Quality of Communication

Although technically, e-mail (with or without a hyphen) and its even faster cousins, IM and text messaging, make communicating across time and distance a breeze, it's still the quality of the communication that counts. [via Wired]

Write to me: Sumank[at]gmail[dot]com

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Death to Caps Lock

"The antagonism toward the Caps Lock key extends beyond its misuse by 13-year-old trolls and naive users. Caps Lock is also responsible for failed entries of passwords and other case-sensitive phrases. Users of word processors are forced to retype any text that was entered with Caps Lock accidentally turned on." [via Wired]

Write to me: Sumank[at]gmail[dot]com

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A Comma Worth $2.13 Million

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation. [Read More]

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e-learning 2.0 - how Web technologies are shaping education

Written by Steve O'Hear and edited by Richard MacManus. This is a two-part series in which Steve will explore how Web technologies are being used in education. Read on!

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Technical Writers of India (TWIN) Portal Launch Today!

Yours truly will be talking at this event. I was responsible for implementing the CMS (Drupal). Be there if this piques your interest.
Start: 2006-06-10 16:00
End: 2006-06-10 18:30
Timezone: Indian
Where: Nahar Heritage, St.Marks Road, Bangalore
When: 10th June (TODAY!) between 4 and 6:30 P.M.

Event sponsor: Interwoven Inc.

Agenda of the event:

a) Welcome - Sandeep Balakrishna (TWIN Admin)

b) Formal launch of the TWIN community/portal - Mr.John Thomas John is the Vice Dean at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media. He has 34 years of experience in journalism in India at Deccan Herald, Indian Express, Statesman and Vijay Times, and Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Business Times abroad. His past work has taken him through a variety of roles from sub-editor, reporter, foreign correspondent, news service head, commentary and editorial writer to being a special projects man and media technology evangelist. He has also had brief academic involvement with two other journalism colleges in India, in addition to his recent part-time association with IIJNM. For more information, please check out http://www.iijnm.org/pro-faculty.html#john

c) About the implementation and the CMS, includes a demo of the portal - Pradeep Vasudev and Suman Kumar

d) How TWIN has evolved as a community - a few senior technical writers

e) Recognitions

This event is free for all and entry is purely first-come-first-serve.

Write to me: Sumank[at]gmail[dot]com

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One Billion Users and Counting

Via Useit.com:Somewhere in 2005 the billionth user of the Internet logged on. Jakob says it could be someone from Shanghai. 36% of the Internet users are from Aisa. 24% are from Europe. Only 23% are from North America.
Now, you tell me who should control the Internet? And who actually does?

Technorati tags: web, internet, usability

Write to me: Sumank[at]gmail[dot]com

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Documentation in RSS Format

Here's my idea for leveraging the power of RSS for usable documentation:

1. Create RSS feeds for documents/manuals and publish it on your support website.


2. The idea is that users that subscribe to a particular document's RSS feed will know when the document is updated. This is possible because users subscribe to RSS feeds using an ?aggregator (desktop or web-based) that polls sites/web pages to which users had subscribed.


3. Your users or customers now can access a particular document or chapter without having to visit your site. This, at the outset, may appear counter-productive but studies show that RSS actually increases website traffic. "BBC news site editor Peter Clifton says the site's RSS feeds delivered 26.7 million click-throughs in July, a 30 percent increase over the previous month." (Source: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/002835.php )


4. Customers are notified when a document undergoes a change without the intervention of e-mail.


5. As against mail-based subscriptions and e-mail newsletters, RSS is ?opt-in? and is free of perils—that plague e-mail—?like spam and viruses. Thus, RSS is a safe, secure, usable way for customers to stay in the know about your products and documentation.


6. By de-constructing a document into smaller, logical chunks RSS helps customers to access the information they need without having to skim through the whole manual. Most RSS readers allow users to search for content within subscribed feeds, which again offers redundant access to information for customers.
7. Also, RSS frees content from presentation. Users read RSS content using aggregators or browsers that use their native formatting. I guess most of these readers allow for customization of the format. What's the big deal one may ask; the deal is that users choose how they view your document.


8. RSS frees your 200-page manual from the clutches of PDF. PDF is not a friendly format for online consumption. And, if your document is a 20MB monster, it will eat up bandwidth and freeze your customer's computing resources. While PDF is excellent for print, it sucks online. HTML is an alternative, but it lacks the pinging/notification features of RSS and is a spoilt brat thanks to competing browsers and lack of rigid standards until recently. RSS standsout as a fluid yet robust alternative to boost your document's usability. It is gaining wide acceptance as we speak, and is fast losing its complexity. Gasp! Please bear with the verbosity guys!


9. Firefox supports RSS auto-discovery and subscription features (the orange icon at bottom-right the right in the address bar).


10. Internet Explorer 7 will have RSS support built-in. See related entry on MSDN: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280.aspx


11. RSS allows customers easy access to specific sections of a document and by boosting the readability of documents (because information is chunked in RSS) it encourages users to use documentation to solve issues rather than call or e-mail your support team. Thus RSS is one of the most significant ways to cut-down support costs and improve customer satisfaction.


12. Last, but most important, generating RSS versions of your documentation will not involve any major extra effort. If you already use XML to create documentation (via structured Framemaker or other tools), you just have to modify your XSLT to generate another output in RSS format.
    

What do you guys think? Have your tried it in your work? If yes, please share your thoughts.

Technorati tags: RSS, documentation, technical writing, communication

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