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?

Well, I guess the templating will have to wait. I want to eliminate the monthly charge for TypePad and just keep this thing on my own domain using WP for free.

In other news, I have been busy adding photos of my own high school class’s 45-year reunion to its website, and have added two of the three outstanding memory books to my wife’s high school class website.

The former is mostly my design, while the latter is mostly my wife’s design and uses a lot more CSS and PHP. Now I feel a strong urge to redesign MY class’s site as well. Sure, in what universe do I have that amount of time. I’m just about to be involved in a redesign of my STC chapter’s website as well.

Maybe I can get around to posting again, here in 2007. But first, I had best see about customizing this blog more or less as I had the old one.

My wife and two of her high school classmates decided in September that they need to orchestrate a 40-year reunion for the Covina High School class of 1968.  Their first step? A website.  But who gets to do that website?  hah.  So now, besides the websites for our church, my own graduating class, and my wife’s learning center, I have the new one to at least erect.  I find myself scanning almost 400 headshots from the yearbook. At least, I’m expanding my skills with CSS….

I have been getting at least one PayPal (or sometimes eBay) spoof/phish mail per day for some while.  I duly report them to spoof@<whichever>.com and always get a lengthy response assuring me that the mail was not from PayPal/eBay, and to be sure not to give out vital secrets. 

1. eBay/PayPal should offer an address to which to send these messages that accepts the info and pursues the senders, but does not give a mini-lecture in return.  It is a waste of electrons and bandwidth.
2. There should be a utility site to which one can forward such messages that will use the form and content to launch a massive load of phishy (invalid) responses to the site the phisherman wants us to trustingly populate with our passwords and account numbers. 

Google started making maps available at http://maps.google.com.  After a time, they added satellite images, enabling you to click a button to choose between a map or a satellite image of an area.  Just now, I happened to notice that they offer a third button: hybrid.  It superimposed names of streets, parks, and so forth on a satellite image.  Good Stuff!

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!

IBM is now encouraging its employees to use Mozilla Firefox as their browser, and also is encouraging them to blog [Thanks, Fred].