Find, Follow, Finesse, Feed: The future for technical authors?

A number of commentators have suggested that, in the near future, content curation will play a key role in technical communication. As more content is generated by users, there needs to be someone who manage this content and ensure users will be able to find the right information. Techcrunch has just reported on how YouTube is dealing with… Read more »

“It’s so intuitive, it doesn’t need an instruction manual.”

I told someone yesterday that there was one piece of technology that was so intuitive it didn’t need an instruction manual. I was talking about the traditional fixed wire telephone. It turns out I was wrong.  A quick search on YouTube revealed there was a major education campaign in the 1920s and 30s, instructing the… Read more »

Why you should write Help for your competitors’ products

At our “Developing your career as a technical author”  course yesterday there was a great discussion about meeting the needs of “Generation Y” – the part of the working population under 27 who have grown up with the Internet. It’s a group that makes up about 13% of the working population. We talked about the… Read more »

Ten key issues for CEOs of software companies

At Intellect (the trade association for UK technology companies) yesterday, there was a meeting looking at how UK software companies are faring in this current economic climate. At this event, a panel of software companies CEOs and directors discussed the key issues they are currently facing and the future economic climate for this industry sector. What struck me… Read more »

Lessons for technical communicators from the telecommunications sector

It’s often useful to look at the economic and technological pressures in other industries, to see if the trends emerging there are relevant to the technical communications/publications sector. In recent Blogs, we’ve covered the issues emerging in education, but the telecommunications industry might also provide some useful insights. Lee Dryburgh, organiser of the Emerging Communications Conference, has been interviewed… Read more »