Trends in Technical Communication – Peering into the crystal ball

I’m starting to think about a conference presentation I have been asked to make later this year. Sometimes, our talks are about “big picture” issues, such as “what makes a good technical author?” or “what’s the value of documentation?”, and I’m currently considering whether I should talk about the future trends in technical communication. The… Read more »

Open source economics

In this video, Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. Is he right? Could the same economic rules be applied to the technical writing projects, where there is a large user base?

How will the Semantic Web affect user documentation?

Tim Berners-Lee said, in 1999: I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of… Read more »

Twitter revisited

Here is graph comparing the use of words in Twitter that are commonly associated with the field of technical communication.