Findability continues to be the bete noire of technical communication. This may be a parallax error, but it seems that findability is more of a problem in technical communication than in other fields. The reason, I suspect, is that many technical documentation suites are too big to browse but too small to search. I have… Read More »
All God’s creatures got a place in the choir Some sing low and some sing higher Bill Staines Traditionally, technical manuals have been written as if they were the only source of information on a product. Of course, the manual was never really the only source. There have always been neighbors, friends, colleagues, retailers, user’s… Read More »
Are structured writing and crowd-sourced content on divergent paths, or can you have both? It’s a pretty hot topic right now. Sarah O’Keefe recently tweeted: Must push XML and structure out to masses and need better tools for that @boses#lavacon Linda Urban recently tweeted this: Yep! RT @finiteattention: The problems of crowdsourced user assistance: http://xkcd.com/979#ua#techcomm… Read More »
At the Battle of Balaclava, an order reached a brigade of light cavalry to take the Russian guns. The general who sent the order was referring to a small artillery position that had been abandoned. But the commander of the light brigade could not see those guns. He could only see the main Russian battery… Read More »
This afternoon, I watched Scott Abel’s webinar What’s Next? Socially-Enabled User Assistance, Interactive Documentation, and Location-Aware Help. It was a tour de force tour of the past, present, and potential future of computer mediated help. But despite all the cool stuff that Scott covered — and he covered a lot of cool stuff — I… Read More »
Search and query are two different things, yet many criticisms of search seem to assume that it should behave like query. It shouldn’t, and we would be poorer if it did. I am, of course, using the words “search” and “query” in a somewhat specialized sense here. By query, I mean a formal database query,… Read More »