Seven deadly sins of blogging 1.0 → Being fake (Sins of blogging) 1.1 Being irrelevant (Sins of blogging) 1.2 Being boring (Sins of blogging) 1.3 Being unreadable (Sins of blogging) ...
Have you ever told a project manager that the instructions he plans on releasing with an application -- instructions written by an intern who is here for a three-month stint -- are complete junk and that it would be an embarrassment to the organization to give them to users? When you tell a project manager that, surprise, you win yourself a new documentation project. That's all right, because Joomla, the topic of the instructions, is some...
I love it when leaders bare their thoughts in introspective ways on a blog. Hughes has really been grappling with the STC situation and how to handle it. I'm not so interested in possible solutions to the STC problem as I am intrigued by Hughes' use of blogging as a heuristic for thinking. One result is that he gets us on his side, whereas leaders who don't share this same introspective searching don't seem to tap into our support and und...
It seems like everyone is moving to WordPress lately. A few months ago, David Farbey moved his blog to WordPress. Scriptorium recently converted their site and blog to WordPress. One die-hard Movable Type interaction designer at my work is moving to WordPress. And now The Content Wrangler has moved to WordPress. I actually helped Scott transition his site from Expression Engine to WordPress. Converting the site was not necessarily easy, b...
Although many people put blogs and wikis in the same social media category, blogs and wikis are actually quite different. Blogs are individually authored mini-magazines or journals where one author (or sometimes a small authoring group) crank out article after article (or entry after entry) usually with a common theme. After each article is published, the article is considered done and the author moves on to newer pastures, always hunting...
Techcrunch says the New York Times' ethics policy of distance and objectivity contradicts their acceptance of David Pogue as an Apple fan boy. Journalists must maintain more distance and objectivity. This criticism reminds me of the case of Chez Pazienza, a CNN blogger fired for expressing views on his blog that contrasted with CNN's more conservative outlook. This is perhaps a subtle danger of blogging: holding views on your personal blo...
I woke up from my long Sunday nap to see all kinds of commotion about upgrading WordPress to 2.8.4 due to a worm that is currently circulating. The WordPress blog reports: Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink ...
In a recent User Interface Engineering Brainsparks podcast, Jared Spool interviews Ginny Redish about her book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing as Conversation, as it applies to interface design. This podcast was one of the best I've listened to all week. In the podcast, Ginny explains how your content should be like the answer to a user's questions. Not styled as an FAQ, but written anticipating and responding to questions the user migh...
In When is the Best Time and Day to Publish a Blog Post, Lorelle Van Fossen explores a question that has become increasingly more relevant to me: when to publish your posts. I definitely get more responses to posts that I publish Sunday evening through Thursday, similar to Lorelle's experiences. Also, most of the traffic seems to come during work hours. This tells me that my audience considers my blog somehow related to their work (that, ...
In previous posts, I've explored whether technical writing is boring. Penelope Trunk's latest post, All advice on how to manage creative people is awful, made me see the topic of workplace boredom in a different light. Citing research in sociology, Penelope explains that "people who work are happier than people who don't because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative." Creativity, then, is an important factor...
In a recent episode of This American Life titled "Going Big," Geoffrey Canada explains his model of Baby College, which is a nine-week workshop where poor, inner-city parents to be learn to raise their children in ways that break their children out of the poverty cycle. Canada gives up on breaking the parents out of the poverty cycle and instead focuses on teaching parents the childhood rearing techniques that will enable the children to...
First time I've seen STC Online Certificate Courses. They look excellent. $595 per course, and there are four courses, each consisting of 5-8 sessions per course. Each of the instructors looks solid. Thanks @AndreaJWenger for the link.
A scholar conducts a 6 year study of student writing and finds that, despite constant accusations that social media is taking writing downhill, actually "we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." I have to agree -- it is a cool effect that the social web is creating. The world needs more writers.
This Manifesto for Slow Communication (linked by Karen Mardahl) will make you think twice about the benefits of social networks, email, Twitter, Facebook, IM, and all the constant noise, hectic rushing, and mindless processing that it produces in your life. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness [awareness of death], but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our ...
Fascinating NYTimes.com article about why teenagers don't use Twitter (linked by Eddie VanArsdall). A few reasons teens avoid Twitter: it makes it difficult to hide what they're doing, parents don't want teens interacting with strangers, the communication is less friend driven and more professional oriented, the tweets are better for marketing or asking questions or broadcasting ideas. Although I tweet, I certainly wouldn't want my kids o...
