Writer in the Thick of It

Merrimack Valley Then and Now

2012-01-24T19:44:00.000-05:00

We have our own weather in the Merrimack Valley, and Boston weathermen are always pointing that out when they predict snowfall amounts. At a recent event, while discussing the predicted pattern of the coming snow (which has come and gone by the time I write this), someone asked where I lived. I replied "In the Merrimack Valley." To my surprise, the person I was talking with had no idea where that was. At lunch the next day, a friend pointed out that many people in Boston/Cambridge really don't know much of Massachusetts geography outside of Metro Boston. That got me thinking about where the Merrimack Valley fits in with the Boston media's definition of Boston when they talk about Boston's loss of tech dominance to Silicon Valley.

Even the Megaboston proposal 100 years ago this month, going around the Twitterverse today, wouldn't have extended this far north. Of course, 100 years ago, cities like Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill were still important cities on their own. Maybe they weren't quite the world class cities they were in the 19th century, but they were definitely still on the map. There's a long and rich history of tech and innovation in the Merrimack Valley. So, completely serendipitously, I came across this video from the AT&T Archives about Western Electric Merrimack Valley Works (in North Andover), later known as AT&T Merrimack Valley Works, now known as Osgood Landing.

The video reminded me of Alexander Graham Bell's Haverhill connection. Bell's story is not just about technology but also about venture capital back in the day. Say what? Yup. Bell's principal financier for the telephone was Haverhill leather merchant Thomas S. Sanders. Bell, a specialist in teaching the deaf, was tutor to Sanders' son. Bell and Sanders became friends, and lots of Bell's telephone experiments actually happened in Haverhill. Sanders invested $110,000 in Bell's telephone. Sanders was one of the founders of Bell Telephone Company in 1877 along with Bell, Thomas Watson, and Gardiner Hubbard (Bell's soon to be father-in-law).

Haverhill claims that the first business telephone call was between Sanders' home on Kenoza Avenue and his sole cutting business on Merrimack Street. Haverhill was right up there with Boston (first phone call) and Cambridge (first long distance phone call). Nearby North Andover was at that time home to Davis & Furber, makers of textile machinery, and so home to many skilled machinists. With good reason the AT&T video treats the valley as a whole as a good place to build a huge tech complex.

Osgood Landing (formerly Merrimack Valley Works) in North Andover

The successors to Bell's telephone company continued to be a big presence in North Andover until well after the Merrimack Valley Works was built in the 1950s. With Alcatel-Lucent now gone, the building houses everything from laser optics to laser tag. The tradition of innovation in the Merrimack Valley goes back a long way and continues to this day.

The valley has gone through transitions from the textile and machine industrial economy, to the old-style tech economy, and into today's New Economy. To ease the transition to the New Economy, entrepreneur Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks, in the Merrimack Valley town of Chelmsford, founded the Merrimack Valley Sandbox to develop and enhance the innovation ecosystem in the cities of the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, including Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill.

In April, Mass Innovation Nights will be coming to Lowell, the very heart and soul of the Merrimack Valley. Boston/Cambridge innovators and entrepreneurs will be able to see for themselves exactly where the Merrimack Valley is.

#MIN34

2012-01-15T21:23:00.001-05:00

Welcome to MIN34

The innovators gathered for another Mass Innovation Night at IBM Waltham. This was the first MIN without BobbieC, so Tim Stansky was in charge of rounding up the innovators. Between Tim and Christine Sierra keeping things on track they proved that MIN is all grown up!

Things in the Hall of Innovation, the conference room, and the Experts Corner were all buzzing before 6:00 PM and the excitement ramped up quickly. With products ranging from mobile website development to used textbooks to bras and nutritional supplements, it was a challenge to take it all in. That's a big part of what makes MIN fun.

BlueTrain Mobile Team

The BlueTrain Mobile team not only did a great presentation, but also won the triple crown for the night: best team costume, best hat, and best prop. They kicked off their presentation with a train whistle and presented an excellent video. BlueTrain's Mobile Marketing Engine enables you to create professional and compelling mobile websites easily. They also work with customers to translate the design and personality of their desktop site into a better mobile experience. The team had fun posing with their train conductor hats and made their brand name memorable.

Kevin with Smooth 8

Smooth 8 showed off their liquid additive that reduces acidity in beverages. According to Kevin and Evita at their booth, a few drops of Smooth 8 in your drink not only enhances the taste, but helps your body maintain a proper PH balance by reducing the concentration of free radicals in the body and making antioxidants more available. This helps your body stay hydrated and healthy. They claim it even prevents hangovers. I didn't try it, but their table was getting plenty of traffic.

Catch App

CatchApp is a smart phone application that lets you create and manage location-based reminders. Not only does it remind you to pick up the salmon for dinner, but it tells you when you're close to a store that sells salmon. CatchApp is currently in Beta test, so you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available in the app store.

jog.fm

The jog.fm team had matching T-shirts and an interesting product. Running, power walking, cycling, or spinning jog.fm matches your workout music to your pace. It's a fitness app that gets you moving and keeps you moving.

Jess from Zyrra

It's about time somebody applied technology to getting a bra that fits! Zyrra does just that. Using 10 measurements and an innovative CAD system, Zyrra creates and sews bras for each individual consumer, no more 34 B or 44 DD - just size you! Whether it's at a bra party or on board the bra bus that comes to your work place, ten measurements and ten minutes to a great fit. Jess looked terrific and you can too.

Mike from GivingSomething

GivingSomething is the coolest way to give real goods to your favorite nonprofits. Whether it's litter boxes to the cat shelter or lacrosse nets to kids in Nicaragua, they get what they need and you know exactly how your money is being used. It's kind of like a bridal registry for non-profits. The best part is, there's no cost to the non-profit!

Crowd Ready for Presentations to Start

Hall of Innovation

Pat from Campus Libre

There was a good turn out with lots of newcomers. I even talked to somebody from New York. The presentations from BlueTrain Mobile, GivingSomething, Smooth 8, and CatchApp managed to be fun and get done within the 5 minute time allotment.

I almost managed to talk to every participating company. Besides those already mentioned, I chatted with NetCommissions, Campus Libre, and Jungle Torch.

Jerry and Igor from NetCommissions

The Experts Corner was busy with innovators consulting the experts as always. Tim Orazem from Boston SEO Experts agreed to pose for the traditional Expert Looking Expert shot.

Expert Looking Expert

Smile, It's #MIN33 !

2011-12-15T15:14:00.001-05:00

Wow, it's the last Mass Innovation Night of 2011 already! IBM Waltham did a great job of hosting again. The space is great and the people are great. Turnout was a little lighter than usual this time, what with Christmas shopping and the prediction of sleet north and west of Boston (which, by the way, still hasn't happened as of Thursday afternoon.), but it was an enthusiastic crowd with a lot of newcomers. The inimitable BobbieC was running around corralling the innovators and experts as attendees began filtering in.

Folks Checking In

Bobbie also did a great job of reminding people to smile and enjoy themselves. MIN is a fun time to connect with people. That's what it's all about.

Budibar

My first taste of a Budi Bar was very satisfying. Budi Bars are whole food for your brain. Full of good stuff like nuts and seeds, they nourish your mind/brain as well as your body and enhance memory. I asked if I could attain enlightenment by eating one. Budi Bars can help, but I still need to meditate. :-)
The Budi Bar kept me going from arrival until after the presentations, so I think it worked.

Team Cangrade

Great companies are made by great people. The team from Cangrade enlightened me on how to hire great people. They combine their social science, psychology, and tech skills to produce a pre-employment test that when combined with the public skill-test test marketplace cuts through the uncertainty in hiring. They made a good case for how their pre-employment evaluation is more predictive of job fit than the interview process alone. Also, they had matching jackets, so I hereby award them best costume of #MIN33.

Greenbean -- Recycle This Can!

The innovation I was still bubbling about when I got home was Greenbean, best recycling idea ever. Greenbean is a reverse vending machine that takes cans and bottles, credits your paypal or student card with your 5 cent deposit for each bottle or can recycled, and gives you an instant real time update showing the number of containers recycled and energy savings within seconds. This is a brilliant strategy to increase recycling rates by using gaming technology and social media. Colleges and student groups can challenge each other and compete in real time.

Greenbean's Beta machine has been on the MIT campus since the beginning of August and a machine is soon to be installed at Tufts. Tufts students will be able to compete against MIT in real time. Predictions of an epic recycling battle between MIT and Tufts were flying around the Twitter stream for #MIN33. I predict that MIT will win and they will be led by the DKE brothers. (Obligatory shout out to DKE whenever mentioning the Institute at the Center of the Universe. :-))

Team Mosaic

I was very impressed with Mosaic's online and offline storage solution for photographers. As a photographer, I know I generate enormous amounts of data (or digital assets). Serious pro photographers generate even more. Managing all this data is tough job that requires lots of hard drives (:-)). The Mosaic solution provides safe and accessible online storage, and helps manage data locally on multiple hard drives. Less time at the computer shuffling hard drives means more time out in the field taking pictures. It's nicely integrated with Lightroom and Aperture too. That's my kind of innovation!

Switch Gear

Switch Gear Interchangeable Jewelry is like LEGO for women who wear jewelry. These kits give you huge numbers of combinations so you can be the innovator in creating your look for the day. You can go from casual to dressy to hipster even when you're on the road being a power woman entrepreneur.

Crowd Already Tweeting before the Presentations Start!

I was having so much fun talking with Board Prospects and ASH that the presentations were about to start and I hadn't met everybody yet! As a veteran of non-profit boards, I appreciate what Board Prospects is up to. ASH's multidimensional approach to health and sustainability impressed me as well.

ASH

Presenting Board Prospects

After the presentations I caught up with MyMentorLink and Job Hunt Express and had another Budi Bar to keep the energy flowing.

MyMentorLink

JR from Job Hunt Express

Along the way, my At-Hand Apps colleague, Robert, and I had a chance to talk with a search engine optimization expert about our New England Day Trips At Hand app.

Robert Demoing New England Day Trips At Hand to Melki

The Experts Corner featured a wide array of expertise this month, including Chef Lam who seemingly can do anything food and event related. I couldn't catch up with him for a photo, though. The experts were all quite busy, as one would expect. I asked longtime Mass Innovation Nights supporter/expert, Nate Therrien, to pose for the traditional Expert Looking Expert closing photo. He promises to recycle that water bottle.

Expert Looking Expert: Nate Therrien

another great Mass Innovation Night -- #MIN32

2011-11-10T16:57:00.000-05:00

Our host for this month's Mass Innovation Night (#MIN32) was MassChallenge, the business competition and incubator, in the Boston Innovation District. CambridgeTrust was our sponsor for the evening and put on a good reception with crepes from Paris Creperie. To my delight, they were also handing out bags of Terroir Coffee. I reminisced with a couple of the Terroir Coffee people about the old days of the Coffee Connection and George Howell's collection of Huichol art. This was my first visit to the Boston Innovation District, which seems hip and cool with its location right next to the ICA.

The MassChallenge Space

The MassChallenge space afforded plenty of room for all the innovators showing off products. Our At-Hand Apps table was right inside the entrance to the space and next to the netBlazr folks and Confidence Beads.

Robert from At-Hand Apps Demonstrating New England Day Trips At Hand

Robert and I chatted with all kinds of people about New England Day Trips at Hand, including people who will never pay for a travel app, those who are already our buyers, software developers, and business development folks. In demonstrating the app, I had my own @Ha! moment of discovering a nearby Boston Fire Museum that I didn't know existed (they have an antique hand-pumper!)!

Brough and Brian from netBlazr

netBlazr helps businesses build cooperative networks that provide free and low-cost Internet broadband service to the co-op members with their specialized WiFi devices. Their customers refer to netBlazr as the Skype of broadband. This should help hasten the onset of ubiquitous broadband.

Confidence Beads

Confidence Beads makes cool inspirational jewelry that gives back to ovarian cancer and domestic violence charities. That is a cool business model - their non-profit partners help sell and win big at the same time. The beads are really beautiful.

Bindo

Bindo makes it easy for local neighborhood retailers to take advantage of the point of sale and back office technologies necessary for survival in today's competitive online marketplace. You can shop your favorite local stores all in one place and as easily as the huge online retailers plus get great service and crazy fast delivery.

Sharks Swimming Across SlideShark Table

SlideShark lets you reliably and professionally show or view your PowerPoint presentations on your iPad. How cool is that? Plus they had the best swag -- toy sharks.

There was so much to see and I had less time than usual because I was also demoing our app, but I managed to check out:

PAMSys from BioSensics, a tiny lightweight monitor that measures physical activity
ArtVenue, which makes it easy for artists to show and sell their work in local businesses (and had a painting with a scannable QR code)
HeyHeyGorgeous, a web service that helps you find hair salons in your city
Seacoast Butters, delicious flavored butters.
Smarterer, which helps you "show what you know" by testing and scoring you on digital, social and technical skills

Sam from BioSensics Showing me the PAMSys

ArtVenue

Tracey from Seacoast Butters

Ginger, Lime, Scallion Butter on Annarosa's Bread

Hey, Hey! Gorgeous

Smarterer

There were no teams with matching T-shirts or great hats at the event this time, but there were lots and lots of great people. The crepes were good too. And I came home with a toy shark, cool shades, and La Minita coffee from Terroir Coffee.

The Experts Corner was really more of an Experts Row this time. I got to chat with Joe Johnson from High Start Group and Daniel Kriegsman from Kriegsman & Kriegsman. Daniel agreed to pose for the traditional Expert Looking Expert shot. He looks quite expert.

Expert Looking Expert

Dennis Ritchie Day

2011-10-30T15:14:00.000-04:00

The power vested in Tim O'Reilly has decreed today Dennis Ritchie Day. C and UNIX is the underlying "stuff" that makes the modern world work. Slashdot's post makes the point that this is a reaction to the overreaction to Steve Jobs' death. However, if we only appreciate Dennis Ritchie in the light of comparing his contribution to that of Steve Jobs we're missing the point that much important work has gone unrecognized. Dennis and the Bell Labs folks built on the contribution of Ken Olsen who died earlier this year, and though his passing was acknowledged by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the media did not make nearly enough fuss about the depth of the change that DEC brought to the world. KO was a modest man. dmr was a modest man. Neither were showmen. Yet, we stand on their shoulders to this very day.

One of funniest moments of my life involved a reference to Dennis Ritchie. I was signing copies of Writing a UNIX Device Driver at a LUG meeting in Nebraska when someone said that meeting me was second only to meeting Dennis Ritchie. Given that I am not worthy to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Dennis Ritchie, I responded with stunned silence followed by nervous laughter. Fortunately, other attendees also laughed because Dennis Ritchie was such a modest man that he would not have enjoyed being lionized either. We all had a good laugh.

The Onyrix blog posted a wonderful picture of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson working at a PDP-11. That photo totally expresses what I just tried to say above about the link between the contributions of the Bell Labs folks and DEC.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

misleading technical writing in 1898

2011-10-17T14:17:00.000-04:00

I came across this article while perusing 19th century tech writing on Google Books. My favorite line is

"But the difference between the mistake of a competent writer, and the absurd effusions of one ignorant concerning his topic, is very marked."

Here's the whole article for your #techcomm amusement:

Misleading Technical Writing

The above is the caption of an opportune editorial in the American Machinist.
The writer quotes, for example, two answers to questions, taken from contemporaries, which are, he claims, misleading and absurd. He deplores, and rightly, too, the fact that publishers of technical journals will maintain departments without competent editors.

The position of the American Machinist is, of course, correct in this matter.

If only well-informed men were to read the writings of the would-be teacher of what he himself does not understand, little harm might follow, except the loss of the reader's time—and temper. But it is the uninformed that have the greatest need of the technical Journals' helpfulness, and, therefore, to be misinformed through this channel is, to such, a great misfortune, and an inexcusable outrage.

Of course, as the editor says, all writers will make mistakes; and, it may be added, they will also speedily correct them if they know how.

But the difference between the mistake of a competent writer, and the absurd effusions of one ignorant concerning his topic, is very marked.

It is the duty of the technical journal to teach the best practice, and for a publisher to be careless in this respect is dishonorable.

We have read articles on foundry practice, written by men who, of course, were strangers to the "sand-heap," whose only merit was that they afforded amusement to the knowing reader. These could be excused but for the fact that the unknowing must he misled.

Obviously, this evil is hard to combat; but it will be well to publish wide the fact that it exists, and so, wise publishers will therefore be on the alert to weed out the incompetent members of tbeir staff.

The Foundry, Volume 13 -- 1898

the Twitter feed is back

2011-10-17T14:05:00.000-04:00

After removing it because it didn't work with Internet Explorer, I have put the Twitter Updates feed back in again. I'll try to remember to start tweeting things as @eganwriter again to display them on this blog.

Launch (#MIN31 part 2)

2011-10-14T16:18:00.000-04:00

One of the highlights of #MIN31 was a tour of Launch@CenturySuites, a brand new shared office space at TradeCenter 128. I've been scouting out co-working spaces in anticipation of needing to move my freelance tech writing business out of my house, so have been keen to check out Launch.

MIN attendees checking out Launch

In a convergence of good luck and hard work, the rain held off for us to trek across the parking lot and the folks at Launch had all the finishing touches added just in time for Wednesday's event. The designer (in the orange sweater) pointed out features and told us which walls weren't there Tuesday night. We were impressed.

Everybody looking around

Launch offers a variety of month-to-month plans and prices, making it affordable for entrepreneurs and freelancers to get out of the house, get connected with like-minded people, and get their business to the next level. There are open desk plans, reserved desk plans, conference rooms by the hour, and day rates. The Launch website describes the options very well. Do check it out.

Desks and conference areas

All the important office amenities are available: fax, copying, WiFi, and coffee and shower access. They even have the same balloon alien that I have in my home office! Guess I won't need to bring mine with me.

Launch Reserved Desk Area

There's plenty of whiteboard space for brainstorming, several conference areas for meetings, storage lockers for premium customers, and access to a lobby and reception area. space can accommodate about 20 people. You can even get mail service for an additional fee.

Being at TradeCenter 128 is almost like being in a small city. There are places to eat, the obligatory Dunkies, dry cleaning, bank, medical offices, and access to public transportation. All that and close proximity to the global headquarters of Carlton PR and Marketing!

Another Successful Mass Innovation Night #MIN31

2011-10-13T15:37:00.001-04:00

Wow! A huge space, big screen, tablecloths, an excellent food spread, and a great atmosphere for Mass Innovation Night at Trade Center 128. Cummings did a great job hosting this month's event. I toured the new Launch co-working space at Century Suites too.

A Huge Space and a Huge Screen Await the Crowd - Note Percussion CM1 Table on the Right

It was an eclectic lineup of new products with mac n cheese, design-your-own shoes and bags, social media analytics, content management, kids' arch supports, and more. It's fun to see the diversity of entrepreneurship happening in Massachusetts these days. The size of the space made it easy to get around to everybody and check out their products. I always enjoy talking to people about their products, even if they're not techies. I love a good geeky talk about content management and love mac n cheese, but it's fascinating to talk to people about how fast kids outgrow their shoes, designing your own handbags and shoes, and the service economy too.

Sarah from Good Tastes <3 Mac & Cheese

Sarah from Good Tastes was handing out samples of awesome frozen mac n cheese. I tried the Brie & Fig and the Wild Mushroom and can't wait to get some more of the Brie & Fig.

Shoes and Handbags

Imagine designing your own shoes and bags. That's exactly what Open Runway lets you do. It is a "design your own fashion" platform where you can create and share your own made to order handbags and shoes.

Speaking of shoes, why is it that all the innovations in kids' sneakers are about bling and not about comfort? Kids need comfort too. Arch Angels® are the first children’s comfort insole on the market designed specifically to meet the needs of active children’s feet.

Arch Angels

The four presenters were:

The crowd packed the space for the presentations, some even watching from the stairs or upstairs in the Experts Corner.

The Crowd

It's about time somebody came up with a tool to help you use Twitter to reach the audience you want. Terametric Optimizer for Twitter does just that, integrates real-time analysis with guidance on what to tweet, when to tweet it, and whom to target on message. They also had nice swag, with T-shirts and hats. Since this wasn't a Cambridge event, they weren't actually wearing the T-shirts, but I'll award them best costume anyway because nobody was doing the matching shirt thing this time.

Terametric

There are a ton of Content Management products out there, but small to medium enterprises are still spending too much on 3rd party services firms to roll out and update their online presence. Percussion CM1 returns the power of content management to the content owner with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Marketers can manage just about every component of their site without a whole lot of web expertise. The folks from Percussion were fun to talk to and had good swag, with yo-yos and pens and stuff in bright orange. One thing I have observed at MIN and other events is that geeks love orange. I don't know why, but they do.

The Experts Corner was upstairs and the experts were looking expert as always.

Experts Looking Expert

What if drawing a sophisticated diagram online were as intuitive as drawing it on a piece of paper or a white board? Grafpad is a web app for creating legible diagrams online that combines the simplicity of drawing your concept/idea on paper with the power of applications like Visio. It uses image recognition to let you draw by hand instead of fiddling with complex menus. You don't need a manual and training to draw your idea on a napkin. The app is essentially a smart napkin. Those who remember how much of computing technology was designed on napkins can't help but appreciate the simplicity of Grafpad.

Grafpad

It was great meeting Leo from VKW Virtual Knowledge Workers, trying out Ravid's simple video messaging application, and chatting with Jon from Splitwise too. I had so much fun at #MIN31 that it won't all fit in one blog post! Stay tuned to this space for more on my tour of Launch and more on virtual knowledge workers.

Leo from VKW

Splitwise

Ravid

Networking at MIN31

the consultation of many works of reference

2011-10-05T17:27:00.001-04:00

Nobody at all conversant with the subject requires to be told that any technical writing needs the consultation of many works of reference, as indeed does the general work of a Botanic Garden.

-- Botany bulletin By Queensland. Dept. of Agriculture and Stock 1897

another 19th century #techcomm quote

2011-10-05T17:17:00.000-04:00

Technical subjects don't admit of much sentiment, and technical writers do best who deal only with matters of fact. Any attempt to wrap technical writing in ambiguous language, detracts from its usefulness and lessens its value; it was truly written :—

"Of writing well, these are the chiefest springs. To know the nature, and the use of things"

From The Journal of the Society of Estate Clerks of Works, Volumes 6-7 By Society of Estate Clerks of Works, London -- 1893

small data and root cause analysis

2011-09-29T15:24:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it's not the "big data" that you need to solve the problem at hand. Sometimes you need small, focused, local data and a whole lot of smarts about the analysis.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away, I was responsible for corporate quality. Metrics were popular at the time, but they were somewhat abstracted from the nitty gritty of actual customer problems. Well, we had a very unhappy customer. "Wicked unhappy" as we say in the depths of New England. They kept telling us our system was buggy and unreliable. Everybody thought it was a bunch of different software problems. Engineering and support management fixated on responding to bug reports quickly as they came in. Timely fixes are good for sure, but there seemed to be something else going on.

I collected the raw data, that is, all the bug reports we'd gotten from that customer. I assembled the multitudes (support, quality, software engineering, hardware engineering). I drew a bunch of buckets on the whiteboard and we categorized each one according to the root cause. Sometimes we had to do a root cause analysis to determine which bucket it belonged in. Surprisingly, many seemingly unrelated bug reports stemmed from the same root cause. We counted how many were in each bucket. Suddenly we knew where to look.

The numbers pointed to an area we hadn't considered to be an issue: the disk-mirroring hardware. Digging a little deeper into the data, there seemed to be a correlation with a particular supplier and with systems built during a certain window of time. Turns out we'd gotten a batch of defective controllers from our supplier. Their testing hadn't caught it, nor had our hardware testing. The problem only showed up when running the complex software on top of it all.

Hardware replaced. Customer satisfied. Lesson learned. Sometimes data is just what you need to lead you in the direction of the cause.

what if girls who like math could cure breast cancer?

2011-09-16T14:54:00.000-04:00

What if instead of buying t-shirts about being too pretty to do homework or being allergic to algebra, our best and brightest young women took on the challenge of fighting breast cancer?

Seeing Tweets and Facebook posts about the absurd t-shirts and then seeing Tweets from a former co-worker about the "healthymagination" open innovation challenge to fund promising ideas to improve breast cancer diagnostics just announced by GE knocked me upside the head with a huge "Aha!" The challenge was launched in collaboration with venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, Mohr Davidow and MPM Capital. The effort will focus on data in partnership with O’Reilly Media. The magic word "data" sprang off the screen at me. Data science, as folks call working with these huge data sets nowadays, is math! Data analytics is math! Yes. Math!

What if we valued girls who like math? Not only can girls do math, but they also have a vested interest in improving breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. What if girls who like math are part of the solution?

With Data Science growing in importance and asking the big questions, it's about time the popular culture embraced girls (and boys too) who like math. Math can make a difference. Let's do something with all this "big data". We just might find some answers to those big questions.

What if girls who like math could be the cure?

#MIN30 Wrap Up

2011-09-15T21:08:00.001-04:00

Our hosts: SCVNGR

Yes folks, it's that time again already, Mass Innovation Night number 30! Thanks to our hosts at SCVNGR, we had an excellent space with lots of nooks and crannies. Every time I turned a corner, there were new products.
As usual, I tried to check out every product. That was a challenge this time, what with the number of products and the nooks and crannies, so I did miss a couple.


HeyWire

I had a nice chat with HeyWire about the difficulties of staying connected to my brother in the Emirates. Free worldwide texting is definitely appealing. SMS to Twitter is also a great idea. HeyWire does a great job of bringing all these communication options together. I also liked how they worked H E Y into their QR code.

Vsnap

Speaking of communication, it was great to meet Twitter acquaintance @trishofthetrade from Vsnap, the cool platform for sharing short video messages. I love the idea of being able to attach items to the video -- gives way more context.

Repeat Receipt

The folks from Repeat Receipt not only have a great marketing/promotion idea to help merchants increase repeat business and give rewards to consumers but also bright orange T-shirts. They win best costume for #MIN30. There's no best hat award this time as nobody was wearing a hat. Oh, and best prop goes to the Chinese gong that Bobbie used to get the attention of the attendees.

Revotas

Who knew there was still room for innovation in email marketing? Revotas offers a marketing platform that brings together email, social media, mobile, and web channels and delivers analytics-driven and personalized customer communications across all of them.

Water My Blog

I enjoyed talking with Water My Blog about how their network of writers creates optimized blog posts specifically designed for your company and your industry. It's a nifty content-driven way to do SEO.

Experts Corner

The Experts Corner was buzzing with entrepreneurs seeking all kinds of expert advice. I think the placement of the food at the far end of the Experts Corner drove a lot of traffic to the experts too.

College Golf Pass

I passed on the chance to try out my putting skills, but did very much enjoy talking with College Golf Pass. Their discount program for Massachusetts college students helps improve the game for college students and supports the local golf community. One of my brothers is a golfer and back in the day he could've used such a program to afford more time on the course.

Brian demonstrating Comparz

Comparz was off in one of those nooks and crannies I mentioned, but I did get to check out their application for in-depth user reviews and rankings of services for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) -- kind of like Yelp for B2B.

I don't think I got a picture of VizConnect, who were sharing a conference room with Comparz.

Century Suites

I made it a priority to talk to Century Suites about co-working space in the palatial Trade Center executive offices. It would be awesome to get out of my house if I can afford it. Turns out they do offer co-working space, called Launch. Of course, the way things are going I'll have a run of clients who want me to work on-site all the time and I won't need an office. I took a flyer with the Launch info. We shall see. Anyway, I think I drove past that building on 128 at least 5 times in the past 3 days.

Yottaa Presentation & Crowded Table

My favorite of the four presenters was Yottaa. They make websites faster. It's amazing what latency can cost you and it's great to see a cloud-based service that addresses performance in a meaningful way.

Client Types

Client Types identifies key behaviors of customer buying style and predicts customer response for sales, marketing and customer retention. This behavioral data allows businesses to create more targeted campaigns. directs you how to improve the interaction to close more sales, improve marketing response or retain more customers. Know your audience as I always say. BTW, the types have cool animal names like Social Lion. I turned out to be a Helpful Penguin. Oddly appropriate since I love penguins and traveled to Antarctica to see them.

As is traditional, I'll close with an "Expert Looking Expert" shot.

Expert Looking Expert

another 19th century #techcomm quote

2011-09-13T21:49:00.000-04:00

Sometimes your documentation is unintentionally a marketing tool.

"A WELL KNOWN TECHNICAL WRITER of this city was recently asked his opinion of a certain make of machine-tools, and his answer was so unfavorable, and accompanied by such unnecessary detraction, that the querist was surprised, and thought he had better see for himself. He did so, and the result was that he bought $3,000 worth of tools; but our disparaging friend received no commission therefor, and is remembered by the machine makers—to whom the report was given—not as one who loves his fellow-men. Moral.—$300 is too much to pay for the pleasure of slandering manufacturers."

The Engineer: with which is incorporated Steam engineering, Volumes 7-8 1884

19th century tech writing quote for the day

2011-09-07T16:41:00.000-04:00

I would have every technical writer able to paraphrase himself in the vernacular; I would counsel him frequently to come down from his scaffolding, and place himself on the level of a common-sensed, right-minded man.

-- Nicholas Patrick Wiseman , The Dublin Review: Volume 71, 1872

empty cities?

2011-09-07T14:46:00.000-04:00

A former co-worker posted a link to this discussion about the Amazon vs. California sales tax dispute, which raises some excellent points about how the loss of sales tax revenue has far reaching effects on state and local governments and their services and some equally excellent points about the impact of online commerce on local businesses. One of the examples the author chose to illustrate the loss of local businesses was his surprise at the the fact that no new business has yet moved in to the location of the old Wordsworth bookstore in Harvard Square after all these years.

Maybe a bookstore is not the best example because people, myself included, have an emotional attachment to bookstores. However, the example did bring to mind this segment of Studio 360 that I heard awhile back: Do We Still Need Bookstores? In it, Clay Shirky mentioned how now that we can buy everything -- not just books -- online, there will be much less street level commerce. While I'm all over the idea of retooling bookstores as non-profit cultural institutions, I don't see that working as a model for all street level commerce. Will cities become places where all we can do is eat in restaurants and drink in bars? Will the arts have a place in these cities?

The same Studio 360 show also had a segment on how the NEA has decided there are too many small theater companies. This got me imagining cities devoid of arts venues as well as bookstores. So many cities are trying to refocus themselves either as arts destinations or tourist destinations these days, but is that the answer? There's only so much art that people can buy. There's only so much tourist kitsch that people can buy.

Are we facing a future of empty cities?

don't forget your audience

2011-09-02T16:33:00.000-04:00

... it is not enough that the subject-matter be clear to the writer, it should be so expressed as to be clear to the particular readers addressed.

Engineering education: Volume 7 - Page 321
American Society for Engineering Education - 1916

expert technical writer

2011-09-02T16:30:00.000-04:00

This marks the difference between the expert technical writer and the amateur. "ACCURACY— TERSENESS— ACCURACY."

From Bulletin of the Technical and Engineering Society: Volumes 4-5 - Page 163

Colorado School of Mines. Technical and Engineering Society - 1908

learning a subject

2011-09-02T16:17:00.000-04:00

No man learns so much from the writing of a book as the author himself. It has been well said that if you wish to learn a subject, write a book on it.

Thomas Arthur Rickard — A Guide to Technical Writing — 1910

analytics vs. the real world part 3: PeerIndex

2011-09-01T14:23:00.002-04:00

Components

Next up in the social media analytics analysis is PeerIndex. PeerIndex is supposed to measure social capital using three components: activity, audience and authority. It measures each of these components individually, then creates a composite score. It gives you a ranking based on the composite score. It also provides a diagram of your "topic fingerprint."

I think they've added components since I ran this, but the site is down today so I'll go with what I've got.

Audience measures how people respond to your posts. It's not just how many followers you have but how many people pay attention to what you're saying. Basically this reduces the effect of being followed by spam bots. They also claim it accounts for the relative size of your audience compared to the rest of the community.

Activity measures the amount of relevant content posted about a topic area. Basically this accounts for the people who stop paying attention to you because you tweet too much or too little about the topic of interest to a given community. This is also a community-relative score. So if you're party of a highly active community around a topic, you'll need a higher level of activity to score higher.

Topic Fingerprint

Authority measures reliability and trust. That's basically how much your followers can rely on your recommendations and opinions on a given topic. They calculate authority around eight benchmark topics. These topics are also shown in the topic fingerprint diagram.

The benchmark topics are (clockwise from top of the diagram):
AME - arts, media and entertainment
TEC - technology and the Internet
SCI - science and the environment
MED - health and medical
LIF - leisure and lifestyle
SPO - sports
POL - news, politics and society
BIZ - finance, business and economics

With all that said, I really don't know what to make of my scores. The biggest surprise to me is my topic footprint. I would have expected more authority in science and environment, given that I tweet about piping plovers and beach ecology a lot of the time. Technology and business seem about right. I can't remember ever tweeting about politics, so have no idea how I got any footprint in there at all. As for arts, media, and entertainment, unless they count soup as entertainment, that one's a mystery too.

So what does all this tell me about the real world in which I write technical documentation, develop New England day trip travel content, and talk to people about piping plovers?

Certainly in the piping plover sphere, I have way more influence when I'm standing on the beach with the USFWS logo on my hat and shirt and talk to people one on one about how cute piping plovers are and what we're doing to save them and why people should pay attention to laws and regulations. The three-year-olds that I'm telling not to disturb the baby birds are not following my tweets, nor for the most part are their parents. Maybe one or two of the striper fishermen are, for news purposes.

As far as New England day trips, I don't tweet much about what I'm doing with New England Day Trips at Hand. What would I tweet about it that would increase my credibility as a travel writer/content developer/photographer?

As for technical communications, since it's a relative score, much of what I have to say about how to do #techcomm, has already been said a thousand and one times. Again, much, if not all, of my influence is and has been live and in person in the workplace. Getting the same level of street cred in the social media sphere as I've had in the real world is going to take awhile. Meanwhile, I've got stuff to do, places to be, and people to see.

Mass Innovation Night Foodie Edition #MIN29

2011-08-11T16:22:00.002-04:00

Banana from Edible Arrangements

It's not every day that you meet a guy in a banana suit at IBM. This must be the annual foodie edition of Mass Innovation Night. Edible Arrangements is promoting their new tropical collection and they did it up with lots of tasty samples and great costumes. I loved the coconut-coated banana.
Edible Arrangements wins the best prop award this time for their fruit costumes. Aris wins best hat again, of course. Aris' hats are becoming a regular feature. Aris was chatting with Lisa from IBM when I ran into him. IBM Waltham did another great job hosting. They even led off the presentations with a video about sequencing the cocoa genome. Big thank you to IBM.

Aris and his hat with Lisa from our host, IBM Waltham

The four chosen presenters were:

Brew1 Single-serve Coffee Brewing System - great tasting coffee, recyclable capsules.
Local Pickins - online guide to all things fresh, local and edible in the ever expanding local foods marketplace.
Evocatus - a community for discovering, sharing, and combining new tastes.
Smiling Sauce - unique, whimsical cooking sauces and condiments.

The crowd filtering in. By the time the presentations started it was SRO.

I enjoyed talking with Adam from Evocatus about combining tastes and Caleb's presentation zeroed right in on how to cut thru the web clutter of opinions on food and beverages.

Adam from Evocatus

The condiment queens from Smiling Sauces presented "the next condiment." Zing is a healthy hot sauce, spicy, whimsical and local. I fell in love with it at first bite: the flavors that jumped out at me were cilantro and jalapeno with tomatillo underneath. I immediately imagined adding Zing to egg salad.

Condiment Queens from Smiling Sauces

Brew1 is taking on Keurig with a single serve coffee machine. I tasted the Peruvian Dark Roast and agree that they have it all over K-cups on taste. And the capsules are recyclable! I can see this as a great system for office coffee.

Brew1 brews up a delicious cup of coffee

I also managed to check out:

Perfect Fuel Chocolate - Endurance Chocolate, dark chocolate fortified with ginseng to fuel triathletes and runners.
Chococoa Baking -- delicious whoopie pies from Newburyport.
Foodies of New England Magazine - a new magazine covering the New England food scene.
Absolute One Home Drinking Water Filter - innovative water filter for your tap water.

Perfect Fuel's Endurance Chocolate is delicious. I'm partial to dark chocolate and this is plenty dark.

Perfect Fuel

Chococoa Baking's vanilla cream Whoopie pie is awesome.

Julie from Chococoa

Foodies of New England Magazine was handing out free copies of their first issue. I enjoyed talking with them about the challenges of photographing food. I hope they visit my favorite North Andover restaurant, Good Day Cafe, soon.

Foodies of New England

Absolute One Water Filter

The turnout for this event was amazing. The place was packed. I didn't get to talk with folks from every one of the 10 products, but enjoyed the ones I did talk with. The Experts Corner was buzzing with entrepreneurs consulting the experts. Jeff Cutler agreed to pose for the traditional Experts Looking Expert shot.

Experts Corner includes Robert Gray from At Hand Apps consulting Jeff Cutler

Expert Looking Expert

analytics vs. the real world part 2: Social Mention

2011-08-03T15:22:00.000-04:00

Next up in the experiment with social media analysis tools is Social Mention, a wide-ranging tool that identifies where and how often your brand is mentioned in social media. Options let you choose which media to search, such as blogs, microblogs, video, etc. I selected "All" and ran the search on my name "Janet Egan" with the quote marks.

My name is very common and there are at least two Janet Egans with stronger brand identity than mine: the fashion designer and the novelist. For that matter, there are a bunch of Janet Egans who go to my eye doctor, order things from Baker Books, or are listed in the local phone book. Therefore, I was expecting the designer and the novelist to be mentioned more than I am.

I was not expecting the first three mentions to be All My Children. Oddly, there is no Egan attached to the Janet in the All My Children videos. In fact, Egan doesn't even occur on the page where it is allegedly mentioned in two of the references. The quotation marks evidently don't limit the search to the exact phrase.

I tried it again from the Advanced Search page, specifying "this exact wording or phrase". Same results.

Some of the remaining results were relevant, some not.
Relevant:

A bunch of references to a Janet Egan Frisard whose Navy father's remains had been found after 45 years.
4 references to the fashion designer
5 references to me
2 references to the novelist who wrote The Keep

Irrelevant:

3 references to Janet Jackson
1 reference to a French vampire
2 references to videos of Shakespeare plays that do mention either a Janet or an Egan but not both

All in all, Social Mention didn't give me much more insight into my online brand than I already had. The only interesting insight is that neither the novelist nor the fashion designer are doing much better than I am at advancing the Janet Egan brand.

analytics vs. the real world

2011-07-28T14:46:00.000-04:00

Most of the buzz I hear about measuring online influence is a bout Klout. Folks are always tweeting about their Klout scores or blogging about how to increase your Klout score. So, is that the only measure of how you or your brand are doing online? A little poking around on the Intertoobz revealed that there are tons of tools for measuring just about every aspect of your online presence.
I came across this post from Newburyport's Ari Herzog: How Tools Measure your Internet Life. He leads off with Heardable, which I'd never heard of until today. It analyzes your domain along many dimensions and does comparisons with industry leaders, generates a cool graphic of your network of influencers, gives you a brand health score, and ranks your domain. Pretty cool.

Alas, my ye-olde-fashioned web site that I've had since 1996 (or was in '95) on the world's oldest Internet Service Provider (remember ISPs) caused Heardable to become non-responsive. So for my experiment, I did the next best thing. I had it analyze redsox.com. I find it fascinating that the redsox.com brand is losing momentum even though the team is in first place in the AL East, 3 games ahead of the industry leading Yankees. Yes, the Yankees have the industry leading brand, but the Red Sox lead the division. As I write this, the Phillies have the best record in Major League Baseball at .631. The Phillies came in with a lower Heardable score than the Red Sox: Phillies 634, Red Sox 704. Oddly, Heardable compared the Phillies with CBS News rather than the Yankees. I never knew CBS News was an industry leader in MLB.

So, assuming you consider MLB to exist in the real world, what do the analytics tell us about the real world? How does brand strength correlate with winning percentage? What puts people in the seats? What sells branded merch? Why isn't Bill James analyzing this? Hmm, there's an opportunity here for melding sabermetrics with web analytics.

what's with all these infographics?

2011-06-22T15:35:00.000-04:00

Infographics are popping up like mushrooms. They attempt to illuminate everything from how many people are really using social media to the Bruins' bar tab at Foxwoods. Why so many infographics lately? Are we really learning anything from them?

I used postpost to find all the links to infographics in my Twitter stream. I should probably do an infographic of infographic tweets according to who tweeted them or what they were about. Yeah, an infographic about infographics ... OK, just spent about half an hour going over the links that postpost uncovered and the only topics that had more than one infographic about them besides infographics themselves were social media, the Bruins bar tab, and Foursquare. I can't even begin to conceive of how to represent that in an infographic.

For the most part, they don't really communicate very much to me. I'm a fairly visual person. I love to take photographs. I often think in pictures. I can often figure out how something mechanical works by looking at it. Why am I having trouble understanding these infographics? Let me count the ways.

Appearance

Some of them look like ransom notes with so many different fonts that I can't focus on the content through the jumble. Some of them have bizarre low contrast color schemes-- paler blue on pale blue is really hard to read on my laptop screen. All of them are hard to read on my mobile device.

Reliance on Text

If they're supposed to be visual representations of quantitative information, why are so many of them crammed with text? I don't think that's what Edward Tufte had in mind in any of his works on graphics in technical communication. By the way, none of the ones I looked at had any "alt=" text for anything except the title. My visually impaired partner would have a heck of a time using a screen reader on them. I mean if you're going to make stuff inaccessible to the visually impaired, why bother including text in the first place?

Get to the Point

Most of them had so much stuff crammed into them that I couldn't figure out what the main point of the graphic was. What exactly is my takeaway supposed to be? A picture can be worth 10,000 words if you have the right picture, but if the viewer is left scratching her head about what the picture is supposed to be, it doesn't communicate much.

Context, Lack Of

Where does the data come from? Why are you comparing apples and peaches when the question was about strawberries? Or was it about strawberries? More context on what questions the graphic is trying to answer, data acquisition methodology, data analysis methodology, and who the intended audience is would certainly help.

Darn. I've barely skimmed the surface and this post has gotten too long already. I feel other posts on the subject building up.

all about #MIN27

2011-06-09T13:45:00.000-04:00

this way

Westward ho! This month's Mass Innovation Night was at CCR LLP in Westborough, easy to find, plenty of parking, and a huge training room set up for us.

the check-in desk

BetterScape snagged the best location for getting attention right as people entered the training room. I totally love the concept: a Facebook game to reward your friends for good deeds in real life -- making the world a better place. An idea whose time has come. I chatted with the guys about how in the late Jurassic when I was a young programmer, people gave each other rides to work when their cars were in the shop and fed their cats when they had to be away on business trips. Using the ginormous amount of time people spend on Facebook to bring back that kind of behavior can payoff in a better world for everybody, even if it isn't much of a business model.

Aris in his innovative hat talking with Casey from BetterScape

Aris made sure I took a picture of the wonderful food. Folks should give Aris a BetterScape badge for wearing his chef hat to the event. The food spread in the Experts Corner had loads of fruit, vegetables, and cheeses. Just the thing for a hot summer night.

innovators like fruit

Bedford Stem Cell Research had the most attention-getting graphic display for their PVSA Post-Vasectomy Semen Analysis mail in test kit. They have a solution for a problem I did not know existed.

Bedford Stem Cell Research - PVSA

I checked out PostPost. They were wearing matching red t-shirts and talking about social search -- explaining how to filter the Twitter stream. I award them second prize for costume (Aris gets first prize for his hat.) This is a great idea! There are so many times when I want to go back in time to find something I saw in my Twitter stream or catch up on what everybody has been saying about a particular topic. It's "content curation" for the Twitter stream. Even if you think that Twitter is only about what your friends had for breakfast, PostPost can help you find historical content about those breakfasts. I have already started using it.

PostPost

On the other side of the room, I chatted with iPresentOnline about their cool tool for adding social aspects to elearning and online training courses. I think the #techcomm crowd might find this useful.

iPresentOnline

I chatted with Rob from TourSphere about his extremely cool mobile app generator for museums and cultural attractions. It makes it really easy for institutions to develop platform-independent mobile tours. This seems like an opportunity for cooperation and mutual benefit for our New England Day Trips At Hand app. I gave Rob a brief demo of our app on my iTouch. We could get people to the attractions and the apps they build with TourSphere could take people around the attractions. By the way, the nearest attraction to CCR is Ashland State Park. Wish I'd brought a fishing pole and a picnic.

Rob from TourSphere presenting

I was impressed with the turnout in way out in I-495 land, especially on a night with the Bruins in the fight for the Stanley Cup and the Red Sox playing the Yankees. The Bruins game did give the presenters a strong incentive for keeping to their 5 minute times slots so everybody could catch the puck drop. BetterScape badges to all for that!

the crowd is building

I saw people tweeting up a storm fast and furious, though it was hard to tweet at the speed of the presenters.

standing room

TemplateZone's Facebook page builder demo was the hit of the night. He created, edited, and posted a professional-looking Facebook page with 12 seconds to spare on his 5 minute presentation. Spontaneous applause broke out!

TemplateZone building a Facebook page in less than 5 minutes

The Experts Corner was well-stocked with experts. Jeff from CCR LLP took a break from giving accounting expertise to pose for the traditional "experts looking expert" shot.

expert looking expert

"technical writer"

2011-06-07T16:16:00.000-04:00

Google Ngram for Technical Writer

Since the prevailing opinion in the #techcomm blogosphere seems to be that those of us who have been called technical writers for the past 35 years or so will not be called technical writers in 10 years, I got to wondering how far back the term goes, when usage peaked, and when the current decline began. Therefore, I ran a Google Ngram search on the term "technical writer". The Google Books corpus only includes works up to the year 2008, so the recent changes in terminology aren't captured, but we can get a little insight from past usage.

The little blip in 1806 is a bunch of references in various articles to the same passage in Knight's Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste about Homer's Iliad. While not strictly about a technical writer in the modern sense, the list of subjects for such a writer does sort of overlap with what we think of as technical.

The author of the Iliad has described every thing, in which error or inaccuracy might be detected, either by experience, or demonstration. The structure of the human body ; the effects of wounds ; the symptoms of death ; the actions and manners of wild beasts ; the relative situations of cities and countries ; and the influence of winds and tempests upon the waters of the sea, are all described with a precision, which, not only no other poet, but scarcely any technical writer upon the the respective subjects of anatomy, hunting, geography and navigation has ever attained.

The earliest use I could find of the term in the sense of writing about technology is from a brief book review in The British Architect from 1882. I like that the reviewer comments on how clear and precise it is. Clarity and precision are still good things to have in content.

No engineering draughtsman or foreman should be without a little work entitled "Details of Machinery" (Crosby Lockwood & Co., 3s.), which Mr. Francis Campin has just written, and which forms an entirely new addition to Weale's Series. It is a wonder a work exactly of this kind has not appeared before; it is here now, however, from a careful technical writer, and will much enrich the invaluable series amongst which it is published. The intelligent appreciation of what is required from the details of machinery is a most important matter, and it is only by the acquirement of sound knowledge of this kind that the able draughtsman or machinist is made. Mr. Campin's writing is clear and precise, and the engravings well chosen; throughout the author has adhered strictly to simple arithmetic, not having used even a plus or minus sign, or any of the calculations, which are illustrated by examples worked out in full.

As you can see from the graph, use of the term technical writer peaked in 1961, declined a bit, then started to rise again in the mid-1970s, continuing to rise with ups and downs to a new peak in 2000, though slightly lower than the 1961 peak. Interestingly, a 1958 article in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication asks the question "What Can the Technical Writer of the Past Teach the Technical Writer of Today?" The same article also makes a distinction between the role of technical writer and technical editor. A 1957 issue of The Writer, a journal for writers mentions "a comparatively new job category, this profession of technical writer. The greatest boost came during the war..." Ads for technical writer as a job category seem to have begun to appear between 1953 and 1958 in such magazines as New Scientist and The Manager.

The peak in 1961 marks the appearance of handbooks for technical writers, books about technical writing, and style manuals. There are lots of journal articles with "technical writer" in the title or abstract, many bunched up between the beginning of 1960 and the end of 1962. (I could spend days going through them all, but I'm doing a blog post here, not a PhD dissertation.) Handbooks, style guides, and "how to become a technical writer" books continue to be common in the corpus well into the 1990s. References to technical writing for the computer industry start showing up in the mid-1970s.

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century seem to have pretty much the same kinds of books and articles, with the addition of books about how to turn your creative writing expertise into money as a technical writer and referring to technical writing as a prospective career for teens in the arts . One book, How to Become a Technical Writer: You Can Earn a Great Living as a Writer Now! from 2001 tells us "If you can write clear, concise instructions, then you can be a technical writer." Hmm, that was pretty much still true in 2001.

The slope of the decline after the peak in 2000 starts to get steeper around 2006. My scan of the literature didn't turn up much change in the types of books and articles except that novels start to appear in the mix, most notably R.J.R. Rockwood's The Last Ant: Elegy for a Technical Writer in 2007. Other novels have technical writers as characters but don't deal directly with the decline of the American computer/software industry. Even Rockwood's novel seems to deal more with the place of the individual in the corporation than with the end of technical writing as a such.

I can't find any pointers to what was going on in the literature between 2008 and 2011 because the data ends in 2008. It will be interesting to see what the literature about technical writing looks like in 2021, assuming Google continues to add new data to the corpus.

It's hard to conclude anything about the future of techncial writing from this stroll through the past. However, I will continue to call myself a technical writer.

LinkedIn Connection Timeline

2011-05-26T14:15:00.000-04:00

I checked out the new LinkedIn tool for visualizing one's career over time. Results are here:

LinkedIn Connection Timeline

Insights I gained from this:

I need to convince my Hungarian dendrologist friends that they need to be on LinkedIn, although I'm not sure they do. They are very well-connected within their own circles.
LinkedIn shows people I overlapped with in grad school, even though I did not know them in grad school, because they were at the same university at the same time.
Although I have connections to my current clients, they don't show up in the timeline because they don't work for Janet Egan Technical Writing. I'm not sure how to fix that.
I'm not sure what this visualization is useful for. What problem is it trying to solve?

museum of printing

2011-05-25T14:20:00.000-04:00

As part of the content development process for New England Day Trips At Hand, I visited The Museum of Printing in North Andover on Friday.

The Museum of Printing

The museum tells the story of producing printed documents starting with hand-set individual foundry type and ranging through mechanized hot-metal typesetting, offset printing, and computerized photo typesetters, where Massachusetts high-tech companies played a dominant role. The Merrimack Valley was actually a hotbed of innovation in computer typesetting at one point. Who knew?

an early press

There were lots of artifacts of 30+ year old computer technology related to typesetting. I didn't know I'd see one of those old removable disk packs in a museum of printing. This one holds about 300MB. The micro-SD card in my phone holds more than 6 of these giant things. I told the guide and the other visitors a story of lugging an RP06 pack the length and depth of The Mill one night when I had standalone time on a marketing machine in the fishbowl, when I was trying to reproduce a bug. Imagine carrying one of these things up and down 5 flights of stairs.

disk drive and removable disk pack

I posted some of these pictures on Facebook and got lots of comments from tech writer colleagues who remembered the print days. That's when it dawned on me that back then content development was separate from production, kind of like the division between writing and information architecture in the DITA model -- a schism, so to speak, sort of similar to the schism mentioned in Sarah O'Keefe's predictions for 2011 back in January.

linotype

Interestingly enough, the museum had a copy of QuarkExpress in the old cardboard box with the old Quark logo, but they didn't have FrameMaker or (gasp, shudder) Interleaf. Given that FrameMaker is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, you'd think it would be a museum piece by now.

With the smart phone projected to be the primary means of content delivery real soon now, it will be interesting to see if content development and content delivery become two separate specialties like writing and printing were in the olden days.

More Points on Technical Writing (humor)

2011-05-23T17:37:00.000-04:00

Looking for early references to technical writing and technical writers, I found this advice on how to develop a technical writer in an article written in 1920 by R. S. Mcbride in Engineering and mining journal, Volume 11 by American Institute of Mining Engineers. I particularly like the advice to "obscure your meaning, and you will become famous."

During the course of a dinner at which the members of the Bureau of Mines staff gathered recently, John L. Cochrane, the director of the Bureau's publicity division, was asked to discuss the following topic: "If you had the power to develop a writer of technical matter, what course would you adopt?" A portion of Mr. Cochrane's reply is as follows:

First of all I would catch him young and feed him on alphabetical crackers to insure that he became a man of letters. Then I would give him a careful diet of raw bull to strengthen his nerve—the one most essential thing to technical writing.

I would teach him that the other man in the same line of work is always wrong: can't possibly ever be right. (You could prove that through the fact that he indulges in technical writing.) I would attempt to teach him that clearness is fatal to any technical writer. I would drill into him daily, "Kid, obscure your meaning, and you will become famous." Then it will give you a convenient loophole to escape if you ever have to. If anyone attacks you then you can very easily call him '"another," because in reality you, yourself, if honest with yourself, as you sometimes should be, do not quite know what you mean yourself. In that way, you'll have it on him, even though he won't know. Anyway, conscience is sometimes convenient, even to a technical man.

If you want to throw a few additional smoke screens into the article, which is always desirable, puncture it with stars, asterisks, crosses and other mysterious marks, the harder to understand the better. Then have a number of footnotes that correspond, but mean nothing. Be sure that you refer as authority to some society that you defy him to find out anything about, such as "Flannigan in the May, 1852, proceedings of Erin-go-Bragh." Make it as difficult as possible for your reader to follow; that's genius.

And here is some advice that ought to be italicized: If you disagree with another author and want to pillorize him before your technical disciple (you really care about nobody else) put in an extra footnote and refer to him as the authority for something you know is wrong. If done naively, it has the effect of T.N.T. The ordinary effort of the layman in such matters is childish in comparison.

Always quarrel with your scientific brother in a dignified manner. Begin with, "May I have the honor to explain." The beauty about such open, gentlemanly controversy is that you may quite as often be as near right or as near wrong as the other fellow. I stress this, because I feel it is an important accomplishment in technical writing. How fully equipped is a technical writer who can tell a man he is a damn fool in language that leaves him flattered!

Then by all means, if you are a Government technical employee, have at least three or four other technical employees read critically your manuscript before it is ready for the printed page. The beauty here lies in the fact that when they get through with it all such annoying superfluities as personality of the author have disappeared. Don't bother about the lack of capabilities of those who read the manuscript. The chances are that unconsciously they may improve it, as in the case of the hitherto homely person who developed into a handsome man after a horse had stepped on his face. And during this process of critique, if you ever wince when they put the hot iron into your soul, you will never make a technical writer, and therefore there may be some hope for you.

And please remember as a technical writer that nothing is ever perfect. If you are in a great art gallery and the simple-minded folk are admiring the Venus de Milo in their crude, enthusiastic way, remember your training and take issue with the work. Suggest that it is not true to nature because it does not have one or two warts on the feet. Point out that there are no varicose veins on the leg.

I almost forgot to say that brevity, being the soul of wit, has no place in a technical article.

If the dream child that I have instructed (and he is no synthetic kid) can follow me, it may be said of him with apologies to Kipling "Then you'll be a man, my son; you'll be a man."

mass innovation night #MIN26

2011-05-17T17:30:00.000-04:00

The 26th Mass Innovation Night was another great time with lots of interesting people and products. I made the rounds of as many demo tables as possible,talking with 77Sparx and GaggleAMP about how marketing strategies, choosing colors for custom earbuds, and rehydrating with Biba.

The buzz at the tables just beginning

Doing a little research for the upcoming launch of our New England Day Trips at Hand app from At-Hand Apps, John and I chatted with 77Sparx, makers of educational mobile games for young children and toddlers about their marketing strategy, and checked out how GaggleAMP, social media amplification, might help us get our message out.

John of At Hand Apps talking with 77Sparx about their marketing strategy

77Sparx table in the Hall of Innovation

GaggleAMP

I ran into Sean from Biba Beverages, the ultra hydration soft drink, who still looks an awful lot like one of my cousins, and met one of his investors.

Biba Beverages Investor

The Presenters

Presenters were:

CustomBuds -- Customizable headphones with up to 425,000,000 color combinations. That's a lot of colors. They're young and socially conscious. Impressive.
ViaClix – Make TVs smarter, the Internet more relevant, and the whole thing more interactive.
GaggleAMP -- Amplifying your social media message by engaging your social network and the networks of all of your stakeholders.
Ripplefunction -- Getting the word out about events and putting people in the seats, again using your social network and the networks of your friends.

ItsmyURLs, online presence in a barcode, not only has a great concept but also had the best t-shirts.

It was quite a night for age diversity with 16-year old entrepreneurs presenting and retired executives from SCORE offering their experience in the Experts Corner. The folks from the local SCORE chapter obligingly posed for my "experts looking expert" shot.

Experts Looking Expert

the future is now

2011-05-09T15:00:00.000-04:00

Started this post several days ago with this paragraph:

At the coffee shop I'm hanging out at this afternoon, a rap song on the sound system tells me some things change and some things stay the same. It also tells me this is Africa, but I'm pretty sure I'm in downtown Lowell. Anyway, change and lack of change are with us all the time wherever we are. Why do somethings change and others not? What's this got to do with technical communication? Well, you guessed it, in techcomm some things change and some things remain the same.

Was about to abandon it yet again when I noticed that some of the links being tweeted around today are from 2006 and 2008. Given that the world of #techcomm and social media changes every twenty minutes, what is up with recirculating stories from 3 or 5 years ago? I guess some things really do remain the same.

Computer Programming: Ten Skills Needed for Success from 2008 tackles the subject of learning new programming languages. With the exception of "top down thinking" and possibly "ability to read specifications" the list of skills pretty much still applies in 2011.

Technical writing: the new black gold of India from 2006 makes note of the boom in technical writing in India. How much has the tech writing field grown in India in the last 5 years? How much of that has been at the expense of tech writing jobs in the USA? Well, it's certainly still booming, still growing, according to Larry Kunz's blog post about the recent STC India Summit. It's hard to tell whether the boom in Indian techcomm is affecting the availability of tech writing jobs in the USA. Depending on which blogs or listserves I read, techcomm in the northeast corner of the USA is either going to hell in a handbasket, already deader than a door nail, or just fine thank you. The same sources seem to regard techcomm in Silicon Valley, Research Triangle, and everywhere but here as still going strong in terms of number of jobs, but stuck in the mud as far as tools and media.

So what's a tech writer to do? Learn Drupal? Become a master of Facebook and Twitter? Move to India? Move to Silicon Valley? Learn Joomla? Take up UX design? Set the way back machine to 1968? We will always need to learn knew skills and languages. We may need to move more often to follow the jobs. The main point is:

The future is now. We are here now. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

lefty loosey, righty tightie

2011-04-27T17:46:00.000-04:00

Visual Thesaurus
Visualization for "counterclockwise"

I grew up hearing the expression "left loosey, righty tightie" referring to threads on a screw, nut, bolt, etc. To tighten, you turn to the right (clockwise). To loosen, you turn toward the left (counterclockwise). So, if I'm writing instructions for, say, removing a field replaceable unit from a chassis, do I tell the reader to turn the screw to the left or counterclockwise? But which way is left? Which way is counterclockwise?

Ever since I read stories about the Beloit Mindset List for the class of 2014 showing that students don't use watches to tell the time, I've wondered about how to communicate the direction "counterclockwise" to young people if they have never seen an analog clock. Maybe the Beloit freshmen have seen clocks, even if they don't wear watches, but sooner or later, clockwise and counterclockwise are going to become meaningless terms.

Then recently, I heard an episode of Radio Lab that dealt with knowing where you are. One of the speakers referred to some indigenous tribes that say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right. They supposedly have a great sense of spatial orientation. The Wall Street Journal mentioned one of those tribes in an article on how language affects the way we think. So would I tell a member of the class of 2014 to turn the screw to the west? Probably only if they belonged to one of those tribes. I'm betting the students are even less likely to know which way is west, than they are to know which way is counterclockwise.

Maybe the best way to tell a reader which direction to turn something to unscrew it is to draw a picture with an arrow pointing the correct direction.

North Shore Web Geeks Meetup

2011-04-22T14:27:00.000-04:00

The Port Tavern in Newburyport was jumpin' last night with the monthly North Shore Web Geeks meetup and some hockey game :-) on the big TV. Thanks to the Port Tavern for handling the geekage in addition to the Bruins v. Canadiens playoff game and a power outage in part of the building. Because the power outage affected the function room, we crowded into the space at the top of the stairs outside the function room to hear Adam Darowski and Joe Oliviera talk about Sass.

Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets

Some folks did sit in the darkened area, with many jokes about running the Zippo Lighter app on everybody's iPhones and yelling "Freebird". Real candles worked a bit better :-)

Candlepower

Speaking of geekage, I think this is the first time I've heard the phrase "Turing complete" since I was a compiler developer in the late Jurassic age of computing. That warmed the cockles of my heart. I see a post about the difference between a markup language and a programming language in the future of this blog. :-) For that matter, why is my heart full of mollusks anyway? :-) Another blog post topic.

The crowd begins to gather.

The turnout was pretty good, around 25 people. I saw many of the people I met last time, and met a few new ones. Also found out there's a Drupal meetup coming up in two weeks at the Port Tavern. I don't use Drupal, but it keeps coming up in so many opportunities, that I keep thinking I should add it to my repertoire. Remember the days when you could call yourself a webmaster when you knew HTML?

Pre-presentation Strategizing

Presenters Adam Darowski and Joe Oliviera

Adam and Joe did a great job of tag-teaming the presentation and covering all the important advantages of Sass for those of us still using plain old CSS. The slides are up on slideshare.com, so I'm not going to summarize them here. Suffice it to say that Sass looks like a big improvement to this old CSS hack.

Mingling and networking and Bruins overtime victory over Montreal completed the night. (Yeah, techie geeks can care about hockey. I have a signed photo of Bobby Orr over my desk -- which may reveal a little about my age as well as working class origins :-)).

writer's block or something like it

2011-04-21T17:00:00.000-04:00

I've attempted three different posts for this blog today. Each time, I froze. The topics were,

infographics that are hard to read, never mind understand
correlation vs. causation
millennials reading Milton's Paradise Lost

The thing holding me back is the same for all of them. How is this relevant to 21st century technical communication right now and in the future? You're all wondering how Milton even got into the mix, but let's start with infographics.

Why write about infographics? In the past few weeks I've come across several infographics were hard to read, either because they used a blurry white font on a pastel background or the graphic was so dense and cluttered it was hard to understand. Some of them would have made their point much more easily as text in a table. In fact, I noticed comments to that effect on some of them. So what's blocking me from writing about infographics? I'm not a graphic designer. I have nothing to add to the experts' conversation about what makes a good infographic. I'm not the demographic for infographics anyway, so it doesn't matter what I think about how well they communicate information to me.

Why write about correlation vs. causation? As I click around the Innertoobz/Interwebz I encounter more and more stories, blog posts, and so on, citing all kinds of weird statistical correlations. They make for good headlines, like the one from OKCupid that found that people who use Twitter every day have shorter relationships than people who don’t. OK, I majored in math. I know how to lie with statistics. I also know that correlation is not causation. Some of the articles about the OKCupid study made that point. Many did not. So what's blocking me from writing about that? Hasn't it all already been said? And to little or no effect?

Why write about kids reading Milton? I overheard a conversation among a group of teenagers at a coffee shop the other day that got me thinking about how different real kids are from the way media portrays them. The media would have us see these digital natives as one big tech savvy monolith who would rather text each other than talk to each other. I sat next to those kids for 2 hours and not once did I see any of them look at a cellphone, smart phone, or any other device. I, on the other hand, had my laptop on the table and was attempting to work on a book project. Anyway, the kids were talking about required reading in their schools and how boring and unchallenging it was, except for one girl who attended a different school from the others. She talked about how much she got out of reading Paradise Lost and how challenging it was. The other kids were fascinated. So what's blocking me from writing about this? Well, maybe I just said all I needed to say. Then, there is the fact that I'm not a kid. And getting back to statistics, this was only 4 kids, not a statistically valid sample, just an anecdote. Maybe they're the only 4 kids in town who want challenging reading and don't need to text each other when they're at the same table. Who knows?

Well, there, now I've written all I needed to about those three topics and not one word about session border controllers, managing multiple site trees, or hazardous materials data sheets. Now it is time to go to the North Shore Web Geeks event to shake myself out of this writer's block thing that's preventing me from getting the book done, finishing my help project, and designing the darn database.

Mass Innovation Night #MIN25

2011-04-14T15:05:00.000-04:00

It was a dark and stormy night ... :-)

April showers were out in full force, but the innovation community packed the house at Continuum and Videolink's facilities in Newton for Mass Innovation Night number 25. The space was amazing. The place was mobbed! Shout out to Continuum and Videolink for sharing it with all these great innovators. Tours were wildly popular and fascinating.

The crowd starts to gather.

Innovators as far as the eye can see.

The focus this month was on things rather than apps. There seemed to be a sub theme of bicycles and bicycle technology going on too, which struck me as very appropriate for West Newton, the home of Harris Cyclery (almost as important to my childhood as the West Newton branch library).

Once again, I didn't get to check out every single exhibitor, but I caught most of them. Products ranged from carpets and shoes to bags for your pooch's poop and everything in between. Some of the ones that made an impression on me:

Carpet Workroom makes custom area rugs out of remnants. I love their focus on customer involvement as well as reuse of materials and good old-fashioned workmanship.

Carpet Workroom

Heyday Footwear makes "bling for your feet", shiny cool shoes. High-tops are already cool, but these are even cooler. I look forward to when they offer women's sizes.

Heyday Footwear

Parachute Dog makes a biodegradable dog waste bag kit. Cleaning up after your pooch without perpetuating the immortal plastic bags is a definite benefit to society.

Parachute Dog

Our old friends from Memory on Hand were selling their USB flash drive bracelets. See my review of their useful and trendy product here.

The four presenters had folks looking up to them in the unique presentation space on the stairwell. Loved the improvised screen. Mass Innovators are a creative bunch!

Looking up at the presentations.

The product that knocked my socks off (what does that mean anyway? I've never seen anybody's socks literally knocked off. :-)) was the Leveraged Freedom Chair designed by Continuum in partnership with MIT to bring a wheelchair to people with disabilities globally. Conventional wheelchairs are not well suited for the rough roads and long distances encountered by the disabled in developing countries. The Leveraged Freedom chair combines the technology of a bicycle drive train with levers to create a nifty leveraged drive train that makes it possible for users to travel faster than they can on conventional wheelchairs, whether they're on pavement or off-road. And they've done all this while keeping the manufacturing cost to $100! Very impressive.

Leveraged Freedom Chair

The surprise hit of the night was Mouthwatchers with their antibacterial nano-silver toothbrush with patented flossing bristles. Who knew you could build a better toothbrush? Traffic at their table was brisk throughout the evening.

Mouthwatchers

Videolink's ReadyCam 2.0 remotely-controlled broadcast quality video solution meets its goals: bring down the cost, do broadcast quality, and do it on demand. This ain't your laptop webcast.

Videolink's ReadyCam 2.0

New England Bike Expo is an event designed to bring together people who love bicycles and alternative transportation, and folks looking to learn about the vibrant bicycle industry here in New England. They'll have tons of bikes and bike related stuff at Arts at the Armory Somerville, May 7-8. Nice to see the bicycling culture that was so vibrant here so many decades ago surging to the forefront again.

Turner Business Services
Note paper content delivery devices on the shelves in the background.

Memories in an Instant

The Experts Corner was a happening place too, with Memories in an Instant taking "social media ready" photos, office furniture from new MIN sponsor, Turnstone, and lots of people consulting Turner Business Services. I got Leaf Legal to pose for my traditional experts looking expert shot. They tried to look very expert.

Leaf Legal

Those readers who've seen lots of my photography know that I love red brick, and there was plenty of that. It was even labled.

Brick Walls

mobile madness on the north shore

2011-03-25T14:41:00.000-04:00

Ever on the lookout for an opportunity to interact with humans instead of my laptop, I've been meaning to check out the North Shore Web Geeks monthly meetup for a few months now. What better way to spend a snowy evening in March? After all, 'tis the season for March Madness. In this case, March Mobile Madness!

the crowd networking before the talk

The group met at The Port Tavern in Newburyport (right next door to Taffy's -- great NBPT breakfast spot). Working from home, I don't often meet others of my kind, so the first thing that struck me was "these are my people."

The crowd was about evenly divided along male/female lines -- more like the real techie world than the media's image of the techie world. Yes folks, there is a world in which both men and women wear Drupal T-shirts :-) The age breakdown seemed to be mostly Gen X with many Millennials and one or two Boomers. Not that I asked people their ages, I guessed by appearance so it's possible that the few I thought were Booomers were actually Xers who had lived hard. :-)

techie conversation was buzzing

It was great to hear what people are working on and share thoughts about the challenges of developing content for mobile.

The turnout was excellent. Who knew that there was so much "web" development going on in Essex and Rockingham (NH)counties?

It was challenging to photograph the event in a crowded and dark room, even with my semi-decent camera. When I mentioned this to one of attendees who was taking photos with her iPhone, she told me that a reporter from the Boston Globe attended the last meetup and had a professional photographer with the right camera gear. Later, I checked out the article online, but there were no pix. I did notice that the Globe article also commented on the gender balance. Guess it must be newsworthy.

Dan Katcher about to begin his talk

Dan Katcher of Rocket Farm Studios gave a talk titled Why You Should Give a $@#%! about Mobile. So why should you give a bleep about mobile? It's the second coming of the web. I love the term "second coming" instead of Web 3.0. (Sorry Tim, but major versioning of the web ends at 2.0). BTW, I loved being able to discuss such things with people who know the difference between the Internet and the Web.

Look at that spike in Android handset sales!

Dan's slides were packed with excellent infographics covering nine different statistics about trends in mobile devices, OSes, and apps. A few specific things really struck me.

Thing 1: Android share of mobile OS is just shooting up like crazy. Symbian declining, Blackberry peaking. Dan predicted: "Android will pass Symbian in 2014."

This infographic really brought home the dramatic increase in Android sales.

growth in mobile data consumption

Thing 2: Mobile data consumption is growing and growing and it's mostly video with a small amount of VoIP.

The purple in the infographic is video.

This dovetails nicely with the statistic that actual phone calls are only about 32% of what people use mobile handsets for. I wish someone would compare mobile use of VoIP with non-mobile VoIP, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.

Digression: I've always wondered why the Pew study of Internet and American Life Generations 2010 apparently didn't even ask about VoIP usage as a thing consumers do with the Internet.

I like it when I am full of questions when a presentation ends. The group moved downstairs to the main bar area for the questions, networking, discussion etc., but alas, I had to leave early and did not get to schmooze as much as I wanted to.

Mass Innovation Night at NERD (#MIN24)

2011-03-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

Microsoft NERD was crazy busy last night with Mass Innovation Night overlapping with Xconomy Mobile Madness. Wow, that was a huge crowd. I didn't get to talk with all of the innovators this time, but I did get to chat with VoKnow, Touchbase, Hello Ladies, and Luminaire Coffee. And then there were the mini-whoopie pies from The Chococoa Bakery. I loved the espresso-filled one.

Crowd enjoying the food

Mini whoopie pies

Another cool feature of this month's event was that all the exhibitors had QR codes on their booths, which automatically sent out a tweet. Alas, I don't have a smartphone yet and my iPod Touch doesn't have a camera, so I wasn't able to try it out.

Conversation Media talking about Touchbase -- with cool megaphone

Conversation Media had the best prop, a megaphone. Their TouchBase family geo-location service helps parents know where their children are and involves the kids in improving family communication too.

Luminaire Coffee demonstrating their coffee brewer to @Krushtown from Blogcastr

Coffee lover that I am, I had a great time tasting fresh-brewed coffee and talking with Luminaire Coffee about their technology for delivering hot water for coffee at just the the right temperature and flow rate. This is the perfect solution for those new "pour-over" coffee bars trying to compete with Starbucks' Clover machine. Luminaire had the second best prop, an old fashioned tea kettle -- their biggest competitor in the hot water space. And I ran into @Krushtown from Blogcastr at the Luminaire booth. You can check out his live blog from #MIN24 here. He got a good picture of the Luminaire machine.

#MIN24 came right on the heels of International Women's Day, so it was great to see Hello Ladies there. I had a great conversation with Liz about Women's History Month, women's salaries, and feminisim. In the immortal words from Bread and Roses "The rising of the women means the rising of us all".

VoKnow

With the presentations about to start, I didn't have much time to chat with the guys from VoKnow about their personalized real-time audio magazine, but I did manage to get a photo. Fortunately, they were one of the presenters, so I got the skinny from the presentation. This is definitely wicked cool.

Crowd listening to the presentations

Other presentations I enjoyed were Mobinett's Plug interactive mobile networking platform for linking online social networking to the real face to face world and Chipalizer functional verification software for semiconductors.

In the Experts Corner, I connected with Anna Goldsmith from The Hired Pens, Amy Hafensteiner from Winter Wyman, and, of course, Christine Sierra from Carlton PR and Marketing. Amy and Christine posed for my traditional "Experts Looking Expert" shot.

Experts looking expert

As if all that weren't enough, I ran into former co-worker Kevin Wiant of Spar Networks who was there for Xconomy Mobile Madness. We had a great time catching each other up on our respective corners of the telecom world and news of other former Boston Technology colleagues. It was great to connect with Kevin again.

But wait, there's more. The feminist theme re-emerged while talking with Dianne Williams, mobile educator, techie geek, feminist, and archaeologist. We talked and talked about what it takes to engage young women in engineering and science, how things are now for women vs. how they were when we were growing up, what's cool about geeking out over engineering and taking stuff apart to see how it works, and so on. Dianne told me about a documentary she saw on International Women's Day, Left on Pearl. That's now on my must see list.

Quite a night.

Note to self: attend more events that feature both mini whoopie pies and feminists. :-)

part two: spring cleaning your facebook profile

2011-03-07T16:13:00.000-05:00

When selecting a tool to help you clean up your Facebook profile, it might help to know what prospective employers are looking for and how the tool can help with that. As I described in part one, the socioclean tool scanned text for words it deems inappropriate such as references to sex, alcohol/drugs, aggression, and profanity.

The Careerbuilder.com survey listed the following as reasons that the 18% of employers who hired someone based on their profile used:

Profile provided a good feel for the candidate's personality and fit within the organization
Profile supported candidate's professional qualifications
Candidate was creative
Candidate showed solid communication skills
Candidate was well-rounded
Other people posted good references about the candidate
Candidate received awards and accolades

They also listed the following as reasons that the 35% of employers who said the candidate's profile caused them not to hire him/her used:

Candidate posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information
Candidate posted content about them drinking or using drugs
Candidate bad-mouthed their previous employer, co-workers or clients
Candidate showed poor communication skills
Candidate made discriminatory comments
Candidate lied about qualifications
Candidate shared confidential information from previous employer

Of the negative criteria listed, the socioclean tool definitely targets drinking and drugs, can find discriminatory references if you use racial epithets, and might be able to find bad-mouthing of previous employers if you used profanity or aggressive words. You'll have to police your photographs, your communication skills, and your violations of confidentiality/non-compete agreements yourself.

The positive criteria are more abstract. A tool can't scan for how well your profile presents your personality, your communication skills, or well-roundedness.

The main thing I gleaned from the list of positives, was that employers are looking on Facebook for things that are usually posted on LinkedIn. The action I took on this point was simple, and not aided by a tool (although maybe I should develop one for this). I added my employment history to my Facebook profile and made sure it matched my LinkedIn profile. My LinkedIn profile supports the professional qualifications I list on my resume. The Facebook profile doesn't really have a section for recommendations and references or for awards and accolades. I'm not sure where the employers found that information, unless those were the minority who looked on LinkedIn.

blue sky

2011-03-05T14:29:00.000-05:00

blue sky over Lowell

part 1: spring cleaning your facebook profile?

2011-03-02T15:53:00.000-05:00

Forty-five percent of employers reported in a 2009 Harris Interactive survey for CareerBuilder that they use social networking sites to research job candidates, with Facebook edging out LinkedIn as the number one social networking site that they check. Ever since those results came out back in August of 2009, there have been many blog posts, presentations, advice columns, and so on advising you to watch what you post, clean up your profile, and cultivate your personal brand. This has also led to a boom in new apps for scrubbing your online reputation. The latest one getting buzz on Mashable.com is socioclean.

My Facebook privacy settings are all set to Friends Only, but with all the advice swirling around us about what things to say or not say on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs many people have gotten quite anxious, including me. Therefore, I signed up with socioclean and ran the app over my Facebook profile recently.

I am very cautious with my postings on Facebook, lately even avoiding references to being sick or tired, never mind sex, drugs, or rock and roll. OK, so I do mention rock and roll once in a great while. Anyway, those who know me in real life know that I don't smoke or drink and am in a long term committed relationship with my partner. I'm pretty boring that way. You probably wouldn't want to invite me to your wild parties. Imagine my surprise when socioclean found stuff that it claimed I needed to clean up.

The tool basically scans wall posts, status messages, photos, and groups for words they deem inappropriate. There is no semantic analysis. If the word appears, it's flagged regardless of context. The results are displayed as a pie chart showing areas of concern and bar charts showing the count of searched words in each category. Clicking on the bar chart gets you to the report showing each searched word that showed up, the complete text, the date, the category, and who created it along with a link to view the offending post. Then you have an option to set the tool to ignore either the word or the instance of the word. Therefore, if something is OK in context, you click ignore instance.

So, the cause of my surprise? Every one of my posts about the Moby Dick marathon reading was tagged as a sexual reference, giving me a percentage of sexual references that earned me a grade of D. If that wasn't humorous enough, a post about the workers removing the ice dam on my roof making banging noises was also tagged sexual and a reference to a glue gun was tagged as aggression. Funniest of all, though, was the puzzling tagging of two references to an article about a night heron rookery in the ornithological journal The Auk as alcohol/drug references. Why? The author was named Waldo Bailey. By the time I excluded every reference to Moby Dick, a few references to airplanes and fishing boats, the glue gun reference, and a friend's comment that a photo was too damn cute, I was left with one genuine alcohol reference to be removed: a tweet about a presentation on locally brewed beers that I heard at Ignite Boston. Hmm, the tool knew enough to exclude Ignite as an aggression reference but not glue gun? Anyway, I deleted the post about the beer presentation, and ran the tool again. I got an A. Clean as a Whistle.

Overall, I don't think the tool was that helpful. I did just as much work reviewing posts as I would have if I had just gone over all my posts manually. The number of false alarms was irritating. I'm still scratching my head about Waldo Bailey. There are a lot of people named Bailey who are not famous Irish beverages.

Semantic issues aside, there are still problems with this tool. It does not take into account your privacy settings, so it sees everything. Therefore, it does not give you a true picture of what an employer or prospective employer would see, assuming Facebook's privacy settings actually work. Socioclean pitches it as a tool that you can use to police yourself. However, what if an employer had your Facebook password? That's not so far-fetched given the recent stories about government agencies requesting prospective employees to turn over their Facebook passwords. If the prospective employer runs the tool and only looks at the graphs, you could lose out on a job because you read Moby Dick or articles by ornithologists named Bailey.

Maybe the real question is not about how offensive your Facebook profile is, but how not to let the constraints of a Puritanical culture in the age of Facebook's philosophy of radical openness stifle genuine human expression.

Why National Engineers Week Matters

2011-02-23T19:11:00.000-05:00

It's National Engineers Week. This year's Honorary Chair is William H. Swanson, Raytheon Chairman and CEO. The Raytheon video for National Engineers Week honors engineering innovation and also highlights the MathMovesU project. The Raytheon website has lots more info about what they're doing this week and about MathMovesU. Check it out here. The week also includes the national Future City Competition.

This week also kicks off the national Real World Design Challenge. The team from Newburyport, with support from my favorite historic airport, won the Massachusetts state title last year and went to Washington for the finals. These kids do real engineering, in teams, to solve real problems.

Encouraging kids, boys and girls alike, to look at engineer as a cool and rewarding career path is one of the best things we can do to spur innovation. The kids participating in the Future City Competition and the Real World Design Challenge today are innovators who are going to be boosting the economy soon. We should pay more attention to them.

report from the field

2011-02-22T16:59:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in the coffee shop with my laptop attempting to write this afternoon. The Internet service at my house has been abysmally slow since Saturday's extreme winds. Besides that, while I'm working at home, all my undone chores gang up on me and distract me from the wonderful world of session-based voice (and media) communication. So after a solid hour or so of writing, I look up from my laptop screen and see 4 people reading paper books (3 paperback, 1 hardcover) and one guy reading an iPad screen. No Kindles. No Nooks. To further confound my impressions of the whole e-book revolution thing, the guy reading on his iPad looks to be in his mid-40s, definitely not a millennial. Of the paperback readers, 2 appear to be millennials and one appears closer to Gen X. The hardback reader looks to be about the same age as iPad guy.

It's possible that the rest of the millennials here are reading on their Android phones, but it looks more like they're texting.

What's going on here? Every time I go outside of my house and see what's going on in the real world, I see far fewer Kindles than I see when I'm hunkered down in my house reading the online media about media. It's not that this patch of world is deficient in young digital natives, there are both a major university campus and a community college within walking distance. There are plenty of young people in the coffee shop, they just seem to use books as their content delivery mechanism.

Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it...

Edited to add: A millennial boy with a Kindle came in and started reading shortlly before I left the coffee shop but after I posted this entry. So the count now includes 1 Kindle. Still tied with iPad and behind "book".

stay calm and keep writing

2011-02-21T14:18:00.000-05:00

This video of Margaret Atwood's TOC conference talk is inspiring. I've watched it 3 times. Watch it first. Then check out the interview with her on O'Reilly Media's YouTube channel.

further thought on creating emotional attachments to digital objects

2011-02-17T17:49:00.000-05:00

I've already blogged that I've been thinking a lot about how the future will be without books. A former co-worker tweeted a link to this article several days ago: The Art of Creating Emotional Attachments to Digital Objects. I've been thinking about it since. I wasn't sure, and I'm still not sure, how the topic of creating emotional attachments to digital objects relates to the #techcomm business, but it does resonate with it. Today I noticed a link to the same article on STC's Notebook, so I guess it is a blog-worthy topic after all.

According to the writer, Dominic Basulto, summarizing the argument for or against e-books boils down to the "touch" issue: "e-books can not be touched, bookmarked and lovingly annotated in the same way that real books can." Digital signatures, digital "weathering", and some kind of way to display what you're reading to others do all factor into it, but his article as well as most of the discourse about books vs. e-books, leaves out one important point. Will I be able to pick up your e-book in 10 years, be able to read it, and understand what it meant to you?

There's more to the emotional attachment to books than weathering.

Let me illustrate with a family anecdote. A few years ago, my nieces (then ages 17 and 19) were searching Mom's attic for a missing tea kettle. The rest of us were sitting around the dining room table joking about how the last time I went up into the attic I found lots of old books, some of which had belonged to
various of the Gills (our across the street neighbors on Warwick Rd.), Titles like "The Boy Allies in the Balkans" and such.

The girls were up there a long time. They returned without the tea kettle, but with a pile of books. The 17-year-old, who had just returned from a semester studying in Spain, held up a book and said "I wish I'd had this book before I went." It was "All About Going Abroad with Maps and a Handy Travel Diary" by Harry A. Franck. Written on the first page was the owner's name "Mary Winifred Gill, Regis College". There was an inscription on the flyleaf "With sincere good wishes for a happy and profitable year abroad. Sept. 19, 1936." We couldn't quite make out the signature but the last name was Hogan. That book must have migrated from Warwick Road when we moved in 1964!

I explained to my niece that the book's owner was my French teacher at Regis. She was impressed and enjoyed reading about exchange rates from the 1930s and stuff. The book became an instant treasure. However, the story doesn't end there.

I wrote to my former neighbor and French teacher, now in her 90s, with the story of the book. She responded with the answer to who had given her the book and the story of how she didn't go to study abroad in her Regis student days after all. At the time all foreign study for Americans was called off because of trouble under Franco in Spain. (Of course, later WWII broke out etc.).

My niece was thrilled to hear the story and feel the connection to a tiny part of history.

Could that story have happened with an e-book? If somebody picks up a 2011 Kindle in the attic in 2080 (won't be me unless I discover the secret of eternal life), will they know it's a reading device? Will they be able to recharge the battery or find some other way to power it on? Will they be able to transfer the content to whatever the current reading device is in 2080?

These days, with the 2011 state of e-readers, I can't transfer some of my e-books from one e-reading app to another. I have Stanza, Bluefire, iBooks, Google Books, and the Kindle app on my iPod Touch. Some of the formats are incompatible. And of course, Google Books are in the cloud. Which of these formats will go the way of the 8-track tape or the Betamax video? Will version 7.0 (never buy a version numbered higher than 7) of the e-reader software you're using be able to read books that you downloaded with version 2.0? Will you be able to read your Kindle content on whatever has replaced the Kindle by then? Will there be a whole new industry of converting old e-book formats to new ones the way there is for audio? These are the problems we need to be solving.

The whole emotional attachment thing in my story comes from the story, not from how weathered the book looks or from showing off to others how often I read about studying abroad. The emotional "content" here came from the human connection across generations. Digital weathering isn't going to provide that. Instead of working on ways to be able to make our digital books seem more used and weathered, we need to be working on ways of assuring that they will still be readable. Instead of working on ways of displaying what our books say about us to the anonymous masses, we need to be working on how to connect people in real life using the power of objects and their content in the context of our emotions and affect.

thoughts on a boy reading a book

2011-02-16T13:59:00.000-05:00

boy reading a book

Sitting in a coffee shop this afternoon, brooding on the future of technical communication and the future of books, which may or may not be related, I looked up and saw a boy studying using a paper book. His laptop was on the table next to him, half-closed, and his focus was clearly on the book. This was totally not what I expected to see, despite other experiences of seeing people reading books in this same coffee shop.

boy reading a book 2

I've seen whole families reading books in the coffee shop. One Saturday afternoon, I was hanging out with a friend and we saw more books than laptops.

reading at Brew'd Awakening

The entry I planned to write today about the doom and gloom going around the tech writing listserves I follow just won't come out from brain to fingertips right now. I'm chasing away the vision of the bookless future and the techcomm-less future by appreciating the present moment, which seems to involve both books and tech writing work.

Now to go write some techie stuff.

Mass Innovation Night #MIN23

2011-02-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's Mass Innovation Night, it's not snowing, and the traffic on 128 is moving freely. Perfect conditions for a great turnout at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham. There's a great crowd with lots of enthusiasm, the demos and presentations are exciting, and there's pizza. What else could you possibly need for a good time?

check-in desk -- get your name tag here

The chosen presenters for this month were:

CloudJolt – Socially responsible web hosting
Buzub – Visual URLs
FiveSpark – SaaS mobile application builder
Personal Remedies – Personalized nutrition advisor

We also got to hear from MyPaperlessBills, who got snowed out last month.

I made the rounds of the Hall of Innovators and the conference rooms to check out as many innovators as possible before and after the presentations.

Buzub

The concept of a visual URL intrigued me and I had a great conversation with Bill from Buzub about representing yourself with a unique string of icons. Since he was wearing his visual URL on his T-shirt, we quickly got into a discussion about hockey. This winter has brought back so many childhood memories of genuine "pond hockey" played on backyard rinks, ponds, and in my case, on the Charles River. Hmm, see what you can get from a visual URL? :-)

CloudJolt

CloudJolt's approach to web hosting impressed me with their comprehensive approach to support for entrepreneurs and social consciousness. They provide the total package, not only reasonably priced hosting packages and tools for creating your site, but also services like "Ask an Entrepreneur" that help overcome the hurdles of starting a business. These guys are the real deal.

Personal Remedies

"Personalized nutrition advisor" doesn't even begin to cover what the Personal Remedies application and knowledge base does for you. Name what ails you and this can tell you what foods are best to eat, and why. Mory crowd-sourced a hypothetical sick person for his presentation and his knowledgebase handled the odd collection of illnesses quite well. Nice idea having the audience participate like that.

I loved Fivespark's approach to empowering businesses to develop their own mobile apps and deploy them to all the mobile devices their employees have. Point and click HTML5 mobile app development is one of my dream products.

Biba Rehydration Drink

I met Sean from Biba outside the Hall of Innovators and after determining that despite his resemblance to one of my cousins, we are not related I checked out Biba. I loved the drink and felt instantly rehydrated without that caffeine jolt. Over in the Experts Corner, I got Sean and first time MIN attendee, Jack, to pose with a can of Biba. The Experts Corner was just starting to get busy. The Experts were all looking very expert.

Experts Corner

Eric from Landmark Real Estate Advisers in the Experts Corner

My former co-worker Matt and his brother Kyle gave a great live demo of Blogcastr. It does just what it says – broadcasts your blog live. Their blog of #MIN23 is of course already up, while I'm sitting here writing and uploading pictures afterwards. They came in 5th in the voting, so didn't get to present, but still got a lot of buzz at their demo table.

Blogcastr

Speaking of buzz, the buzz-free cable from Gig-FX is the real thing. No annoying buzz when you plug it into the guitar. He also demo'd his guitar effects pedals. Talk about cool demos!

Christine from Carlton PR and Marketing in the Experts Corner

Folks from the Boston Globe, Your Town and “Forever 128″ column redefining coverage of local news

After the presentations I got to schmooze with some of the great folks who tweet about Mass Innovation Nights and match real people to their Twitter handles. It was a great night with a great crowd of great people (have I said great enough?). Huge thanks to IBM for hosting.

the crowd listening

Monday in Tweets

2011-02-10T14:31:00.000-05:00

11:22:33: Parking lot gates at Mass Eye & Ear are broken. Use valet parking if you have an appointment today.

17:25:27: And the poetic Doug Chickering. RT @TalkinBirds: Latest show: Mysterious Moorhen; & calcium for your birds?... Forum page at Talkinbirds.com

18:36:37: Bobbi C @MassInno is talking "freestrapping" for startups. #gigbos

18:45:44: Max from codeforamerica calling for community involvement, collaboration, open government. #gigbos

18:54:51: Kidlauncher! I think we built something like that back on Warwick Rd. 100 years ago. Kids need to learn how to use tools. #gigbos

18:58:59: Parts & Crafts CSE teaching kids that you don't need a special space to do fun projects. Making stuff is fun. #gigbos

19:22:49: Dan Zarrella of HubSpot on Social Media Unicorns & Rainbows vs. really looking at the SM data. #gigbos

19:26:08: "I'm going to scientifically prove to you that Facebook is Jersey Shore." Dan Zarrella #gigbos

19:29:09: Context! We want context! Search engine needs to be able to handle context and concepts. How cool would it be if the engine knew me? #gigbos

19:40:51: Scored O'Reilly books on Docbook and REST at #gigbos. U should have seen the stampede for books at halftime. Real paper objects!

19:48:39: Compostable plates. Gives whole new meaning to the clean plate club.#gigbos

19:51:36: Successful Social Enterprises are sustainable, use profit to work toward the goal not as the goal, and produce good. #gigbos

19:52:51: "Capitalism kicks ass" -- Meaghan #gigbos

19:55:57: Wrapping up #gigbos with 5 things you didn't know about beer. So, did you know there are fishguts in your beer?

19:56:37: RT @BobbieC: #gigbos presentations today so far have ranged from giving birth to composting plates to search to unicorns to troll commen ...

21:19:18: Home from Ignite Boston. So, should I go downstairs and start a mad scientist lab in my basement or blog about #gigbos right now?

studying entrepreneurship, startups, innovation, and Ken Olsen

2011-02-09T13:59:00.000-05:00

Read a fascinating article this morning about UMass Lowell students studying entrepreneurship in Turkey: eNews: Management students in Turkey : News : UMass Lowell.

What makes an entrepreneur? And what influence does the cultural environment have on the birth of a company? We're not talking Boston vs. Silicon Valley here. (Although someone should study the real cultural differences involved there too.) We're talking a whole 'nother continent and culture. These guys are onto something. Take the students out of their own cultural context to see what's common to entrepreneurship and what's influenced by culture, location, and underlying assumptions. Get down to the bare bones of the anatomy of entrepreneurship. The professor and students blogged about the experience too. Very much worth reading.

As sometimes happens, things I read as a result of tweets from vastly different realms converge thematically. My friend Tim posted a link to this article by Steve Blank critiquing Startup America. The keywords “startup,” “entrepreneur,” and “innovation” are all over everywhere in political discourse about how to fix the US economy these days. But what are we really talking about? What makes a startup? Where does innovation fit in? It seems like we're a long way from having a national innovation strategy or even a local innovation strategy. Steve Blank's post nails it with his distinctions among the four types of entrepreneurship: small business, scalable startup, large companies, and social entrepreneurship. A one woman tech writing shop is not scalable, not a technological innovation, and not solving a social problem, but I'm sure as heck an entrepreneur. So, maybe that's not the best anecdote to illustrate the differences, but you get the idea. Read the article. It's very well-thought-out and raises the questions that need to be raised. Maybe Steve Blank should be the Startup America czar.

Do we really know what it takes to build a successful, scalable, innovative startup? What can we learn from the legacy of Ken Olsen, founder of what was arguably one of the most important computer startups ever? As I've watched the tweet stream, the news feeds, and all the media since Ken's death, I've wondered about that. There's much more to the Ken Olsen legacy and the Digital Equipment Corporation legacy than people think. I so wanted to ask for a moment of silence in memory of Ken Olsen at Monday's Ignite Boston, but realized that the word had not reached the press yet. I'd gotten the news through DEC alumni channels. I also realized that although the whole techie environment we were in that night was a result of Ken Olsen's legacy, many (most? I hope not) of the attendees would have no idea who he was or why he mattered even though they are techies. If they've heard of him at all, it's only because of a quote from long ago taken out of context. You know the one I mean. Let's study not just the rise and fall of DEC, but the ripples that are still flowing outward from that mill in Maynard.

So, Massachusetts entrepreneurs and innovators, let's remember Ken and do his legacy proud by making Massachusetts once again the innovation center of the world.

Ignite Boston 8

2011-02-08T15:36:00.000-05:00

the hashtag for tonight's event is #gigbos

Busy day today with the semi-annual trek to Boston for an eye checkup at Mass Eye and Ear and then across the river to Microsoft NERD for Ignite Boston 8, the kickoff event for Global Ignite Week. Ignite is sort of like a Pecha Kucha night for geeks.

Topics were all over the map: pregnancy, wheatstalks, troll comments, augmented humanity, startups, social enterprise, beer ... Yup, a pretty eclectic program with themes sort of emerging as we went along.

For the record, here's the lineup:

Conception, Pregnancy, Labor, Delivery, and Infants (for Geeks), Jacob Buckley-Fortin
How Freestrapping Is Killing Our Start-Ups, Bobbie Carlton
Code for America: Education and Technology in Boston, Max Ogden
How to Start a Summer Camp, Katie Gradowski and Will Macfarlane
The Real "MobileMe" How Smartphones Are Enabling a World of "Augmented Humanity," Joseph Flaherty
Halftime Break
Social Media Science, Dan Zarrella
The Future of Search Is Context, Mark Watkins
Trolling for Data, Courtney Stanton
Compost Your Dishes: Better than Washing, Heather Gilmore
Social Enterprise: What Works, What Doesn't, Why It Matters, and Why You Should Hate Oprah, Meaghan Cassidy
Pure Imagination: How Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Is Really An Anti-Drug Parable, TC Cheever
5 Things You Didn't Know About Beer, Sarah Hastings

It was a full house with a fun crowd. It was great to see former co-worker JD Doyle, Mass Innovation Nights' Bobbie Carlton, and some of the folks I follow on Twitter, as well as to meet new people. (OK, so no cousins were in evidence, but this ain't Maynard. :-)) It was a fun crowd. The pizza provided by O'Reilly Media was delicious and the plates were compostable.

quite a crowd

James Craig Burley (@burleyarch) captured the mood with his halftime tweet:

"Halftime. This is like New England weather: if you don't care for a presentation, wait a few minutes! But they've all been good."

I agree they were all good. Several reached the level of "awesome".

The talk that got me most ignited was Katie Gradowski on parts and crafts, projects for kids. I love the CSE idea -- a monthly box of craft, technology, and engineering projects for kids to make and do. At halftime I chatted with people about building things, taking things apart, and doing projects with my dad and brothers in ancient times and how so many of the great pioneers of computing got their start doing just that. It's bugged me for a long time that kids don't have the same opportunity to learn how to use tools and make stuff. It's inspiring to see kids making stuff.

Other talks I really enjoyed were:

Meaghan Cassidy on why social enterprise matters. The successful social enterprise is sustainable, profitable, and does the greatest good for the greatest number. Video of her talk is up on YouTube.

Max Ogden of CodeforAmerica on having augmented reality type outreach for public libraries. really cool concepts to make libraries more social and connected. Max Ogden's slides are up on Slideshare and video of his talk is on Vimeo.

TC Cheever on Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971) as an anti-drug parable. Absolutely hilarious. Best laughs of the night.

Dan Zarrella's proof that Facebook is The Jersey Shore.

Courtney Stanton's analysis of troll comments on her blog. Her slides were beautifully designed and her hair matched the color scheme.

crowd filling in plus nerds descending a staircase

A recurring theme in this blog has been the unexpected persistence of paper books. I didn't expect to touch on that theme at Ignite, but here it is. At the halftime break people mobbed the stack of free books from O'Reilly Media.

free tech books from O'Reilly Media

I came away with DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide and REST in Practice. By the end of the night there were a couple of books about Visual Basic left. Someone remarked how lonely they looked. I had to say "But VB is soooo 20th century."

that mob in the back by the window is the stampede for free books

And as part of my ongoing series of photos of people reading books (homage to Andre Kertesz), I got a nice shot of JD reading his free book takeaway. Entrepreneurs read. That's how they become corporate rock stars. :-)

JD reading an O'Reilly book
ready to become the next corporate rock star

I love the view of Boston from NERD and am always looking for new ways to photograph it. So I'll close with my favorite photo of the night -- the view from NERD including reflections of nerds.

Ignite Boston 8 -- Global Ignite Week - Eventbrite

2011-02-07T00:44:00.000-05:00

Attending Ignite Boston 8 -- Global Ignite Week - Eventbrite tonight. Had a great time last year. Looking forward to entertaining and thought-provoking presentations and lots of alpha geeks to schmooze with.

Stay tuned for a full account in the blog.

Review: Memory On Hand (MoH)

2011-01-24T21:15:00.000-05:00

Wristband on wrist

At the last Mass Innovation Night, Andrew of Memory on Hand (MoH) gave me one of MoH's USB flash drive wristbands to review. Mine is a snappy blue and orange pattern that goes well with my bluish gray sweater. I've had a couple of weeks to try it out now, so it's time for the review.

Since everything is not yet in the cloud, folks who use computers in multiple locations often need access to their files wherever they are: the library, a friend's house, a client's office, or whatever. I often need to move files between computers via what we used to call sneakernet back in the day. (OK, so in those days it was 5 1/4" floppies that held about 180 kb, but I don't care if readers guess how old I am. :-)) I've got flash drives rattling around in desk drawers and recently found one in my sock drawer. So I love having one I can wear on my wrist, which greatly reduces the chances of it ending up in the sock drawer. The bright colors help too. It's really hard to lose this one.

So, when I needed to carry some files home with me, I copied the files onto the drive and put it back on my wrist. It stayed securely and comfortably on my wrist until I needed it and plugged right into my laptop's USB port for the file transfer. No rummaging around in my pockets for the flash drive. Very convenient.

Connected to my laptop

The Memory on Hand wristband is perfect for students who are always on the go using computers in the lab, the library, the dorm and so on. I have two college age nieces who could really appreciate this product. It comes in lots of colors and patterns, and can also be customized for your school or organization. It makes a great gift for a student from middle school on up through grad school. It even comes packaged in an attractive gift box.

And it comes in a nice box, perfect for gift giving

What does Facebook's slow adoption in Japan mean for #techcomm?

2011-01-17T16:16:00.000-05:00

Apparently Facebook has not caught on as widely in Japan as it has here. I found this article fascinating:
Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan - NYTimes.com.

Being in the telecommunications field for so long, I've been used to thinking of Japan as on the leading edge, not the trailing edge. I've also been used to thinking that having a strong presence in Japan was crucial for business. Also, I've been reading recently that tech companies are starting to adopt Facebook as the portal to their technical documentation. Much of what I've been reading in the techcomm groups on LinkedIn or in the blogosphere not only has content migrating to social media, but also has context senstive help going the way of the dodo. So in my tech writer head, I got to wondering how migrating technical content to Facebook and Twitter is going to play in Japan.

Will American companies have a hard time getting Japanese customers on board with turning to Facebook for instructions on how to configure their switches/routers/SBCs/firewalls or test their enterprise VoIP systems? For that matter, how well is the move to social techcomm going over with American customers in that space? It's one thing to have hitting F1 in your application take you to the company's web site instead of to the online help, but it's a whole 'nother thing to have F1 take you to a Facebook page, especially if you're not a Facebook user.

In addition to taking translation into account when we're creating content, will we now have to take into account different attitudes toward social media? I don't have an answer. I'm just asking the question. Have any readers out there in the techcomm community had experience with migrating your doc portal to social when you have a large market presence in Japan? I'd love to hear about it.

Mass Innovation Night #MIN22

2011-01-14T14:07:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts innovators are flexible, an important quality both for innovation and for handling New England weather. Giant snow storm on Wednesday? Reschedule to Thursday. A few tweaks here or there, and presto another excellent Mass Innovation Night.

Mass Inno at IBM Waltham

The turnout was pretty good despite the rescheduling. The Experts Corner was packed and lively.

Experts in the Experts Corner

Activity in the Experts Corner

The four presenters were:
PointKnown -- Mapping buildings digitally for energy modeling, retrofits and reuse
ScreenRetriever -- Software for parents to see what their children are doing online
WaySavvy -- Simplified travel booking cuts through the screens and screens of data and gives you options for cheapest, biggest bang for the buck, and swankiest
Grembe Apps -- Apps to create pictures, flashcards, storyboards, routines, and visual schedules for kids with special needs

I made sure to check out each of those and as many others as I could in the demo areas. Besides the four presenters I managed to check out Memory on Hand, Job Tac Toe, bubulu labs, and say hi to LockerNotes (met him at the last MIN).

PointKnown

Talking with the PointKnown guys was fun. One of my brothers used to do HVAC in old buildings undergoing renovation and I could immediately see how PointKnown's laser to Building Information Modeling tool would speed up that kind of work.

Memory on Hand

Memory on Hand's cool-looking USB flash storage wristbands made a colorful statement and solve a practical problem. You never know when you need a few gig of storage and it sure helps to have it right on hand, er, on wrist, when you need it and make a fashion statement at the same time. Sure beats those keychain flash drives. The nieces (well, the college age Boston & NY ones, not the pre-school Dubai ones) can look forward to gifts of storage soon. :-) :-) Andrew generously gave me a 2-gig one to try out and review. Stay tuned to this space for a review soon.

Job Tac Toe has a unique approach to job hunting, turning it into a game, giving the hunter status and support. Caroline gave an enthusiastic pitch and I enjoyed our conversation about the job hunting process and about status in hunter gatherer societies. Looks like a great way to fight the depression, boredom, and discouragement that can creep in to the job hunt.

Job Tac Toe

WaySavvy cuts through the information overload involved in online travel booking. I love that it sorts the results into cheapest, best bang for the buck, and swankiest so I can just click on a tab for the type of trip I want and book it right away and all at once. And he was handing out cookies!

WaySavvy

ScreenRetriever looks like a great tool for parents, watching what the kids do online instead of just trying to block stuff. The kids know you're watching so it provides a good opportunity for parent/teen discussion on why some things are inappropriate.

ScreenRetriever

Grembe Apps impressed me with visual communication tools for kids with special needs. I can see why it's taking off among folks with autistic kids. I can actually see applications for it beyond helping non-verbal kids. Some aspects of their apps would make a good storyboarding tool for tech writers developing procedures for assembly, installation, and repair. Must mull that over a little.

Grembe Apps

The Crowd Listens

Had some good networking chats with Uma from bubulu labs and Andrew from Ciclismo Classico (maybe I will finally get to that European bike tour I've always wanted to do). And Mass Innovation Night would not be complete without running into a former co-worker. Shout-out to Matt Rushton of blogcastr.com.

Kudos to Bobbie Carlton for another great event despite the weather-induced obstacles. Thanks to IBM Waltham for hosting.

the continued popularity of paper books

2011-01-11T17:13:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, I attended the 15th annual Moby Dick Marathon reading at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. While I would normally not mention this in my professional blog, I am doing so here because I observed a couple of interesting things during the course of the 25 hour reading event. Also, I just saw the results of the Book Industry Study Group survey that showed that 75 percent of college students prefer print textbooks over electronic versions.

Observation 1: books outnumbered Kindle/Nook/iPad reading devices by about the same proportion as last year. Everywhere I looked, I saw folks with well-thumbed paperback or hardcover copies of Moby Dick. iPad and Kindle seemed to be the leaders among the devices this year rather than Nook. That most likely has to do with the fact that last year's event featured the Nook, with four of them on loan from Barnes & Noble. Where last year there were people wandering around looking for outlets to charge the Nooks, I seemed to be the only outlet seeker this year and that was for my iPod touch, which I used more for Twitter access than for reading along, although I did alternate between my beloved Modern Library edition and the Project Gutenberg e-text in Stanza (Hmm, there's another subject for an entry -- why I like Stanza better than iBooks, Bluefire, and Google Reader).

Reading along during Cetology chapter in the Sperm Whale gallery

Observation 2: Most of the folks using ereader devices were older. They had gray hair. This doesn't fit with mashable.com's representation of people over 50.

Following along while waiting his turn to read in the Jacobs Family Gallery

Some people, besides me with my iPod Touch, were using both types of reading platforms. One guy was even using both at once. I'm not sure what that added, but it was interesting to see.

Cetology chapter on paper and e-book at once

Observation 3: There was a strong social media component to the marathon this year with live streaming on the web and a designated hashtag (#mdm15) for tweeting during the event. One thing I tried was tweeting from within Stanza while reading. Alas, Stanza and my Twitter account were not getting along. However, I was able to share passages on Facebook directly from Stanza. My iPod Touch battery was not up to the endurance test of the marathon, but my battered Modern Library edition (with the Rockwell Kent illustrations) held up just fine.

Book

I don't know why Kindle and iPad haven't made more inroads into the Melville afficionado community anymore than I know why college students still prefer books.

e-reader

My observations at the Moby Dick Marathon fit with observations I made last fall on a walk in India Point Park on Columbus Day. People are still reading paper books. Somebody needs to do more research on why this is.

book

way past the future

2011-01-06T16:44:00.000-05:00

Robert Desprez has an interesting discussion going on LinkedIn re tech writers not embracing Web 2.0. His blog post asks "Why is it that most technical communicators are operating as if Web 2.0 never occurred?" In a somewhat similar vein, Tom Johnson over at I'd Rather be Writing asks if technical communication is stuck in the past. I view these as related discussions because one of the definitions of "past" is "not being web-savvy and not participating in social media culture." Social media culture is definitely part of Web 2.0.

So what is happening with #techcomm in the Web 2.0/social media space? Where are the innovations happening in technical communication? Tools? Techniques? Delivery channels? When is Web 3.0, aka the semantic web, going to come into its own? I've spent the past couple of days looking for answers to these questions instead of writing. Know what? I haven't found as many answers as I thought I would or as I would have liked.

Probably the best and most concise look at the future, at least for 2011, is Sarah O'Keefe's blog post, 2011 predictions for technical communication. I see the movement toward XML-based authoring accelerating even more quickly than it has been in recent years. Content strategy, content analytics, content management, and collaborative authoring are all seeing lots of buzz in discussions about technical communication, though I don't yet see them listed as required skills in job postings. Most of the job postings I see still focus on writing skills and expertise with specific authoring tools, with an occasional requirement for a specific content management tool. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

Getting back to the social media theme, in the comments on Sarah's post, Sarah Maddox wrote

"Another trend may be that we will focus on going to where our readers are. This is just another way of expressing the “know your audience and their environment” rule. For example, if we’re documenting web apps and social media apps or if our audience lives in those apps, we should look at how we can use them in the documentation."

How right she is! The next big trend in technical communication may just be the rebirth of the oldest trick in the tech writer's playbook: writing for the reader. Know the audience. Know what they're trying to do and under what conditions they're trying to do it. Put yourself in their shoes. Whether the user is a first-grader trying to login to his school's homework app, a researcher using some kind of hardware/software combo to collect his data in real time, an astronaut on the ISS trying to troubleshoot the on-board computer, or a soldier on the battlefield trying to repair a piece of equipment, the very best technical communication will provide what he needs.

Past, future, or way past the future, knowing the audience is and will be the trendiest thing in technical communication. Whether social media is the delivery mechanism for our content or not, it gives us valuable tools for understanding the audience.

Culturomics, Google, and William Dean Howells

2010-12-21T20:25:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of buzz about culturomics and the Google Ngram Viewer these past few days since the tool described in an article titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” published online in the journal Science was launched as a feature on Google. On Point Radio tweeted that tomorrow at 11:00AM EST they'll discuss culturomics, culture and word frequency, with Erez Lieberman Aiden and Geoff Nunberg. I'll probably tune in and see if I can write and listen to a discussion of culture and word frequency at the same time.

Meanwhile, after seeing this cool graphic of the frequency of selected Boston-related words on Boston.com a couple of days ago and noticing that the Boston.com people had left out "New York" from their list, I had to tackle one of the well known cultural questions of American literature: When did the hub of American literature change from Boston to New York? The conventional answer to that is usually 1886, the year that William Dean Howells moved to New York. (See this 1907 article about Howells for more info.)

I fired up the Google Ngram Viewer and compared the relative frequency of Boston vs. New York from 1800 to 1900. New York edged past Boston in 1830 and really took off in about 1851, all before the fabled Howells move. The group of great writers that supposedly made Boston "the one brilliant literary centre the country has ever seen" was still going strong when the change in frequency of the word Boston in books began to rise less rapidly than New York. However, it was not declining.

I changed the dates to 1800 and 2008 and saw that Boston didn't really start to decline until around 1950 and the decline has been pretty slow up to 2000. I'm judging by eyeball because the tool doesn't calculate the slope and you're all already bored with the details anyway. It looks like there is ample fodder for somebody's AmCiv dissertation here.

Generations Online in 2010

2010-12-16T17:59:00.000-05:00

The latest Pew Internet study is out: Generations Online in 2010 Pew Internet and American Life Project. So, how are the different generations using the Internet in their American lives?

Apparently none of them are making phone calls but they are using their phones to access the interwebz. Actually, Pew didn't ask about VoIP and maybe people who have phone service through their Internet providers don't realize they're using the interwebz to make phone calls. OK, I only thought about that because it's what I've been writing about in my work writing life. Well, that and I just had lunch with a couple of telecoms colleagues. I love it when I can have a lunch time conversation where I mention SIP and H.323 and everybody knows what I'm talking about. End of current VoIP digression.

What's really interesting about the Pew report is the way various news organizations summarize it in their headlines. The top themes seem to be blogging in decline and and (gasp, shudder) old people using the Internet. Here is a sampling of the headlines, in the order they showed up on Google News when ordered by relevance:

Pew study: Everyone uses email, but blogging is on decline	USA Today (blog) - Stan Schroeder
Blogging 'Peaks,' But Reports Of Its Death Are Exaggerated	Wired News (blog) - Ryan Singel
Pew: More Old People Using Facebook, Teens Blogging Less	Switched - Amar Toor
Millennial Generation's Web Dominance On The Decline, Pew Study Says	The Huffington Post - Amy Lee
Older web users catching up: Pew report	CBC.ca - Matt Kwong
Internet is No Longer a Domain for the Young Alone	Ecommercejunkie.com
Elderly people rapidly adapting to online social networks	TechRadar UK - Adam Hartley
Old catching up to young on US Internet: study	AFP

Of 26 hits for the Pew study on Google News at around 4:15 PM EST the headlines were distributed as follows:

17 old catching up with young
2   blogging in decline
3   Twitter use (general headlines related to Twitter, no connected theme)
1   75% of Americans look for news online
1   search is the number 2 online activity
1   open channel for cancer education
1   Reddit Delicious StumbleUpon Mixx LinkedIn Google Buzz Yahoo Buzz

The "blogging in decline" meme seemed to be spreading on subsequent searches. That's also the trend that got picked up by Mashable.com in their "What's Hot in Social Media This Week" article.

The old vs. young themed articles made for interesting reading about who does what online. One thing that struck me was that the young were more likely to read blogs but less likely to blog themselves. I wonder what blogs they read?

Other online differences among the generations seemed somewhat more related to the kinds of things people do when they're young anyway. I'm not surprised that younger people are more likely to play games online and participate in virtual worlds. I'll bet if they did a survey of paintball or laser tag or even soccer playing, they'd find a decline in participation with age.

One thing I wish Pew had surveyed was how people use the Internet on the job and how personal vs. work-related use of social media breaks out. How many people use Facebook and Twitter as part of their jobs as opposed to for personal connection? How many people use wikis in their jobs? I'd also like to know what kind of jobs the Millennials are in vs. the jobs the older cohorts are in. And wouldn't you just love a job where you could spend your day using social networking sites, instant messaging, using online classifieds, listening to music, playing online games, reading blogs, and participating in virtual worlds?

The Pew study raises lots of interesting questions. There's much more to be learned about how Americans are using the Internet.

SIP Call Manager :-)

2010-12-15T15:24:00.001-05:00

SIP Call Manager :-)
Originally uploaded by Captain_Peleg

No, it's not really the lastest SIP Call Manager. It's a good old fashioned switchboard. I took this photo last week at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. It got me thinking about how moving IP packets around in cyberspace isn't all that much different from moving wires from plug to plug on a switchboard.

#MIN21 Another Great Mass Innovation Night

2010-12-09T16:21:00.000-05:00

If it's the first Wednesday of the month, this must be another fabulous Mass Innovation Night. An amazing number of innovators, entrepreneurs, networkers, bloggers, tweeters, and Steampunk fans braved the December cold and the traffic on 128 (what up with 128 -- 2 hours from North Andover to Waltham???!!!???) to gather at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation.

Steam Punk Writer's Workstation -- I would totally be more productive writing about Session Border Controllers on this thing!

Once I finally got to Waltham, I took a few minutes to visit Alex at Back Pages Books so I could drop off some used books for him to sell, find out if he has the new James Prosek book about eels in yet (it'll be in Friday), and recommend that he check out Mass Innovation Nights and the Friday morning breakfasts.

So the museum was already humming with innovator activity when I got there. Downstairs, people were getting name tags amidst the museum's regular exhibits and checking out the Steampunk exhibit.

Getting Name Tags at the Check-in Desk

Up on the mezzanine, the experts corner -- experts mezzanine this time, I guess --- was buzzing with conversation.

Experts Mezzanine

The demo tables in the main room all seemed to be attracting lots of attention. I made sure to visit all four companies who were presenting: Coloci, Media Armor, TenMarks and Cambridge Semantics. I had a great conversation with Steve from Cambridge Semantics about databases and semantics. We got kind of geeky. I love a good technical conversation.

Cambridge Semantics

Media Armor

LockerNotes

Coloci

I was impressed with Media Armor's take on analytics, TenMarks' take on math homework, LockerNotes' take on reminding your Dad to buy bananas and pancakes, and Coloci's take on using our always on cyber-connectedness for connecting with friends in the real world.

Folks were packed into the alcove off the main room for the presentations. TenMarks had the best presentation with an excellent video. It's about time somebody made it easy and fun to learn math. America needs better math education.

Packed House for the Presentations

Coloci had the best slide with their cool display showing where your friends are in relation to where you are.

Coloci's Friend Radar

After the presentations, I spent some more time checking out the Steampunk exhibit. You can see my Steampunk photos on Flickr, along with some photos of the regular museum items, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/captain_peleg/sets/72157625564219026/.

By the time I got home last night, a former co-worker who'd seen my tweet about TenMarks (via my Facebook status) was asking for the link for her 4th grader. That's the power of Mass Innovation Night!

action and influence

2010-11-20T15:51:00.000-05:00

I tried out Klout for the first time yesterday and did not understand my Klout score at all. According to Klout, I'm an Explorer. I feel like I should tweet back "Thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida." (First one to identify the name of the song and the band gets a free shoutout for your blog.)

I love Klout's definition of influence and action:

"We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action -- "action" might be defined as a reply, a retweet, a comment, or a click."

OK, so what about actions like:

Grab the binoculars and go look for the Pink-footed Goose that @bbcbirds just tweeted
Go to Mass Innovation Night and network with entrepreneurs live and in person (OK, so that's sort of a gray area because I did tweet about it while I was there)
Run down to the Andover Bookstore to buy the Mark Twain autobiography
Try a new soup recipe (What, you don't follow @whatsthesoup?)

What about tweets that get you to vote for somebody or take to the streets in protest? Do you have to retweet, reply, or click something first? Even die hard political tweeters went out and pressed the flesh like it was the freakin' 1960s this year in Massachusetts.

And who influences me? According to Klout, I'm influenced by Evan Williams and National Geographic along with a couple of people I know in real life. Know what? Despite my finding Ev amusing and National Geographic interesting enough to share, there are a whole bunch of tweeters that have way more influence on what I think about and what I do in the world.

Let us not confuse online influence with real influence.

mass innovation night at the mill #min20

2010-11-15T22:11:00.000-05:00

Everything old is new again in the great cycle of innovation in Massachusetts, so it was great to experience Mass Innovation Night #MIN20 at the very mill that nurtured the minicomputer revolution decades ago. The mill, now known as Clock Tower Place, is once again the home of lots of small companies -- with room for more -- building the future. It was a very cool setting for this month's innovators and a trip down memory lane for this writer. Little did I know just how much of a trip down memory lane it would be though...

Webiva Demo Table

I managed to check out all the presenting companies at their tables during demo time:

Active Interview – Web-based video interviewing. Should help hiring managers cut through the piles of resumes.
Novell Pulse — Real-time enterprise collaboration technology and cute stuffed penguins.
iCreate to Educate — Innovation in K-12 learning.
Spreadable — Tool for word-of-mouth marketing, way better than just sticking a Tweet This button on your web site.

Active Interview Demo Table

Other companies with tables that I made it to were:

Webiva — a web Content Management System with analytics built in.
Weed lance — a seriously cool and clever weeder. This would really have helped when I was trying to rid my yard of invasive Oriental bittersweet.

Big Crowd

In the Experts Corner, I chatted with Springboards and Structured Information. Springboards provides communications coaching and English language training and Structured Information writes articles, white papers, and other types of marketing communications for technology companies.

Experts Corner

A friend and former co-worker from MASSCOMP days, Chuck Palmer, stopped by. He works at a company in Clock Tower Place and had seen flyers for the event and finally decided to come when he saw my Facebook status that I would be there. We had a great time checking out the demos, peppering Webiva, Active Interview, and Weed Lance with questions.

Chuck and Janet (me)

As we were standing by the Novell table looking for someone to take our picture, I noticed a familiar face from very long ago. I blurted out "I know you" and it turned out he recognized me too. Jim Burrows. We worked together in this very mill a very very very long time ago. I remembered arranging standalone time on his RSTS machine so I could reproduce a FORTRAN compiler bug. It was that long ago. I am amazed that we recognized each other. Naturally, Chuck and I got Jim to take our picture.

Our reactions to Active Interview got us talking about innovation. Some of us have noticed how often companies hire people who have done exactly XYZ before and then those employees do XYZ exactly the same way they did it before. That's not a good path to innovation. I love it when Mass Innovation Night results in some new insight in addition to cool new tools.

Mill memories, new technologies, new ideas, old friends, new insights, old connections, and new connections made for quite a night. As if that weren't enough, I also rendezvoused with my cousin so I could lend him a sander I borrowed for him from one of my friends, thus weaving virtual connections into real ones. Oh, and I was pleased to see that Irene's Stitch It Shop, who repaired so many of my clothes back in the day, and the Maynard Outdoor Store, where I bought lots of my camping equipment, are both still in business.

What the old poster on a wall on 5-5 once said of Geneva could be said of Silicon Valley or anyplace else today: "It's nice, but it ain't Maynard."

content strategy = speaking prose?

2010-10-25T20:58:00.000-04:00

"Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it."
Monsieur Jourdan in Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme by Moliere

These days, the tech comm blogosphere, the Twitterverse, and the social media conversation is all about content strategy. All the buzz got me wondering how content strategy fits in with my day to day work as a freelance contract tech writer. Thus far, most clients have hired me to document specific features or modify legacy content to fit in with their documentation conventions and tools. Where does strategizing come in? Furthermore, how do I jump aboard the content strategy bandwagon? What the heck do I know about content strategy?

In talking with a former co-worker recently, I suddenly felt exactly like Monsieur Jourdan in Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme. I've been speaking content strategy for years without knowing it!

As documentation manager for several start ups over my career, I have had to plan the creation and delivery of content for new products. I asked myself these questions for the company as a whole, the product, and the individual documents:

Who is the audience and what do they need to know to use this product to do their jobs?

How do we create the content and manage it?

How do we distribute the content to the audience?

What about feedback from the audience? How do we get it? What do we do with it?

Amazingly enough, these same questions, with a little tweaking, apply to web site content strategy.

Audiences

You still have multiple audiences looking for exactly the information they need. In olden times, I used to divide the audiences for, let's say a platform (hardware, operating system, and applications), at the highest level into: people who buy the equipment, people who install and manage the equipment, people who install and manage the software, and people who use the applications to do their jobs. All those groups had different information needs. Content strategists for the web need to think about the same kinds of things. No matter what the application is, there are still people whose relationship to it requires different information. The software developer who is creating his application based on your API needs to know details of the programming interface. Other folks at his company need information on cost, digital rights, market penetration, and so on. The content strategist must make sure that all of those audiences can find what they need.

Content Creation and Management

You still have content creation and management to worry about. Who is going to create the content? The developers? A team of tech writers? The customers? A third party? You get the idea. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away I pioneered customer generated content, third party documentation, and content curation in the doc set for our platform.

Content Curation
Our product included a UNIX platform and our customers were mostly scientists who programmed in FORTRAN. So for example, rather than writing a UNIX tutorial, I selected the best available published book to ship with our UNIX platform. I did the same thing for the FORTRAN compiler. Why use my valuable resources to document FORTRAN when there were excellent books on FORTRAN?

User-Generated Content
Likewise, I engaged one of our early customers who was interfacing their own data acquisition devices to our platform to provide content about that because other customers were about to do what they had already done. My strategy had to accommodate incorporating their content into the overall doc set.

Third Party Documentation
In addition to buying off the shelf books, we also engaged a contractor to develop documents about various UNIX utilities. They were responsible for the production of finished books or booklets, which they could then sell to other clients in addition to us.

Content Management
The big difference here is that where we could use a standard source control tool like SCCS to manage revisions and versioning and the Bill of Materials to manage what went into the box with the hardware, these days the content is broken into hundreds of small pieces that need to be configured for various types of output. Then we worried about help files and printed books, now we have to worry about web site content, maybe embedded help, mobile content, collaborative content like wikis, and maybe even PDF. The tools are more complicated, but it's still content management.

Distribution

In addition to the output issues I mentioned above, today's content strategists also have to worry about free vs. paid content, open vs. proprietary content, and sometimes restricting content to paying customers. Click on the support tab of just about any major hardware/software provider and you'll see that some restrict access to the user documentation and some don't. Your content strategy needs to address those considerations up front.

Feedback

Audience feedback has always been key to great documentation. The wonderful thing about social media is that it makes it a whole lot easier to get that feedback. Where once you had prepaid mailer reader comment forms in the back of paper books, annual or semi-annual user group meetings, Usenet newsgroups, and customer site visits, now you can get instant feedback via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and any number of similar tools. Today's content strategist must integrate all these channels and have a plan for acting on the feedback.

Conclusion

I have been speaking prose for the entire play.

round 2: where the job tweets are

2010-10-18T17:27:00.000-04:00

I repeated Thursday's experiment this evening, this time using #techcomm AND job. This got 9 hits. All tweets were dated between today and October 11. No earlier tweets were available.

Only 2 of the tweets were actual job postings. Both of those were for the same job, located in Houston, Texas.

Also of interest, although not job postings, were:

A retweet of @STC_Austin promoting Jack Molisani's upcoming "Job Hunting Secrets that Might Surprise You" job hunting presentation for STC Austin:
http://stcaustin.eventbrite.com/

A German web site about #techcomm job profile & tasks, w/ salary survey: http://www.beruf-technischer-redakteur.de/

Searching on #techcomm AND #jobs yielded only the 2 postings for the Houston job mentioned above.

The next thing I tried was "technical writer" AND #jobs. That one seems to be the mother lode. 500 hits! That's a bit much to analyze manually, so I tried the search using The Archivist, which not only allows you to export to an Excel spreadsheet but does some interesting visualizations on the data. I made my search archive public so I could link to it here: Archive on "technical writer" #jobs Containing 500 Tweets: http://archivist.visitmix.com/hammerchick/1

Alas, the visualizations don't include location. The data exported to Excel includes latitude and longitude of the tweet, which isn't necessarily the latitude and longitude of the job, so I'm not sure it's worth my trying to figure out how to get Excel to translate the coordinates to a map location. Instead, I read the text of each tweet and identified the ones that specified a location, entered the location in a spreadsheet, and made the bar chart shown above. The top three locations were California with 13, Maryland with 8, and North Carolina with 6. So, for today, where the tech writer job tweets are is California.

I need to work on automating the location data. This is a work in progress.

where the tech writer job tweets are

2010-10-14T15:42:00.000-04:00

Read this great story at AvidCareerist about a guy who used Twitter to find his wife a job. I immediately open TweetDeck and add a column for search on "technical writer" AND job AND Boston. Unsurprisingly, it gets zero results.

So, I thought I'd see where the tech writer job tweets are. I dropped the AND Boston qualifier and got 21 hits. One of those was not a job posting but simply somebody mentioning that technical writer was her night job. Of the rest, 10 were the same job tweeted by different job boards with different hashtags and no location specified. The following locations had one job each:

Chicago

Richmond, VA

Qatar

Dorset, England

Yaphank, NY

Iowa (unspecified city) -- same job tweeted by two different job boards

Atlanta -- same job tweeted by two different job boards

Columbus, Indiana

San Francisco

The most recent tweet was yesterday and the oldest was Thursday, October 7, basically a week's worth of tech writer job tweets. That's clearly not enough data to conclude anything at all about where the jobs are, but it is still an interesting snapshot.

By the way, "tech writer" and "technical communicator" both yielded zero results and "content strategist" yielded 5.

Have you got a story about how you found your tech writing job using Twitter? Please share with us in the comments section.

context and the death metaphor

2010-10-01T19:25:00.000-04:00

It's hard to understand context in a 140 character tweet. It's also hard to understand context in a tweet stream from an event if you're not physically at the event. I'm not sure that even if I had been at Lavacon, I would have understood this tweet:

"Silence = death: If you’re silent about this (social networking), then you’re not going to be in the conversation."

Silence = Death is a little extreme to apply to being left out of the social networking conversation. As someone who lost a loved one to the AIDS epidemic back in the days when the Silence=Death campaign was talking about actual death I was taken aback by this usage.

While I gathered from the Lavacon tweet stream that the speaker used the AIDS metaphor intentionally and that his T-shirt was in fact modeled on the Act Up design, there was nothing in the tweet stream that explained why. How is the rush to social networking like the AIDS epidemic?

What conversation are we talking about here? Are we talking about the conversation inside enterprises about content strategy? Probably the worst thing that will happen to technical communications managers who stay out of the corporate conversation about content strategy and social media is that they'll lose their jobs. That's unfortunate, but it's not death from a horrifying disease.

There has to be a better way to communicate the urgency of getting technical communicators in on the conversation than trivializing an epidemic that is still killing people in Africa. There just has to be.

what's a conversation?

2010-10-01T13:23:00.000-04:00

This posting I read on Mashable the day before yesterday has gotten me thinking about what conversation means in the social media space: Most Tweets Produce Zero Replies or Retweets. If somebody tweets and nobody replies or retweets, does that really mean it "fell on deaf ears" as the article claims? Many Twitter users are not looking for replies.

Twitter seems to me more like a broadcast medium with the ability to talk back in real time -- kinda like talk radio but without the screening and filtering. If I listen to On Point and don't call in, that does not mean I didn't hear what Tom Ashbrook and his guests said. Same thing with Twitter. I may want to know what the soup of the day is at Life Alive so I can plan my lunch hour. Therefore, I follow Life Alive on Twitter. If I then go to Life Alive for lunch instead of say, Athenian Corner, because of their tweet that's neither a retweet nor a reply on Twitter but it's surely part of a conversation in the real world.

What's a conversation? Since we're discussing social media here, let's consider the definition in Wikipedia:

"A conversation is communication between multiple people. It is a social skill that is not difficult for most individuals. Conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other. ..."

Leaving aside the grammatical question of between vs. among, does communication happen if one person broadcasts to many, but none of the many respond? Is some degree of reciprocal communication necessary in order to call something a conversation? Maybe. Maybe not. I put information, opinions, and observations out into the Twitter stream and I take in the same types of things from the Twitter stream, but most of what I take in is not necessarily responsive to what I put out except for an occasional reply. There's some exchange taking place. I'm just not sure if that's a conversation.

One of the themes that pops up more and more often in technical communication circles is how we need to be in on the social media conversation. What is this "conversation" we're going to be left out of if we don't get on the social media bandwagon? The secret to great technical writing/documentation has always been and still is knowing who the audience is and how they use the content to do their jobs/tasks/whatever. Interactive media is certainly better for getting at that kind of audience knowledge than old fashioned tear-out reader comment forms at the back of a paper manual. Nobody can argue with that. Is it better than meeting face to face with your users at a user group meeting or a visit to their business? Maybe it is. We can certainly connect with a broader part of the user base using Twitter and Facebook and corporate blogs and wikis than we could face to face. We can't personally meet every user, but we can find out what they're thinking via social media.

So, back to the Mashable post that triggered these thoughts. Why do so few people reply to tweets and/or retweet them? Maybe bursts of 140 characters just aren't enough for the thoughts and reactions readers may have to tweets. Maybe it's hard to keep track of the context. Maybe the tweets just aren't interesting or discussion-provoking.

As I was checking out the Twitter stream from #lavacon today, I was struck by how little context there is for a given tweet from an event even when there's a hash tag and multiple tweets. The lack of context can create confusion. For example, one tweet read

“It doesn’t matter what I think or say. It matters what everyone else thinks and says.”

What's that about? To whom do his thoughts and words not matter? His audience? Himself? Is he saying that there are no experts anymore and all that matters is crowdsourcing? Or is he only saying that he's not an expert? Or something else entirely? Because I'm not at #lavacon and only following it via tweets, I have no idea what the context of that quotation is. Were I present at #lavacon I might have been able to have a conversation about that thought with the speaker or with other attendees, but it makes no sense to do that on Twitter.

Whatever the social media conversation is, it is just beginning and we all need to fumble around trying to get the hang of it for awhile longer.

mass innovation night -- number 18

2010-09-15T22:52:00.001-04:00

Charles River view

This month's Mass Innovation Night was held at Microsoft NERD on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. I've been to other events there, but the view of Boston still impresses me every time. Great choice of venue. I'm glad I got there early because it gave me plenty of time to engage with the folks doing the tabletop demos before things got really crowded.

the join.me team

The folks from LogMeIn not only had a cool tool for collaboration, join.me, but also had the best T-shirts and the best SWAG. Join.me is the simplest screen-sharing tool I've ever seen. It beats the pants off WebEx and GotoMeeting for the kind of impromptu collaboration I need to do as a freelance tech writer just needing a quick look at a developer's screen. It also looks like it could work for supporting my Mom's computer remotely. Save on the drives to Waltham on 128 :-) I also got a chance to meet up with a former colleague who now works at LogMeIn. Not only all of that, but they gave me a cool coffee cup too.

The folks from Neuron Robotics had a cool tabletop demo of their DyIO module mounted on a hex bug and controlled with the arrow keys on a net book. They really take the task of programming your robot up to a new level of abstraction and simplicity. I was having brainstorms all over the place about things I could finally make a robot do. Entertainingly enough, their presentation brought back warm memories of The Jetsons.

Arno demoing TrustedOnes

I watched the Neuron Robotics tabletop demo with Arno Grbac of TrustedOnes, another one of the four chosen presenters. I love his idea of making better decisions using online "crowd sourcing" but from people you know and trust -- better than Yelp or the Tips tab on Foursquare. I'd rather base my decisions about hotels or coffee shops in the city I'm about to visit on recommendations from my friends in RL (real life) than on recommendations of strangers whose tastes and preferences I don't know. I've downloaded the app to my iPod Touch. I foresee a future blog entry about my experiences with it.

It's hard to pick the coolest product from among the wonderful innovations presented at Mass Innovation Night, but the one I definitely came away wanting to own was Vizit from Isabella Products. They've come up with a digital picture frame that does things I've been wishing such a device would do for years. You can share photos with anyone from anywhere over the mobile network. Picture it, my far flung family members can send photos from their camera phones, their computers, or online photo sites right to Vizit. Imagine the twins in Dubai at their first day of "big girl school" instantly framed on their grandma's dining room table in Waltham! My family needs this for sure.

It was another great night with lots of new ideas and new connections. The extra added bonus of time catching up with my former colleague made it even better. Connection and innovation just rock!

changing light over the Charles

mass innovation night -- foodie theme

2010-08-17T13:58:00.000-04:00

Whoa, I'm behind on posting about Mass Innovation Night number 17. I've been so busy spreading the word about online ordering and catnip greeting cards and Cooking for Geeks, that I've neglected this blog. I've also been wracking my brains for a way to connect the food theme of #MIN17 with technical writing. Except for the idea that technical writers are now essentially the same as cupcakes (stay tuned for a future entry on tech writer as cupcake) and that my favorite take away from the night was a cookbook, I'm stuck for a profound professional connection.

So, here are my favorites of the night:

Tasting cinnamon ice cream from Batch: http://batchicecream.com/
KangoGift's simple concept of sending real gifts (vouchers) to a cellphone via SMS: http://www.kangogift.com/
Online ordering from 1fastbite for small, local, indie restaurants that may not otherwise have much of an online infrastructure: http://www.1fastbite.com/
Jeff Potter of Cooking for Geeks demystifying watermelon cubing for me and serving wonderful watermelon & feta salad: http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/

First thing Thursday morning:

Told the owner of my local coffee shop about 1fastbite.
Notified my former colleagues that online ordering from BHB, their favorite takeout, is available through 1fastbite.
Sent emails to connect Catnip Cards with Merrimack River Feline Rescue where I used to be on the board.
Sat down with my new signed copy of Cooking for Geeks and read up on the science of some of the things I like to cook.

In other news somewhat related to Mass Innovation Nights, when I went up to Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Friday, I noticed that an electric bike company has already implemented the idea I had after July's innovation night: electric bike rental at off-refuge parking location.

Readers, chime in on the comments section to let me know how technical writing and foodie innovation are related.

on audience

2010-08-07T14:19:00.000-04:00

Coming across a Dr. Dobbs article with the headline Technical Writing for the Kindle and a Scriptorium blog post Retail therapy for tech comm (and I don’t mean shopping) during my browsing adventures in search of the magical convergence between technical communication and social media led me to a revealing insight into the current technical communication scene. We seem to be expending a lot more time and energy discussing tools and output formats than we do discussing and researching the changes in audience needs.

The audience for most technical communication has changed radically in the last decade. There are far more different types of users with different needs. Fewer readers have English as their first language. The Millennials have a shorter attention span than that of other user age cohorts. Software development processes are more collaborative. All of these things affect what content we need to present to the reader and how we present it.

We as technical communications professionals need to be thinking about writing for the reader, not just writing for the output device.

some questions about tools and techniques

2010-07-17T14:16:00.000-04:00

Mark Fidelman's post about the survey regarding technical communicators and their tools - How well do you know Technical Communicators and their tools? - got me thinking about all kinds of things I want to know about the current state of the tech writing universe. I thought about writing a blog post about each of these questions, but then it hit me that it might be more thought provoking to just blast out the questions.

Tools

Where are the content management tools in all of this? Nobody using Expression or Drupal?

Why are there so many competing tools? Development tools aren't this incompatible.

What's so important about HTML5?

Techniques

Why are people still writing verbose narrative documents? Why are specs from pharmaceutical companies so bad? Why isn't anybody doing anything about it? Why are technical communicators so blase about the crappy reputation of our profession?

Why can't we learn to write short sentences in the present tense and active voice? Why is this technique news to tech writers? It was drummed into me early and often. I've communicated it to my staff back in the days when I managed tech pubs departments. What is the big deal?

mass innovaton night 16

2010-07-15T14:44:00.000-04:00

Last night I attended my second Mass Innovation Night. It was even more fun than my first one (last month). Amazing entrepreneurs presented to a packed house. I do mean packed. People were sitting on the floor and standing in the hallways. July is supposedly the slow season for this kind of event. It sure wasn't slow season at the IBM Innovation Center last night!

The stars of the show were definitely Pietzo Hybrid Electric Bike and Episend.

Pietzo had bikes available for test rides and folks were zipping down the IBM corridors. I was happy to discover that the bikes were lighter than I expected. The battery and motor don't add that much weight. The amount of zip you get from the motor is amazing. I can definitely see widespread adoption in urban areas really having a green impact. In my other identity as a plover warden at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge I immediately thought that positioning a fleet of Pietzo electric bikes at strategic locations outside the refuge would do wonders to reduce the number of cars on the refuge and the long lines of idling cars on summer weekend mornings. I'm picturing cleaner air, less damage to vegetation, and less pressure on the environment. I'll bet it would reduce the amount of roadkill when the swallows are massing for migration too.

Episend's strategy for sending and sharing all kinds of media is brilliant. You can send anything to anyone: large files, videos, mp3, photos, links, whatever. I immediately signed in to Episend and checked out the UI. It's simple and elegant. I have always wanted a way to send media files to people without having to worry if they had the right application to view it or worrying whether Outlook would deem it harmful or the recipient didn't support the right MIME type. Episend eliminates all that worry. It's all so easy! The presentation was great and the M&Ms were a big hit (M&Ms seem to be emerging as a theme in these innovation nights).

In my continuing quest to integrate technical communication with new media, I had a long and productive conversation with the folks from Real Cool TV about how they develop video content for marketing communications and how similar techniques and technology could be used to develop content for things like hardware installation, software tutorials and user guides, and so on. They impressed upon me the importance of brevity-- something that I've emphasized in technical communication. Their insights into communicating via video dovetailed nicely with the philosophy I've been pushing for years regarding user manuals: People don't read manuals, they use them. Great conversation.

Acquia Drupal Gardens had gorgeous presentation slides and an exceedingly practical idea: you can develop Drupal web sites without being a superhero. No superpowers required for content management? Who hasn't been waiting for that? I need to give some more thought to how a service like Drupal Gardens can integrate with online help authoring and other technical communication challenges. This presentation definitely gave me a lot to think about.

What a terrific night! And if a Martian spacehip ever does land in my backyard, I'll be sure to send out rich media content complete with an interview with the Martians.

my LinkedIn mistake

2010-06-24T13:12:00.000-04:00

LinkedIn doesn't get as much coverage in the swirl of discussion around social media but it's the one social media site that is practically mandatory to belong to if you work (or want to work) in the tech sector. Many of us are adept at tracking down contacts in our network who can link us to a company we want to work at, invest in, or sell to. Everybody knows how to search for jobs posted on LinkedIn. We understand the basics. Some of the other features are a little harder to use.

The help defines "Answers" thus: "This feature is designed to allow professionals to exchange expertise." I had a question that was more of a request for help than a specific easily answerable question. I chose Answers as the place to post my request because it required specific expertise and the Answers feature allows you to specify an area of expertise, in this case databases.

I posted a request for Filemaker expertise to help a non-profit whose board I used to be on. The interface for narrowing down the query is cumbersome but I managed to specify "database" and the zip code of the organization's location. I made it clear it was a volunteer thing. I thought I narrowed it down enough. Apparently, I did it all wrong. The only response I got was from India informing me that programmer's time is not free. Oops.

In retrospect, I should not have used the Answers feature for it. A request for help is not a question and a request for volunteer help is apparently a social transgression. Maybe LinkedIn was the wrong medium in the first place.

People are on LinkedIn to leverage their connections to get jobs, investors, or customers. That's what differentiates it from Facebook or Twitter. Despite the zillions of articles on how to use Facebook and Twitter to get jobs and customers, that's not their sole purpose. My mistake was trying to transfer technical expertise from one social network to another. I'm not sure to what extent LinkedIn and Facebook-type media will converge. However, right now there's a divide to be overcome before we can leverage social capital built up over a professional career to impact the social good in the real world with the social media tools we have at hand.

are social media social?

2010-06-15T20:01:00.000-04:00

Following Patti Anklam's tweets from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today, I was surprised by the following question she retweeted from Boris Pluskowski:

"Are people more social now because culture's changed or because technology allows it nowadays?"

That brought me up short. Are we more social now? More social than when? What does social mean in this context? Have we finally transitioned out of the "bowling alone" era? I'm not so sure.

I'm old enough that I can remember the days when co-workers would gladly give you a ride to work when your car was in the shop or feed your cats when you were on a business trip. That sort of social connection stopped sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. There wasn't a clear break. It just sort of happened gradually without our really noticing it. One day I stupidly asked a co-worker who passed right by the car dealer where I went for service if he could pick me up on his way to work. You'd have thought I asked for his first born child. No, it wasn't just me. A whole industry of car rentals that bring the car to you grew up and flourished. Same thing with the pet care while you're on business trips. Nobody in their right mind would ask a co-worker or a neighbor to look after their pets. You pay a pet sitter. Period. Has this changed? I'm not seeing it.

As high-tech (as we used to call it) began to die out in Massachusetts, many of my closest friends moved to Silicon Valley, Seattle, or other points west. We used email and sometimes the telephone to keep in touch. With the rise of social media, we can and do interact more online and catch up with each other more frequently. So maybe in that sense we are more social than we were in the 1990s. Technology has certainly made it easier to exchange status updates, photos, and links. So, why does it feel like there's still something missing?

I think what the enterprise is looking for from social media is collaboration not community. Technology has certainly made collaboration in the workplace easier. In that sense the workplace is more social. However, just because applications can exchange data more easily and workers can Tweet or IM or whatever instead of the hated email doesn't mean it's become any easier to create a workplace where humans relate to each other as people.

the future is now

2010-06-08T17:19:00.000-04:00

If I could predict the future I would have sold my stock while it was still worth something, I would have won the lottery by now, and so on. So I know that what we mean when we discuss the future is our educated guesses about current trends. End of disclaimer.

On Saturday I attended The Future of Technical Communication, a small conference put on by Cheryl Landes of
Tabby Cat Communications. The focus was clearly on social media as the current trend. The presenters were:

Rich Maggiani on Social Media: Present and Future
Neil Perlin on What's up eDoc?
Ed Marshall on Effective Job Search Techniques for Social Networking
Patti Butcheck on A Wiki Primer

I gleaned much from each of the presentations. I have to admit that even though I was among others of my kind (tech writers) it wasn't as much fun as Mass Innovation Night was because the emphasis was not on new technology or new uses of current technology but on where our skills fit in with current trending technology in the technical communications field.

Rich Maggiani's generational take on social media reminded me of a chapter I read back in 2007 in IMS Crash Course by Steven Shephard (which came out in 2006). The Millennials are indeed different from the Boomers and from Generation X because they have grown up with social media and all the gadgets that a subset of their Boomer grandparents spent their careers designing and documenting. From the technical communicator's point of view, they are a vastly different audience for whom we must tailor the content we produce. The emerging trend for communicating with that audience is clearly user-generated content. How the role of the technical communicator will play out in the realm of user-generated content is fodder for a whole 'nother conference. Get your slides ready, Rich!

As an aside, with all due respect to Rich, we Boomers did not grow up with party-line telephones. Even my cousins' farm deep in the Maine woods without indoor plumbing had direct telephone service. Just thinking about that makes me wonder how the cell phone coverage is up there. If any of them had stayed on the farm, they'd probably still need land lines. End of humorous aside.

My take away from Neil Perlin's presentation was naturally about the tools and not the audience. FrameMaker cannot die soon enough. Nor can RoboHelp. It was good to hear Neil predicting their imminent demise. I'm left wondering when a better tool than Word will emerge for creating single sourced content for multiple output formats. The best thing I got out of it can be summarized thus:

Never call it documentation. Documentation is done by those quiet people on the third floor. Call it content. Content is cool.

Ed Marshall's presentation on using social media in the job search was rich in "how-to" with tips and tricks for using LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. However, my most valuable take away was how he positions himself as an experienced professional. Having been coached by outplacement folks to downplay years of experience, I needed to hear that.

I have to say that Patti Butchek's presentation on wikis was my favorite. She walked us through real world application of a wiki to meet a technical communication need. Also, I had no idea there were so many wiki tools available. My best take away was that you have to know when a wiki is the right medium. As Patti said: "Don't send a wiki to do a blog's job!"

So after a long day that began with an encounter with my crazy neighbor and ended with tornado watch and a microburst I was left still wondering what the role of the technical communicator will be in this brave new world.

mass innovation night

2010-06-04T19:37:00.000-04:00

Last night I attended Mass Innovation Night for the first time. It was well worth tackling Rt. 128 at rush hour in a thunderstorm for!

I wanted two things out of the night:

a chance to try out my new spiel on how my tech writing skills can help startups
to see cool techie presentations on new ideas

I satisfied both of those needs.

The spotlight was on IBM SmartCamp winner Sproxil, a mobile application developer. They're developing technology to help consumers in developing companies identify counterfeit pharmaceuticals using their cellphones. According to Ashifi Gogo (I hope I got his name right), fake medications are a big problem in developing countries. This was the coolest thing I heard. I wish he'd been able to into more detail to satisfy my geeky curiosity.

The other presenters were Jumper Networks, Rate it Green, and thebuyersNET.com. I really responded to Jumper Networks and Rate It Green.

My inner geek really enjoyed Steve Perry's presentation on Jumper Networks' new kind of personalized search. I love the idea of users tagging content and creating a search community around content. I was already starting to imagine how this type of search strategy would help both with developing technical documentation and with getting the right information to the right audiences -- the goal of all good tech writers.

My inner "I want to put green roofs on everything in sight" perked up for Allison Friedman's Rate It Green, an online community for folks interested in green building. I especially liked that it was born out of Friedman's own frustration when seeking green building resources. I can't wait to get on there and see what I can find for resources on growing things on roofs.

I also got in lots of good networking, had a great conversation with Bill Scher, one of the Experts of the night, who provided useful feedback on my tech writing pitch, and learned about IBM's developerWorks online community. Not a bad night! I definitely intend to attend future Mass Innovation Night events.

Failure to communicate?

2010-05-19T16:24:00.001-04:00

Failure to communicate - The Boston Globe

Posted using ShareThis

This article on the poor writing skills of younger people these days is subtitled " The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age." Unfortunately, it really doesn't go into what those costs are. It focuses on the shortage of English teachers and the lack of instruction in writing in our schools. I wish it had focused more on what it means that "Johnny can't write." Does the inability to write a coherent English sentence mean that Johnny can't communicate?

There's so much more to communication than grammar skills and paragraph construction. Good communication also involves listening, organizing, critical thinking, expressive abilities, and maybe even empathy. The mechanics of grammar and writing are the tools we use to put all of those skills and qualities together. Unfortunately we don't do any better with teaching thinking or listening than we do with grammar.

Two college students are sitting at a nearby table in the coffee shop where I'm writing this. One is working on one last paper he needs to hand in. The other offers to help edit. She reminds him how important it is to have correct grammar. I jump into the conversation, explaining that I'm trying to write about "why Johnny can't write" and what this means. They enthusiastically inform me about how reliance on spellcheckers and the MS grammar checker prevents them from learning to write and how they are were not taught to think critically in high school. They both tell me that the ability to communicate clearly and think critically is essential for a functioning democracy. Wow! I couldn't have expressed it better myself.

They are about to leave. The young woman offers me her copy of Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose. It's a classic on education and the underprepared, focusing on those who have trouble reading and writing in our schools and workplaces. I'm looking forward to reading it.

The two students have left. There's only one other customer in the place. He's reading a newspaper: the printed kind. I have a lot more reading and thinking to do before I will be truly able to write thoughtfully about the state of literacy and its implications for then workplace.

Stay tuned.

English is impossible or is it translation that is impossible?

2010-05-07T13:42:00.000-04:00

This isn't exactly a technical writing issue unless you're writing about striped bass. However, I've meant to blog about it for awhile anyway. Here in the Merrimack Valley, the word schoolie refers to young, small, striped bass. It can also mean young fish in general. In the rest of the world, or so I thought, schoolie apparently means students in their last year of school (school leavers) or students in general.

I first discovered that schoolies doesn't necessarily mean fish when I was trying to find an article about a UMass scientist who tagged schoolies in Plum Island Sound a couple of years back. Naturally I googled schoolies. All the hits on the first page referred to Australian students -- not a single reference to stripers. Once I did find the research I was looking for, I got to wondering how on earth that research could ever be translated either by google translate or even by human technical translators. I imagine there are scientists in China wondering why on earth somebody in Massachusetts is tagging Australian students and for that matter what Australian students are doing in Plum Island Sound. OK, so context counts for a lot.

My point is that much translation does not take context into account. It's not just English either. I remember reading a French language web site about snowy owls (they nest in Quebec) that said: "Les juvéniles sont uniformément bruns, avec des restes de duvet blanc éparpillés." Google translated that as "The youthful ones are uniformly brown, with scattered remainders of white sleeping bag." Though I had fun fun picturing baby owls in sleeping bags up there in the frozen north of Quebec, I was pretty sure duvet meant down not sleeping bag. Then again we're back to the impossibility of English because down can mean a direction or fluffy feathers or a rolling upland. That's even leaving out football and depression. :-)

Back to schoolies in my digressive rambling style of today. My original thought was that schoolies as fish must be unique to the Merrimack Valley. Then I saw references to them all along the east coast of the US. OK, must be an east coast term. Then I got really confused when I found this UK news article from the Thurrock Gazette, which refers to fish. Evidently the difference is not geographic. The first dictionary that comes up when I try schoolie definition in google is www.freedictionary.com. Lo, and behold, the first meaning they list is young fish.

English is an impossible language in which to communicate, let alone translate. So, when writing about striped bass, I will continue to use the word schoolies. And I will write a more coherent entry about the pitfalls of context some other time.

competing trends?

2010-03-30T15:18:00.000-04:00

A former co-worker tweeted this afternoon that Inc magazine did their article on teleworking without going into the office. That got me thinking. I've noticed recently that the media, both mainstream and the twitter/blog/social-sphere, have been paying way more attention to the "virtual office, distributed team, remote work, no more commute" trend than they have been to the trend toward Agile processes. Actually, I'd been thinking about it a bit since I heard a story on NPR a couple of weeks ago about telecommuting helping with work-life balance. When I looked up that article, I found tons of others. That confirmed my impression that this is a popular topic with the media.

On the other hand, I have not heard anything about Agile and Scrum (or is it SCRUM). Indeed a search for "agile scrum" on the NPR web site brought up nothing remotely related to software development. Yet Agile Scrum XP seems to be a much bigger trend in the actual software development world. Agile Scrum processes supposedly require physical co-location of all team members and daily face to face standup meetings. At one of my previous jobs it was absolutely forbidden to phone in to the daily standup (neither blizzard nor flood nor sick child was sufficient to merit using a telephone -- team members would simply notify the team they were not coming in). To reinforce this, the scrum area had no phone. The tech writer's role in an Agile team depends heavily on overhearing what the developers are talking about. You can't eavesdrop remotely. Additionally, we were working with another development team in China, who had their own scrum. Coordination was difficult.

I said "supposedly" above because I recently heard a talk by Julie LeMoine at Ignite Boston titled Virtual Work Spaces and Teams, which dealt with using avatars in Second Life to support distributed Agile teams. That might have helped with the China issue described above. I'm still not sure it would've helped with the eavesdropping issue though. I did ask about that afterwards, but did not have enough of a coherent discussion to resolve it.

So are these competing trends? It seems like Agile processes and telecommuting/work-life balance are mutually exclusive. Why aren't the trend-watchers noticing this and commenting on it?

Achieving Technical Writing Excellence

2010-03-24T17:39:00.000-04:00

While searching for some parts to upgrade an old Mac G4 for my dendrologist friends, I came across the iFixit site. Although I didn't find the 3.5" IDE/ATA 120 Gb internal hard drive I need, I discovered a treasure trove of information for DIY troubleshooting and repair. The procedures are clear and well written gems of technical communication and the folks at iFixit are proud of it. The sidebar of the page I was looking at had a link to their latest blog post: Achieving Technical Writing Excellence.

My take-away from the blog post is that even in our brave new world of technical writing as type-driven topic-based content management, writers are achieving excellence using the oldest tech writing maxim in the book: writing for the reader. It was thrilling to read these words:
"You always have to be conscious of your audience, for they are the ones who will be gaining the most from your words. Write for them — not yourself."

Technical writing excellence is not about clever use of tools. It's about communicating the information that the user needs. It's about the user. It always will be.

Technical writers now recognized as distinct profession in Occupational Outlook Handbook

2010-02-24T21:54:00.000-05:00

I was heartened by the news that technical writer has been added to the 2010-11 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH). STC has worked hard for this. It is a strange, though, that this is finally happening at a time when a trend is starting to emerge in which technical writers are being switched to non-exempt status and being paid hourly rather than salary.

The emerging de-professionalization of tech writing is just a trickle right now and mostly going under the radar. Most companies are still looking for either permanent salaried technical communications workers or for temporary contract (1099 status) workers. However, a small number of job listings are now starting to be for full-time, permanent, hourly non-exempt tech writers at fairly low rates. I noticed one in particular that was offering $27 per hour for a senior tech writer with 7+ years of writing experience and developer-level technical skills.

I am starting to wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg and we are going to see software engineers becoming hourly workers as well. On the other hand, maybe this isn't a trend at all. Maybe it's just a few employers on each coast who are trying to cut costs. Time will tell.

Reading from the User's Point of View

2010-01-03T13:31:00.000-05:00

As technical writers, we need to remember that the user is trying to get his or her job done. We need to see the task from the user's point of view.

Recently I was helping a friend troubleshoot some issues with the treatment management software used at the social service agency where she works. Staff members were having trouble with closing cases. They had been trained on the software when it was in Beta test but had no documentation beyond the training handout. Newer employees had not even seen the training handout. Fortunately, there were still a few copies of the handout around.

As soon as I sat down with the handout, I understood why the users were confused. Terminology was wildly inconsistent. It used the term button for command buttons, radio buttons, and sometimes tabs. Tab seemed to mean both the tab you clicked on and the screen it took you to. There were dependencies too. Some operations required that other operations be completed first but there was no indication of that in either the handout or the user interface.

The staff were asking "How do I close a case?" The handout presented the available options on each screen (or tab) followed by an exercise using them. Deep in one of the exercises, I found some clues. Turns out certain buttons did not appear unless you had completed another screen that was not necessarily actually required for the worker to close the case in real life. Using clues from the handout and some experimentation, we discovered that there was a simple workaround that allowed you to skip the unnecessary steps and still close the case. All that was needed was a short task-oriented procedure that told the workers how to do what they needed to do in the context of their agency's policies and practices.

Reading from the user's point of view turned out to be a valuable reminder of what it means to write for the reader.

2009-12-08T15:10:00.000-05:00