I was recently reading about Mooer's law in Peter Morville's Ambient Findability. Morville contrasts Moore's law with Mooer's law. Moore's law (much more familiar) asserts that the number of computer transistors that you can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. We're all familiar with the ever-increasing amount of storage space, processing power, memory, and other rapid advance with technology. But Mooer's law is perhaps ...
After I linked to my interview with Kristi Leach about collaborative posts, a reader submitted the following question: One of the problems I've had to combat over the years has been boredom/burnout — that feeling you get either when you've been on the same project for too long or a you're on new project that just feels like exactly what you've been working on for years. How do you breath life into work that you've done many, many times be...
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Kristi Leach interviewed me for a quick Q&A about the occasional collaborative posts that I do on this site. You can read the interview on Kristi's site, Why Tech Comm. Here's an excerpt: When I was deciding on a format for my workshop, Grassroots Documentation Testing, I thought of Tom Johnson's collaborative posts on his blog, IdRatherBeWriting.com. In collaborative posts, Tom poses a question to his readers (who include many seasoned ...
In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville has an interesting observation about visual maps. He notes that we use a lot of physical wayfinding metaphors for the web -- we go to a page, we follow a path, we search for objects, we become lost, we use breadcrumbs to orient ourselves, we surf around, we use sitemaps, we design with blueprints, we practice information architecture, we navigate around, etc. These are all metaphors for using the web...
saratogaspringssecondtrip We went down to Saratoga Springs along the Jordan Parkway Trail. This time I brought Molly, Callie, and Lucy, and let them all ride in the Burley. Walking is much easier this way, even though three kids is a bit too much in that space. Cozy makes three in a burley Looking at Google Earth images the day before, we were intrigued by the butterfly pattern that you see below. The strange butterfly path pattern As we walke...
We walked down to the Saratoga Hot Springs tonight -- just Callie and Lucy, since Avery was sick at home. The trail to the hot spring is short, maybe half a mile. Beautiful walk, as you can see Utah lake and the mountains. We weren't sure if the hot spring was bathable water, but when we arrived, it was full of people, including a couple of hippies drinking beer. They called the tall grass elephant grass and joked about watching out for snakes...
The following is a guest post by Noz Urbina, organizer of the upcoming Congility conference, held May 24-26 in Gatwick, UK. We live in a multi-in, multi-out world. There are so many information pipelines running into, out and around the organisation these days that it's overwhelming companies the world over. The famous information overload is in stark contrast to an endless pressure to deliver excellent content — quickly and cost effe...
Robert Desprez has an interesting post on How Will Technical Writing Change in the Next Ten Years. Among a few predictions, he writes the following about tech comm's future for mobile: We'll all be preparing our online help for mobile devices. Smartphones and tablets are expected to start outselling computers in the near future. More and more people will be using these devices to work and will need technical assistance. I expect this is t...
Avery, Callie, Lucy and I drove into Cedar Fork, parked at the LDS Church, and walked over the cemetery. I'd heard that Cedar Fort has an old cemetery, and since I hadn't taken the kids to many cemeteries, I thought it would be a good idea. After walking about a mile, we reached the entrance of the cemetery. Cedar Fort seems to be an old town, one that never really saw a thriving day. No house is new, many are run-down, and the general absence...
Arnold Burian, founder of the new social network TechnicalWritingWorld.com The following is a guest post by Arnold Burian, founder of the new social network Technical Writing World. When it comes to knowledge sharing, we technical writers have it pretty darn good. There are active mailing lists (HATT, TECHRL-W), many informative blogs (I'd Rather Be Writing, The Content Wrangler), a vibrant notification system (#techcomm on Twitter), and...
It's been about 9 days since my last post, and yesterday my colleague leaned over and asked why I hadn't been posting -- was something wrong? He himself has been working on a novel, so he hasn't posted anything for a month. No, nothing is wrong. I always chuckle when I see blog posts in which people apologize for not posting on their blog, or when they provide reasons for their lack of blogging activity. I chuckle because it's like, hey, ...
If you want to be able to sort information by various classification schemes, such as by most popular, or by role, or by problem, your content has to be chunked in a granular enough way to facilitate the various means of sorting. Consider a work that is one large book, with no chunks at all. In that case, it would be impossible to sort anything, because you have just one object. With one object, the only pattern you can configure is itsel...
The following is a guest post by Marcia Johnston. Marcia lives in Portland, Oregon, at the intersection of Writing, User Experience, Information Architecture, and Content Strategy. She is the president of Marcia Riefer Johnston, Inc. Marcia Johnston They has gone singular. So have their, them, and themselves. We're assailed every day by sentences like these: “What's annoying to me isn't someone using their phone at the table, it's the ...
Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger In Everything is Miscellaneous, Dave Weinberger argues that classifications that we have imposed on most everything from the alphabet to the encyclopedia, planets, books, and knowledge ultimately represent our own beliefs and priorities. As time changes, we see how our own thinking at that time inclined us to organize the information that way. In reality, things in the world don't have suc...
