Robert Desprez Communications

AMAZING TED TALK HIGHLIGHTS THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL BOOKS

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In a recent blog post, I wrote some of my thoughts on how I think tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion may change in the next 10 years. Based on the num­ber of com­ments post­ed, it seemed to gen­er­ate a lot of interest.

On a relat­ed note, I recent­ly vis­it­ed www.mytechcomm.org for the first time. One of the dis­cus­sion top­ics includ­ed a link to an online video that’s avail­able on the TED con­fer­ence web site. In the video, soft­ware devel­op­er Mike Matas presents the first full-length inter­ac­tive book for the iPad.

In the dis­cus­sion group, some tech­ni­cal writ­ers argued that this could be the future of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. In my opin­ion, I could see some of these tech­nolo­gies being employed. But I’d also haz­ard a guess that cre­at­ing these inter­ac­tive graph­ics is chal­leng­ing and prob­a­bly very time con­sum­ing. What do you think? Here’s the web site: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html

INSPIRING VIDEO OF WIRED MAGAZINE RUNNING ON AN iPAD

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When Apple unveiled the new iPad yes­ter­day, it remind­ed me of this very cool video—a demo of an elec­tron­ic ver­sion of Wired mag­a­zine that has been opti­mized for use on the device that every­one seems to want. Imag­ine if users could read­i­ly inter­act with elec­tron­ic user guides or help sys­tems this way? Inspiring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wwFbwHaP5tE

COMPLACENCY AND TECHNICAL WRITERS

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I’ve seen it hap­pen many times. Col­leagues who chal­lenge them­selves in their careers and nab a desir­able job with a sought-after title. Maybe the job is a Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er role. Per­haps it’s a Senior Tech­ni­cal Writer position.

After they set­tle into the new role and demon­strate suc­cess for some peri­od of time, they appear to stop learn­ing. It’s as if they’ve reached their goal and don’t want to push them­selves any­more. Here are two exam­ples I’ve witnessed:

  • The man­ag­er who just wants to write. They love writ­ing but they’re not that keen on tech­nol­o­gy and they avoid terms like DITA and XML, even though more and more jobs require these skills.
  • The tech­ni­cal writer who works for a large well-known com­pa­ny that is strug­gling finan­cial­ly. He knows the com­pa­ny is going through chal­leng­ing times but doesn’t both­er apply­ing for any jobs out­side of the firm. He feels secure and can’t be both­ered to be proac­tive. One day, senior man­age­ment decides to lay off almost every­one in the divi­sion, includ­ing the tech­ni­cal writer. He’s unem­ployed for six months because he is now com­pet­ing with all the oth­er writ­ers who were laid off. He almost exhausts his sav­ings in the process.

It’s not unique to tech­ni­cal writ­ers and man­agers. I know some­one who worked for years as a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant. When social media became more and more preva­lent, he dis­missed it as a fad, when it actu­al­ly became a require­ment for a job. If you were an employ­er and you had to choose between an eager can­di­date who was well versed in RSS feeds, blogs, and viral mar­ket­ing and an expe­ri­enced but expen­sive mar­ket­ing per­son who was still mired in the 1990s, who would you choose?

In my opin­ion, all of these peo­ple became com­pla­cent. They stopped car­ing about learn­ing and improving.

Why do peo­ple do this? Do these exam­ples ring a bell? Why do you think that some peo­ple fall into this rut?

AVOIDING INFOBESITY

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Christ­mas is here and it is a great time to exchange gifts and spend time with friends and family.

Christ­mas is also a time that is syn­ony­mous with over­con­sump­tion and overeat­ing. It seems that every month, I read some alarm­ing sta­tis­tic about North Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing girth. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of us are now clas­si­fied as obese.

Now there’s the term infobesity—the ten­den­cy to gorge one­self on infor­ma­tion. British jour­nal­ist John Naish used the term in his book Enough: Break­ing free from the world of more. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restrict­ing one’s data diet. There are com­pelling rea­sons. The glut of infor­ma­tion is not only caus­ing stress and con­fu­sion; it also makes us do irra­tional things such as ignore cru­cial health infor­ma­tion. The British Government’s lat­est sur­vey on our food-buy­ing pat­terns shows that while we are giv­en more infor­ma­tion than ever about healthy eat­ing, our con­sump­tion of fresh food has fallen…We are so wired to gath­er infor­ma­tion that often we no longer do any­thing use­ful with it. Instead of paus­ing to sift our intake for rel­e­vance and qual­i­ty, the dai­ly diet of pruri­ent, pro­found, con­fus­ing and con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion gets chucked on to a men­tal ash-heap of things vague­ly com­pre­hend­ed. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by get­ting more.”

Many of us are over­ex­posed to infor­ma­tion. With social media pro­lif­er­at­ing and smart phone adop­tion sky­rock­et­ing, it’s now eas­i­er than ever to read blog posts on the go, see what your vir­tu­al friends are doing, and check out the lat­est videos on YouTube.

As pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors, I think we should all be mind­ful of not con­tribut­ing to the del­uge of infor­ma­tion. For a relat­ed post, see Why Writ­ing Less Can Offer More.

WEB 2.0 and TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS

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Web 2.0 has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way soci­ety uses the Inter­net. Whether it’s Wikipedia, YouTube, Twit­ter, or LinkedIn, we’ve moved from pas­sive read­ers to active contributors.

Giv­en this fun­da­men­tal change, why is it that most tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors are oper­at­ing as if Web 2.0 nev­er occurred? Based on what I’ve seen, most writ­ers haven’t embraced the col­lab­o­ra­tive mod­el that is com­mon­place with Web 2.0. Why? Here are a few guesses:

  • Some of the web sites are rel­a­tive­ly new. Twit­ter, for instance, has real­ly only tak­en off in the last 18 months. Most writ­ers haven’t fig­ured out whether to use sites like this and how to use them in their jobs.
  • Our tools haven’t ful­ly embraced Web 2.0. The tools that tech­ni­cal writ­ers use don’t ful­ly take advan­tage of Web 2.0. RoboHelp’s new­er Help for­mat, AIR Help, does per­mit users to com­ment on a giv­en top­ic but it doesn’t allow writ­ers to mod­er­ate those com­ments. To me, this is “Web 2.0 lite.”
  • Slow accep­tance of social media by tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments. Mar­ket­ing peo­ple have ful­ly embraced sites like Face­book, LinkedIn, and Twit­ter. But from what I’ve seen, tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion depart­ments appear to be tak­ing a “wait and see” approach when it comes to lever­ag­ing these technologies.

Of course, there are orga­ni­za­tions that have tak­en full advan­tage of social media—more on this lat­er. But I believe these orga­ni­za­tions are the excep­tion rather than the norm.

Too bad. I believe that incor­po­rat­ing Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies into tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could make our con­tent bet­ter, fos­ter more dia­log with our cus­tomers, and change—and improve—our careers.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290