What can Technical Authors learn from celebrity chefs and musicians?

We wrote recently about the Attention Economy and the challenges faced by technical publications departments. So what about other business sectors that are facing similar problems – can we learn from them? Andrew Savikas has been looking at some of the ways in which the Publishing industry, aspiring young musicians and celebrity chefs have been… Read more »

Trust is the new critical currency in the connected age

Trust is the new critical currency in the connected age.” This is a Twitter post by Scott Berg, Director of HP Global Digital Strategy. Assuming technical communicators produce highly trustworthy material, is their content becoming more valuable?

Which model of communication will technical communicators employ in the future?

About 44 minutes into his presentation, Michael Wesch talked about network size and the effect it traditionally has on the ways teachers communicate information to students. He said as the audience size increases, teachers have found they’ve had to get their students to participate less and follow more. He argued educators should and could move back to… Read more »

The “Google or Death?” choice for technical authors

July’s edition of Science magazine includes a study that shows scientific researchers are now more inclined to get their information from the Web (specifically, “quick and dirty” searches in Google) than from specialist scientific resources. If scientists are focusing on only a tiny bit of research – the bits served up by Google – what are typical users… Read more »

Feedback on our 1st Documentation Managers/Leaders mentoring meeting

We hosted the first of our peer-group mentoring meetings on Tuesday, and I pleased to say the event went as well as we could have expected. We’ve attended and hosted sessions for other entrepreneurs, but this was our first experience of running such an event for documentation managers.  The interactions and the nature of the outcomes… Read more »