I took a side swipe at the DIKW (Data Information Knowledge Wisdom) pyramid the other day, and included a link to David Weinberger’s excellent debunking of it, which concludes: The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it’s a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each… Read More »
Summary: As content consumers, we love hypertext. As content creators, we still believe in content management, even after years of disappointment. Content management disappoints because it does not scale for culture. It is time to embrace hypertext instead. I should know better. Every time I put the word “hypertext” in the title of a post,… Read More »
‘Any technology you use should be “Googlable”‘. These are the words of Bill Scott, VP Engineering, Merchant | Retail | Online Payments at PayPal, as reported by the amazing Sarah Maddox. (I say amazing because Sarah manages to lucidly and intelligently blog just about every conference session she attends. Having just helped cover the LavaCon conference, and… Read More »
Hierarchy as a form of content organization is dying. A major milestone — I want to say tombstone — in its demise is the shutdown of the Yahoo directory, which will occur at the end of the year according to an article in Ars Technica, Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organization. (Actually it… Read More »
Is the Web making us smarter or dumber? Kath McNiff sums up the dilemma beautifully: I fear that the web is not making me smarter. It’s distressing my synapses and dumbing me down. Not because the content is junk but because there is too much good stuff. Amazing material at my finger tips – TED talks, zeitgeisty blogs,… Read More »
There is no doubt that the Web is highly disruptive. Nicholas Carr thinks it is rotting our brains. David Weinberger, on the other hand, thinks it is fundamentally changing (for the better) they way we understand and develop knowledge. I think it is restoring civilization to its roots.
There is a long-running radio program on the BBC called Desert Island Discs that asks celebrities what recordings they would take with them if they were going to be stranded on a desert island. Today, the question does not make as much practical sense as when it was first broadcast in 1942. As long as… Read More »
I’m a fan of emerging technology, and generally tolerant of emerging terminology, but when it comes to job titles I tend to the view that if it was not mentioned in the Domesday Book, it isn’t a real job. I have, on diverse occasions, decried attempts to replace the title “technical writer” with something else,… Read More »
It struck me today that the Web does Minimalism. Not only does it do it, it does it naturally, and it does it well. Consider: Here’s a common listing of the principle tenants of minimalism (borrowed from http://www.ryerson.ca/~ipederse/Minimalism.htm via Google): Take An Action-Oriented Approach Aim for Guided Exploration Position the Documentation in the Task Domain… Read More »
Social media is not a ship, it is the ocean. This, it seems to me, is the key to understanding what is going on and what it means for professional technical communicators. Writers complain that community content is of poor quality, unreliable, badly written, etc. etc. as if it were something that could therefore safely… Read More »