ITauthor

When you’re recording screencasts, a lot of people think about microphones, and focus on the technical setup behind your sound. But really, your audio starts with the vocal cords in your larynx, the upper part of your throat.  Your voice is your main instrument, not the microphone. (Here’s a picture of some vocal cords.) One of [...]

Here’s a question and answer writeup that I have had squirreled away for a while. Q: You recently published a book entitled “Conversation and Community“. If you could pick just one thing from your book about interacting with the community, what would it be? A: I actually blame Whurley and Michael Cote’ for getting me interested in [...]

MadCap Software today released Flare V6, and it is pretty cool. I’m still working on a post to give you the details to help you decide if you should upgrade your existing Flare project to V6 (which I’ve been previewing for about a month), but alas, with work deadlines that post will have to wait until [...]

I mentioned in my previous post that we run a webhelp build of our content (a.k.a. our Knowledge Centre) on our developer community website, and that it was hosted in an iframe. I thought it worthwhile fleshing out the detail of that as it includes a bit of custom code some others might find useful. As [...]

Dug, you gotta love him! But I seem to get involved in discussion threads where it seems a cyber squirrel runs through the conversation and everyone gets distracted. It's a good thing we didn't have discussion groups in the old days.Churchill: Things are looking rough on the continent, the axis forces are massing to eliminate free civilization as we know it. This could be our darkest

We held our first doc sprint a few weeks ago, and it was awesome. Even the moderately stressed organiser (that’s me, folks) had a lot of fun! We wrote some very shiny tutorials. My earlier post was about the people and the results, so now I thought you might like to hear about the planning [...]

Elections for officers and board of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) are open. Today on Twitter, Peggy Harvey (@paharvey) said she wishes students could vote. I retweeted and replied, “Taxation without representation? If a student cares enough to vote, shouldn’t he/she be able to?” This allusion to the American Revolution was branded later as [...] No related posts.

How social media can help make you a better technical writer Does technical documentation need to be written by an expert? A long, but informative, article on error messages Some thoughts on creating visual help for visual code Something we all know: writing is harder than most people think An interview with Peggy Harvey about the future of documentation Related posts:Weekly [...] Related posts:

1. Weekly links roundup
2. Weekly links roundup
3. Weekly links roundup

One term of art in technical communication that just bugs me is "content". It's the term we use to describe information when we don't want to be specific about the format (text, graphics, audio, video).

The Free Software Foundation has an interesting take on this term:

... using the word ["content"] as a noun to describe written and other works of authorship ... regards these works as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. ...

The term “content management” takes the prize for vacuity. “Content” means “some sort of information,” and “management” in this context means “doing something with it.” So a “content management system” is a system for doing something to some sort of information. Nearly all programs fit that description.

My objection is more on the intellectual side. "Content" is just so vague that it could mean almost anything. It implies "stuff that goes inside something else", which could include, say, peanut butter. I think the term "content" has gained currency thanks to web designers, whose primary concern is the form of a design, with the content that goes into the form being somebody else's concern. But for those of us who provide it, the fact that content fits into a form is a secondary feature.

Unfortunately, none of the alternatives is much better. "Information" and "communication" are nearly as broad. "Knowledge" is also broad, and not all content rises to the level of knowledge in the DIKW hierarchy of "goods of the mind". I mention this merely as an excuse to quote T.S. Eliot's The Rock:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The best alternative to "content" that I can come up with is the slightly longer phrase "content assets". While this still relegates works of authorship to the status of a commodity, it at least makes the concept into a count noun instead of a mass noun, and implies that the commodity has some intrinsic value beyond filling a box.

I realize that "content" is already so prevalent that it's not going to be changed any time soon. But I still can indulge in an inward cringe when I read or hear bare-bones "content", and engage in a private crusade to use "content assets" instead.

Hi I need your expert help regarding two sentences. Can you tell me which of the two options is the best?

1. This device has a problem, but Windows cannot determine what the problem is. (100%)
2. This device has a problem, but Windows cannot determine the origin of the problem.

Video: Walking from Beijing to Urumqi! is a post from: Shanghai Tech Writer

Video: Walking from Beijing to Urumqi! is a post from: Shanghai Tech Writer Below is an awesome time lapse video of a man who walked from Beijing to Urumqi over the course of a year, taking photos of him (and his growing beard) along the way. He also blogged about his journey every single day for [...]