Google Maps now offers a street view to major cities on their maps. It's like there are 360 degree web cams set up all over major cities -- you can virtually explore them, cruising up and down streets. It's simply amazing. Check it out.The only disappointment is that more cities aren't available in the street view. I think right now it's limited to San Francisco, New York, Denver, Las Vegas, and Miami. Watch this video for a two-minute ex...
Alan Houser, a well-known DITA expert and conference committee member for the last STC conference, started up a blog at http://groupwellesley.com/wordpress/. I attended a DITA workshop Alan gave at the Doc Train conference in Vancouver and really enjoyed it. He definitely knows what he's talking about, and he is a regular listener of Tech Writer Voices. I'm excited to see him in the blogosphere—be sure to subscribe to his feed. ...
Although I dismissed the effectiveness of newsletters in a previous post, I am rethinking my position for one main reason: readers of stc-suncoast.org aren't feed savvy enough to be checking their feedreaders daily. And even if they do use feedreaders, it's so easy to skip past a post in the constant barrage of information. So I implemented the ShiftThis Newsletter plugin, which costs $20. It's one of the few plugins that actually costs m...
T asks: I have been a professional pilot for 37 years. I have taken about 7 online courses in Technical Writing and earned a certificate in Technical Writing from Clemson University. I have a Master's degree in Aeronautical Science. I don't have any experience in the graphics software like Photoshop. How can I break into the technical writing field? If you've been a pilot for 37 years, you probably know more about the airplane mechani...
The most pressing idea I took away from STC Leadership day is that associations are on a downward spiral and must innovate in new ways to provide value members want. From 2000 to 2007, membership in the Society for Technical Communication (STC) dropped from 20,000 to 14,000 members. This is not unique to the STC, but is a trend for all associations that don't offer an industry standard certification as their main value. Average retention ...
In this Rice Cooker Critiques podcast, from Design Critique: Products for People, Tim and Tom talk extensively about the usability of several rice cookers. One of their conclusions is that instructions for cooking rice need to be printed on the actual rice cooker. I think the advice is sound and applies to many products: where possible, print instructions in a visible location for the user. This is one way that user help literally becomes...
Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP), makes some interesting reflections in this iinnovate podcast (a podcast dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship). A few things struck me. Carly said corporate America can be confining and limiting after a while. Now that she's out of it, she feels free. As a CEO, she said you're never free. I think everyone in a large corporation can relate to that (hence the popularity of Dilbert ca...
WordPress 2.2 is definitely worth the upgrade. After my backup and restore issues the other night, I had a problem-free upgrade this time. The wp-cache plugin was what threw a monkey wrench in the upgrade before. Is WordPress 2.2 worth it? Yes. Here's why: In previous versions, WordPress let you pull the trigger on a loaded gun. You might activate a plugin that ends up crashing your blog. Now they've made it foolproof by preventing fatal...
I spent a fun evening wrangling with WordPress 2.2. I attribute most of the trouble to the wp-cache plugin, because I kept receiving this exciting error: Warning: fopen(/home/idrathe1/public_html/wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/idrathe1/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 96 I've never had a problem with a mutex.lock! After se...
I received a couple of questions last week about podcasting. Klay writes, I REALLY like what you are doing and I am excited to try this out at work. I would like to have a better understanding of how to conduct an interview for a podcast. Do you give the person the questions ahead of time? I had to conduct some interviews last summer and it would have been great to record those. Anyway, I felt like I was not well prepared and would apprec...
Listen here: I interviewed about three dozen people at the STC Conference in Minneapolis this year. If you scroll down and look at the last 34 podcasts published on this site, you'll see that they're tagged with STC Conference or Leadership Day (which is part of the conference). Each podcast is short, about 5-10 minutes. Interviewees include both presenters and attendees. To download the podcasts, right-click the downloa...
Listen here: Jack shares some trends in the technical communication industry. He says writers need to become hyphenated to move forward and be successful in the future. Jack owns a technical writing staffing company and also produces the Lavacon conference, which is in New Orleans this year, but is traditionally in Hawaii. Jack says users aren't concerned about polished language these days; they just want accurate, relev...
Listen here: Geoff is one of the founders of tc.eserver.org – the largest online index for all works related to technical communication. The library indexes works by technical communicators in dozens of categories, and allows users to add new works, rank them, and get RSS feeds of specific topics. There are over 25,000 RSS feeds generated on the site and 15,000 visitors each day. Tc.eserver.org is five times as popular a...
Listen here: Rob explains how you can use Captivate to create nontraditional e-learning materials, such as on-the-job training, sales and marketing training, or even bird-watching training. You aren't just limited to technical how-to information in screen demos. Rob recommends Brenda Huettner's book on Captivate and also Ruth Clark's book on Building Expertise. You can also use resources on his own site, at www.userassis...
Listen here: Scott's presentation on Web 2.0 was the most popular presentation of the entire conference (at least this is my impression from these interviews). In his presentation, Scott touches upon RSS feeds, wikis, blogs, geospatial positioning, social networking, tagging, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 technologies. He expands here on geospatial positioning and tagging. Scott also explains why he uses a newsletter in ad...
