Rethinking technical communications, rethinking Technical Authors

Our June newlsetter contains a links to a flurry of articles on rethinking technical communications. We’ve added comments to a number of these articles, and I thought it might be worth summarising our thoughts on the likely future for technical communication. Today, many products are not always “technical” A lot of technology today is part… Read more »

A help system with 3 million readers, 800K edits and 3K comments

At this moment, Autodesk’s Web based Help system statistics stand at: 3,166,604 visitors (since 1 Feb 2011) 31,268 registered users 388,517 pages 4914 videos 3,282 comments 815,966 page edits 2,333,219 all contributions More at  Irregular Enterprise Would you like your Help system achieve similar results?

Is re-using content a good or a bad thing to do?

Today’s BBC News Web site has a piece on Ofsted re-using sentences in more than one school inspection report: An investigation has begun into claims that Ofsted approved “cut and paste” inspection reports using identical sentences and phrases…both reports say: “Some teachers do not plan learning for pupils at their different levels of ability and… Read more »

Content doesn’t matter? Don’t tell Coca Cola!

If you’re not sure the value of content and writing, take a look at this video from Coca Cola. Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company describes the challenge of content creation to Coca Cola and why it is so important to them. The terminology Jonathan uses in the… Read more »

How software users become champions

Matthew Syed is a British sports journalist and former three times Commonwealth Games gold medallist, who has been investigating what is needed to make people excellent at doing any task involving complexity. He argues that natural talent, your genes, are far less important than many people think. What’s important is practising what you can’t quite do…. Read more »