, digital poetry is significantly more accessible than paper format.

Audiobook Poetry for Children

Poetry and audiobooks are two terrific resources for children learning to read. Poetry is a literary form that emphasizes language structures in unique ways to connect lines inside a poem. Poetry frequently rhymes, which is an excellent approach to improving phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the capacity to perceive and control sounds in language through writing. Children learn to break words down into phonemes through rhyming, which strengthens their decoding and comprehension skills. Poetry introduces children to new words, enhancing their vocabulary. Reading longer materials might be challenging for a new reader. On the other hand, poetry presents concise texts that are rich in significance. Additionally, poetry’s frequent use of metaphors enables more nuanced readings of the material. Children learn to become more self-assured, independent thinkers because poetry allows for personal interpretation. 

The benefits of audiobooks for new readers are very similar to that of poetry. Students can hear the precise letter sounds and word-forming letter patterns through audiobooks. In addition to increasing vocabulary, understanding, and critical thinking abilities, audiobooks encourage student interaction with the material and expose them to a wider variety of terms. Students who listen to audiobooks are exposed to academic jargon and book language. Their previous knowledge, a crucial element for a developing student, is built through exposure. Audiobooks also promote the growth of higher-order thinking abilities. Combining these two resources for new readers could make a significant difference in children’s reading skills and their appreciation for poetry as they get older.

Digital Poetry vs. Poetry Textbooks

Students are only exposed to a narrow variety of poetry styles, subjects, and writers since teachers rely on overly well-known poems and ways of studying them. Handing a student a poetry textbook comprised entirely of the same authors and the same kinds of poetry is dull and uninspiring. Poetry textbooks have been done to death and can be listed as a contributing factor to students’ distaste for the writing medium.

A study called “The Transpoemation Project” chose a group of ninth graders to explore digital poetry with. They gave these students a project where they wrote their own poem, took it from pages to devices, and then transformed their poem into a movie. The students’ knowledge that they were going to make a short film of their poem allowed them to be more creative with their uses of themes and language. Translating a poem from the page to the screen highlighted the importance of analyzing their work. The same poem was read by various students in different ways, and the aesthetic decisions creators made when utilizing technology to animate the poem encouraged the other students to experience the ‘filmmaker’s’ interpretation of the text.

 Poetry inspires us to consider how to use the various multimedia tools at our disposal to increase students’ comprehension and appreciation. Students must use creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and interact with a poem multiple times to translate verse from the page to the screen. It would have been impossible for the students in this study to complete this project without extensively re-reading their poems. This repetitive reading exercise improved understanding and aided interpretation.

Poetry Appreciation

Poetry is becoming near extinct in education as a whole. Even when poetry is taught, most teachers do not feel confident in teaching it. They resort to picking apart similar themes and never exposing students to anything new. Implementing technology into teaching poetry could be very influential. Translating a poem from the page to the screen and then taking it further and animating the poetry brings it to life. Projects similar to “The Transpoemation Project” have the potential to make learning poetry more enjoyable and influential. The ninth graders who participated in that study are sure to, at the very least, remember how fun their experience was. The potential of audiobook poetry to introduce children to it at a young age could create a lifelong appreciation for poetry. A new age of technology has ushered in new ways of teaching nearly everything. So why should poetry be an exception?

People commonly talk about the sale of fiction rights as if they were a bulk package. In reality, there is a broad spectrum of marketable rights that stem from a single work of fiction, one subset of which is electronic rights. Understanding how rights work is crucial for navigating digital publishing.

What Publishers are Looking For

Online fiction magazine sites differ slightly in terms of the rights they are looking for. Clarksworld wants first world electronic rights, first print rights, and non-exclusive anthology rights. Asimov’s Science Fiction wants First English Language serial rights, and Strange Horizons wants first-printing world exclusive English language rights. For beginning writers trying to publish online, deciphering these requests can require a little clarification.

An Author’s Rights Under Copyright

To better understand what rights publishing companies are asking for, it helps to understand what rights an author has under copyright in the first place. According to the Digital Media Law Project, there are six key rights protected under copyright which are: the right to reproduce, to distribute, to create derivative works, to perform a work, to publicly display it, and the right to perform it publicly for recordings. Electronic rights merely refer to how these rights protect an author’s work in electronic media.

Jerry Cornelius, in an article for Hubpages writes that authors don’t sell their rights but license a specific right or rights to a publisher. Yen Cabag, in an article for TCK Publishing, notes that when authors license their work rights are often broken up into specific parts. An author has a variety of marketable rights from one single work including the right to print their work electronically.

Defining Electronic Rights

Cornelius defines licensing print rights as allowing publishers to reproduce a work in any form of printed media. Licensing electronic rights allows a publisher to be the first to distribute a work electronically. Freelance Writing’s article Publication Rights for Freelance Writers discusses how granting all electronic rights gives publishers the ability to do anything from record a work on CD’s or post it on the internet. However, a publisher who only has electronic rights for a work cannot publish the work in print. Web rights give the publisher the right to post your article on the web but cannot reproduce it by CDs or similar means.

Claire E. White, writing in A Novice Writer’s Guide to Rights, advises that writers clearly define which electronic rights they are licensing and which they are not, as electronic rights themselves can be broken down into subcategories that are continually expanding due to advances in technology. Due to the broad scope of rights that authors possess, clarity of what you are offering and what you are not is key when negotiating contracts.

First Rights and Electronic Publishing

Brain A. Klems describes First North American Serial Rights (FNASR) in an article for Writer’s Digest. FNASR gives a publisher the right to be the first to publish a work in North America before any other publication.

While licensing first rights may seem straightforward, Cornelius writes that first rights are media-specific, allowing an author to sell first print rights and first electronic rights separately. An author can sell first electronic rights even after their work has long been in print, provided electronic rights were not included when they sold print rights. This gives authors an added stream of income and helps further monetize their work.

How to Keep from Losing First Electronic Rights

Writers also need to be aware of the consequences of posting material online. The editor of Clarkesworld Magazine Neil Clarke writes that editors consider a story published if it appears on your site or another publicly available website. While this might not fit many writers’ conceptions of publication, from an editor’s standpoint, the work has already been viewed, and first serial rights can no longer be sold. Taking care of what you post can save your first electronic rights.

When negotiating a book deal, it is important to know what rights you have and what they are worth to a publisher, allowing you to better understand your assets and the needs of the market.

Have you ever been editing your content to find that the words are running together in your head? Authors and editors alike analyze and re-read texts repeatedly to weed out mistakes, and after time your brain can become overwhelmed. Reading the text aloud to see how the words flow is a tactic many people in these fields utilize. Speechify makes it possible for you to hear your writing aloud rather than reading it yourself, which makes it simpler for your mind to focus on seeing errors that are directly in front of you.

What Speechify is

Speechify is a multi-platform program using artificial intelligence (AI) voices to translate text into speech. The HD voices are one of the best features Speechify has to offer. From a distance, you can easily hear the voices, and you can alter the voice to suit your requirements. You can alter the reading’s pitch, tone, loudness, speed, and more. Instead of having to read the grammatical and readability errors yourself, you simply hear them. The ability to highlight the text while it is being read to you is another noteworthy feature. You can follow along with the text while highlighting the areas that require further attention as well as take notes within the software. Speechify also supports many languages. If you’d like, you can even translate across languages. The best part about Speechify is that it is a free program. There are premium features, but you can try them out for free first to see if you like them before deciding to pay for everything.

Competitors

Natural Reader and Murf are two large competitors for Speechify. With Natural Reader, you can turn written content from websites, ebooks, Word and PDF documents, and other types of written text into speech. There are 56 voices currently available in nine different languages, including American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. Natural Reader has a free plan as well.

Murf is Speechify’s largest competitor if you are looking for a tool to assist with your proofreading. Murf is not free, but it has a wide range of plans available. There are three different pricing options: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. A full set of AI tools are included with Murf. If you don’t think you have the correct tone or accent for a piece of audio content but would prefer not to use a voice actor, there is even a Voice Changer tool that allows you to record something before it is changed into an AI-generated voice. Time Syncing, Grammar Assistant, and Voice Editing are additional capabilities. Having a grammar-assisting tool within the software is what makes Murf such a threat to Speechify. Although, as an author or editor just looking to have your work read back to you, this may not be worth spending money on when there are free applications.

What Makes Speechify More Useful to Authors and Editors

There are many text-to-speech applications on the market. What sets Speechify apart is its free plan. They offer a 3-day free trial of everything they offer. Moreover, the highlighting and note-taking features within Speechify are ideal features for editing. With free grammar assisting tools such as Grammarly available, the need for a grammar assistant within a text-to-speech application is not necessarily needed. As an author or editor, all you need is Speechify’s free plan to significantly improve the quality of your work. Hearing the way the words flow and being able to point out mistakes that way can make all the difference. The note-taking and highlighting tools are certainly useful and make the premium plan worth it, but besides that, the voices are the only other thing that might entice you to purchase the premium plan. They have a wide array of voices available. Celebrity voices are mimicked on Speechify as well, which can be incredibly entertaining. However, for editing what sets Speechify apart is the fact that authors and editors get everything they need out of it for free.

Downsides to Speechify

You would assume that by purchasing the premium plan you would have unlimited access to all of the features Speechify has to offer. With premium voices, speechify has a cap of 150,000 words each month. You can only hear the typical voices after you reach that limit. If you are an author or editor who already does not necessarily need the premium option but bought it for the voice options, this could be potentially frustrating. Also, with the standard version, the user experience may be hampered by the pushy ads intended to persuade you to upgrade to the premium plan. 

Overall Assessment

Speechify is simple to use and a great tool for revision. Yet aggressive advertising can be irritating for users of any app, and this one is no exception.  The note-taking and highlighting features on the premium plan are quite helpful, and the voice options might be amusing. Although those tools can be useful, they aren’t absolutely necessary for text editing. So, overall, as an author or editor using this to weed out mistakes in your work, the free plan gives you what you need, a second voice reading your work back to you.