TechWhirl: Technical Communication Recap for November 2, 2012

It’s mostly by the numbers this week: 9 myths, 10 things about tech writers, tekom 12, 5 necessities in content, and 10 tips for tech writing improvement. We found great posts from around the web in content strategy, technical communication, and user experience, despite the storm of the century, 14-foot storm surges, 15,000 flight cancellations, and millions without power. Actually there’s quite a bit that doesn’t mention numbers, and it’s all worth a read. Enjoy….

The Father of XML, Jon Bosak, once expressed (way back in 1998) a vision for how XML would be used to achieve media independent publishing. That early vision is finally coming true, but not the way Bosak expected. Let me explain.

She checked herself in the mirror, straightened her jacket and tried to look confident. The knowledge that anxiety made her epilepsy worse did nothing to ease her mind, as she imagined having a seizure in front of the people she was supposed to be impressing. She frowned at herself briefly, then took a deep breath and stepped out of the ladies’ and back onto the foyer of Neunet Plc, the self-styled “supercomputer supercompany.”

In the summer of 1993, I had an enjoyable university summer job. The research interests of the institute that employed me included creating an artificial intelligence system that could produce automatic précis of legal judgments. The idea was that humans like me would create a précis by hand, by selecting enough sentences from the judgment that it provided a reliable summary. My selections were recorded, and the idea then was to use neural network software to learn from the work of the human editors so that the process of creating a précis could be automated. The researchers had uncovered certain linguistic insights.

Practical considerations still require that zombies be “physically restrained to protect both the dead and undead from the flesh-and-brain-seeking behavior we’re still trying to understand.” However, with the demand for skilled labor reaching crisis levels, more and more companies are transitioning skilled members of the infected back to work.

Bob Zebian brought a real life example of web analytics value to documentation teams to his LavaCon 2012 session. He offered the following case study on how analytics at Sterling Commerce helped reinforce movement from a book paradigm to an online paradigm.

Not only did I not eat the donuts; I went across the street for my chai. No sense taking any chances, and I needed a change of scene to think things through. What I’d learned about zombies was only reassuring from the perspective that nobody would be trying to eat my brain at work, and we wouldn’t be locking the doors and hiding out with shotguns and talwars to ward off the zombie apocalypse.

The whoosh of six simultaneously released bated breaths drowned out Cook’s next words. We’d been expecting the worst, and had spent more time during the last month helping each other polish our résumés than actually documenting the software. Nobody had noticed, lending an uncomfortable amount of credibility to the rumors.

Halloween weekend brings you a review of the TechComm Jobs spanning industries and countries. Search for the right technical communication job for you. We have technical writer roles in Durham, North Carolina, St Petersburg, Florida, Dallas, Texas and San Francisco, California plus many more locations.

Currently, we have hundreds of books and countless YouTube videos telling us how to survive the zombiepocalypse, and many of them provide useful technical and non-technical content. But what about detecting the first signs of next coming of zombies before they strike? Here are some signs savvy technical communicators should be on the lookout before it’s too late.