The Curse of Knowledge is a concept in a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The curse of knowledge concept has generated quite a bit of buzz. Here's an excerpt, which I got from 37 Signals: People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads o...
A couple of weeks ago, Rhonda recommended Boagworld as a good podcast to listen to. If you're into web design, I also recommend this podcast, particularly the episode on Community Websites. This episode has two parts: Part 1 Part 2 Paul mentioned a few interesting points about communities: Users who can participate and contribute to your site feel more loyalty and belonging to your site. The comments and information they add can also ...
Listen here: Thom Haller, information architect and director of the Center for Plain Language, talks about how to create a site where users can actually find the information they're looking for. Specific topics in this podcast include: The GECKO method (Gather, Evaluate, Chunk, Know, Optimize) for organizing content for websites Arranging information based on user tasks Clarity traps such as familiarity and clutter Meas...
I just posted a podcast with Thom Haller on Tech Writer Voices. It's an interesting podcast, with the central focus on organizing your site's information around tasks the users want to perform. We write help documentation the same way of course, but I hadn't really thought of applying the same principles to a website's information. I haven't yet applied the GECKO principle Thom talks about to my blog or podcast, but I plan to. With Tech ...
Big news in the WordPress world -- 2.1 has been released. I think we've been waiting about a year for this major upgrade. You can download the release from WordPress here. Here's an excerpt from WordPress about what this release includes: Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post. The lossless XML import and export makes it ...
Take Darren Barefoot's survey on blogging here: http://www.whydoyoublog.com/node. He's gathering info for a presentation he's giving on blogging. It's a fun survey and gets you thinking about why you blog.
I've been thinking about how simple, inexpensive ideas can be surprisingly successful. Like how Digg's founders basically started Digg with a $1,000, and converted it into a site worth millions: Kevin Rose started Digg in December of 2004 with just $1000. Today Digg is one of the biggest news sites on the Net, with over 400,000 members and over 200 million page views per month. According to this article from Business week, Digg will make ...
I've been trying to create a logo for Tech Writer Voices, but I'm not a graphic artist, so my logo looks pretty amateur. My idea is to have something like this: The above image comes from someone's Flickr stream. But instead of the RSS logo, I thought I'd put in a globe. So I loaded Google Earth, captured a globe image, and then inserted it into some headphones that I got off of Microsoft clipart. My idea behind using th...
The CEO of technorati, David Sifry, posted an interesting report on the state of the blogosphere. Technorati is the organization that most carefully tracks blogs. There are at least 57 million blogs that Technorati is tracking. The number doubles about every 236 days. More than half of the blogs are active. Technorati ranks blogs by how many people link to them (similar to how Google ranks pages too). They looked at why some blogs are ra...
Yesterday my wife needed to use the computer for a while, and since we cut our cable TV, I decided to open up the Intercom to read some of the articles. After reading for about a half hour, I thought about the differences between reading blogs and traditional print media. My conclusion: the interactive nature of blogs makes the reading experience more enjoyable. With Intercom, I first read Keith Hoffman's Web 2.0 article. It was an inform...
I'm excited to upgrade to RoboHelp 6, but would you believe that RoboHelp 6 isn't compatible with Word 2007? Oh my. I assume RoboHelp will have to offer another release fairly soon. Monkey PI has a really interesting review of RoboHelp 6, calling it "craptastic."
Snap is a really interesting new feature that allows you to see an image of a link's destination just by moving your mouse over the link. I added Snap to this site and to my podcast site. (Adding Snap takes about 30 seconds, that's all.) The following image shows Snap in action. Some think this preview is annoying, and others are really intrigued by it. I think it adds interactivity to your site and allows the reader to make smarter deci...
Ponyfish allows you to create an RSS feed for sites that don't have them. If your favorite site is constantly maintained and updated, and there's no feed for it, just enter the URL into Ponyfish, configure it a little by clicking your mouse on the site's links, and Ponyfish will create a feed for you. It's a little hard to believe that it actually works, but apparently there is quite a buzz about it. The user interface is fairly simple. ...
At the end of the day, most of my life in IT is spent in problem solving. I've come to learn a few tips and tricks about solving problems. 1. Use View > Source and right click > properties to see the parts behind the visual display. When you can locate the parts, you can often identify the particular component that is running the show behind the scenes. I did this with RoboHelp today as I was trying to hack the "traditional - no skin" the...
You can choose from a variety of blogging platforms out there (Movable Type, Blogger, Vox, Live Journal, and so on), but there's something intangibly blissful about the open architecture of WordPress. You can get inside the code and customize it just how you want it to look. Of course some customizations take longer than others. And customization can be a frustrating experience. But other times it is extremely rewarding, and even blissful...
