[Tip of the hat to Sarah O’Keefe, in Palimpsest.]
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?
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
[Not only journalism, but technical communication, I’d say.]
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can’t even describe, aren’t even aware of.
Ellen Goodman
[brought to my attention through Quotes of the Day]
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….
Tog (Bruce Tognazzini) is bugged. Tog is "is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group, the ‘dream team’ firm specializing in human-computer interaction." Before that, he was Lead Designer at Web MD, and before that was a hotshot, user-focussed engineer at Sun.
Until today, Tog had a list of 7 items labeled the "10 Most-Persistent Design Bugs." Today, he added the final 3 and reports many, many more on the main page of The BugHouse.
#10 appeals to me a lot. Tog calls it "Focus-stealing." Say I have three IM windows open and am typing in one of them. I click Enter and suddenly realize that at some point during my typing, another IM window suddenly grabbed the focus away, and I find I have sent part of a message intended for person A to person B. That can get downright embarassing.
In point of absolute fact, as I started this posting TypePad had not QUITE completed drawing its window, and when I had typed the first letter in the Title block, TypePad suddenly switched my focus to the Post Continuation block.
Do have a look at all 10, and the additional categories: Pandemic Bugs, Application Bugs, Websites & Browsers, OS-X, Window, Multiple OSs, Networks, Security Bugs, Hardware & Drivers, and Programming & Command Lines. Pack a lunch and some beverages — you might be there a long while.
[reposting with spelling correction]
An entry in Dan Gillmor’s blog brings my attention to this entry in Ed Foster’s Gripelog:
Diluted Documentation
Are
IT product vendors deliberately watering down the amount of information
they provide in their documentation? Not only do a growing number of
readers seem to think so, they have some interesting theories as to why
reading the feeble manual no longer does much good.
. . .
Many readers think the main reason for
shortchanging customers on the documentation is to give the vendor a
lucrative aftermarket.
. . .
Another reader, himself a technical editor, had a
somewhat different theory. "This is a by-product of the outsourcing
trend," he wrote.
[One of the comments in Dan’s blog also points us to an article from 1998: "The Death of Documentation."]
Speaking as a reformed software developer — one who spent some 17 years building software and now has spent over 22 years explaining (other) software — I have some other observations.
No wonder Silicon Valley area STC membership took a big drop in recent years.
According to an article by Scott Thurm in the Wall Street Journal of October 8, 2004,
More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and more than 40% experienced declining incomes over that period, according to a study on the impact of the tech bust.
The study, by the Sphere Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Burlingame, Calif., think tank, found that the fate of tech workers during the bust depended largely on whether they stayed employed at a tech firm. Those that did enjoyed rising incomes — up 11% after accounting for inflation. But workers who left tech for other industries saw their wages stagnate or decline. Those who shifted from semiconductor makers to health care, for example, made 31% less in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with the first quarter of 2000, after accounting for inflation.
…Nearly one-third of the tech workers in California in early 2000 weren’t even working in the state in 1995, and an additional quarter were working at nontech firms. Those who weren’t in tech in 1995 were more likely to leave the industry, or the state, after 2000, the study found
The full text of the article is behind the WSJ subscription wall, but was brought to my attention by a mailing list. A fairly simple Google search turned it up here.
The ITtoolbox charactrizes itself as the
IT Knowledge & Support Network
It has a weblogs section called ITtoolbox Blogs.
One of the features is IT Outsourcing: Special Coverage from the Front Line
The debate surrounding IT outsourcing is heating up. To help provide an in-depth, real-world view of the issues and impacts of this phenomenon, ITtoolbox Blogs is now featuring special coverage on offshoring, highlighting firsthand experiences and front line perspectives of ITtoolbox Blog authors from across the globe.
I’ll be reading this blog….
The ITtoolbox charactrizes itself as the
IT Knowledge & Support Network
It has a weblogs section called ITtoolbox Blogs.
One of the features is
IT Outsourcing: Special Coverage from the Front Line
The debate surrounding IT outsourcing is heating up. To help provide an in-depth, real-world view of the issues and impacts of this phenomenon, ITtoolbox Blogs is now featuring special coverage on offshoring, highlighting firsthand experiences and front line perspectives of ITtoolbox Blog authors from across the globe.
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.