GuysBlog

So many companies have set up their incoming telephone lines with speech recognition options or button-pressing options. It can be very frustrating trying to reach a human. Now comes GetHuman, the “database” of magic codes that let you reach a live person. Let’s hope your bank, insurance company, credit company, and so on is listed here.

If it is not, and you get a voice recognition system on the line, swearing sometimes gets you to a human — even direct to Customer Relations. But if you are calling a medical facility, it just might get your call routed to the Psych Department.

STC offers two glossy magazines with membership: Intercom (ten issues per year) and the quarterly journal, Technical Communication. The former contains society news and announcements and articles about the profession, while the latter seems aimed at the academic community and also has an extensive set of reviews of a lot of topical publications.

Many folks I know who have been technical communicators for more than, say, seven years have said that they find much of what is in Intercom to be aimed more at the beginning technical communicators, and they find the content of “TechComm” too esoteric.

What sorts of articles do you read in other publications (or on the Web), aimed at the more “seasoned” technical communicator, that you’d like to see in our STC publications?

What sorts of topics should be covered? Should we have more theme-based issues, in which most of the articles are on a given topic area?

Should, perhaps, book reviews move to Intercom?

What other ideas for our periodicals come to mind?

Clay Shirky has a diverse background: art, drama, technology publishing, investing, education.  Recently, he presented "Ontology is Overrated" at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and "Folksonomies &
Tags: The rise of user-developed classification" at the Interactive
Multimedia Culture Expo in New York.  Subsequently, he published a very insightful consolidation of the two as "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags." He contrasts the original approach of Yahoo (top-down: categorize everything) with that of del.icio.us (bottom-up: tag everything). 

We create categories to help us to find things. Shirky points out that categorying schemes are by their nature transitory: the section of the Library of Congress scheme that used to be marked "Soviet Union" is now marked "Former Soviet Union.  There is no longer a political entity called Yugoslavia or East Germany. Where do books about them belong now?

Categories are connected with quantities and distinctions. Are there enough books about X to warrant giving X its own category? (Do we need another shelf?) Should a book about the history of film be filed under History or Film? (Which shelf should it be kept on?) Tags, plus the power of the computer and Internet, enable us to shift the decisions from the system to the users.  Long live metadata!

What’s the best book to learn Java?  Barnes & Noble’s book browser web site lists 846 Java programming books. Border’s Books & Music’s web site (through Amazon) reports 2455. 
Well, whatever the number, there’s a new edition of one of the best Java books out there: Head First Java, 2nd Edition.
It’s one of a growing family of "Head First" books. They are not your father’s learn-to-program books.  They attempt to reach your mind/memory through multiple channels, in order to (as the authors express it) "get past your brain’s crap filter."
Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra are masterminding this series, and they have a related weblog: Creating Passionate Users where they talk about the concepts, and the research behind them.  Their most recent two postings are about how the muse always comes late and who is in charge — you or your brain. Check it out! 
I’m picking up a copy of HFJ2 on my way home today.  I want to learn more about how to learn….

Metafilter is "a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to." Ask Metafilter is "a discussion area for sharing knowledge among members of MetaFilter."

Yesterday, a poster asked about an obscure poem seen ON A SCREEN IN AN ILLUSTRATION for an article about 3-D graphics in an Amiga computer magazine at least 12 years ago (he was not even sure which Amiga mag).  He recalled the (approximate) name of the author of the article as "Brad W. Schenk or someone similar", and hoped to find the text of the poem.

The first respondent to the posting (in just less than an hour, apparently) reported that she "went down the hallway on a whim to talk to the art director at the company where I work - whose name happens to be Bradley W. Schenck" …

The discussion is continuing, and another poster has turned up a list of what is in each issue of an Amiga magazine that had Brad W. Schenck as its Graphics columnist.

(Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.)

(more…)

The April-May issue of Sound Off, the newsletter of the Puget Sound chapter of STC, brings two articles that I found interesting:

Certification for technical communicators: The time is now — by Peggy Jacobson
and
Think weird and prosper — by Rahel Bailie.

Peggy opines that it is time (yea, past time) for STC to support certification for technical communicators. She cites other similar organizations that have done so. Why not STC?

Sure, there are lots of different kinds of TCs, but some skills are universal. Also, there can be a baseline certification and the speciality certifications, or some folks might get just the baseline, then a certification in the area of their primary audience, such as Oracle or Microsoft programming.

Rahel quotes from Tom Peters:

“The only way to effect true transformation in the workplace is to enlist the outliers in your organization to your cause. Find the weirdos and the freaks, offer support for the projects they’re secretly pursuing, then get them to help you with your own revolutionary change ideas.”

She recounts how she has used “weirdness” to differentiate herself as a technical communicator and even to defuse road rage.

I wonder how one might apply these two concepts together….

Thanks to Scott Abel, aka The Content Wrangler, for the tip about Peggy’s article which led me to discover Rahel’s.

A student from India posted on SlashDot about the state of US education and attitude.

I come here and notice that being smart or good is being made fun of - this, despite the fact that I’m in one of the US’s top engineering schools. The ones with the social life are the ones who show off or the ones who throw ball. Even here, being really smart or nerdy is looked down. People do not respect the need for some of us to be introverted and reclusive, and people are branded as obnoxious or stereotyped as nerds or geeks, most often in a derogatory manner.

Am I bitter? Absolutely.

I come from an environment where both my parents went to grad school, half the people in my family are PhDs and my uncle is a quantum physicist at CERN. When I was in middle and high school, I wanted to be a physicist or a mathematician. Social life was not an issue, it was always a given.

This is not just about his social life — it is an indictment of our society’s attitude towards technologists in general.

A signifcant number of comments follow the main item cited in Slashdot. Check it out.

If you are a Californian, do visit A Californian’s Conception of the Continental United States. I await the revelation of a New Yawker’s conception of same.

Thanks to Rebecca Blood for including this in her pocket.

CNN reports that people, as well as tech jobs are moving to India.

Robert Dunn first spotted the warning signals three years ago, after the dot-com bust.

That’s when his Las Vegas-based company, Creative Healthcare Solutions, which provides Internet technology services to healthcare clients, started seeing jobs being awarded to companies in India and China.

Instead of protesting against the offshoring of work that might have gone to U.S. firms like his, Dunn, 55, has decided to get in on the game.
…
“It’s important for Americans to collaborate more than they have been,” Dunn says. “It’s unfortunate that everyone has put a stake in the ground that outsourcing is totally bad or totally good. No one’s looking in the middle.”

Thomas Friedman writes from Bangalore to explain the “outsource computer jobs to India” phenomenon.

Nine years ago, as Japan was beating America’s brains out in the auto industry, I wrote a column about playing a computer geography game with my daughter, then 9 years old. I was trying to help her with a clue that clearly pointed to Detroit, so I asked her, “Where are cars made?” And she answered, “Japan.” Ouch.
…
So now I wonder: if I have a granddaughter one day, and I tell her I’m going to India, will she say, “Grandpa, is that where software comes from?”

He ends his tale with some good news and some bad news.