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Crowdsourcing: Five Reasons It's Not Just For Startups Any More

While Internet startups have had considerable success with crowdsourcing over the last few years, including with its more serious cousin peer production, it's only recently that they've focused on creating the tools and communities that can be readily consumed by enterprises.

Exporting Your Writing from Google Docs

A short article that discusses how to use the bulk export feature of Google Docs to back your work up to your computer.

How to Replace the Learning Management System with SharePoint

One of the main reasons I chose to dedicate so much of my professional time on SharePoint is because it gave me the possibility to own the very site where I post and work. As a knowledge manager and trainer I have the constant need to keep materials updated. I also need to keep my end user engaged. Working within the constraints of enterprise learning and publishing structures means you have to send materials out to teams that then in turn publish the materials out, not always swiftly.

Shattering the Myth of Blog Niches: How to Grow a Huge Readership

One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers is to find a niche that you can dominate — the smaller the niche, the better, because all of the bigger niches are already dominated by bigger blogs. This advice is fine if you’re trying to sell a product to a specific group of potential customers, but if you’re trying to grow a blog with as big a readership as possible, I think niche blogging is dead wrong.

Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code

You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time. If you're curious about how to become a programmer, you can get off to a running start using tons of great free web-based tutorials and resources.

The Twenty Most Common LinkedIn Mistakes

You probably know by now that LinkedIn is a powerful networking tool for personal branding and executive job search. In case you don’t, get busy immediately building your branded profile, connecting with people, expressing your executive brand, and leveraging LinkedIn to full advantage. But don’t make these 20 mistakes.

Ten Things to Consider Before Choosing an LMS

Over the years I have spent many hours testing content and trying various different Learning Management Systems, and have even done some LMS (like) design work with Articulate Online. Over that time period I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about what does work well, and what doesn’t work well in a lot of systems, so based on my knowledge on the subject, here is my list 10 things to consider before choosing in an LMS.

Install Windows' Old-School "Help" in Windows 7

If you've installed older software in Windows 7, you might notice that .hlp-formatted Help files aren't recognized or supported. Microsoft offers a free download to read and manage those WinHelp files.

Professional Online Networks: The Bridge to Business and Information

The world is a village – a village with nearly seven billion inhabitants, to be exact. Through modern travel and electronic means of communication, we’ve come closer to our friends and colleagues all over the globe. There’s no serious reason keeping us from working for customers in other countries, cooperating with partners on other continents, sharing information with peers from all around, networking with all the people we have met along our path during our entire professional and social life, something, that has lately become more popular than ever.

You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners

"Content-rich" is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery.

How CarTalk Can Save Your E-Learning

You, as the instructional designer, are starting to panic — you know that you have limited time and resources to create this training, and the more content you put in, the less you are able to do with it. If it’s e-Learning, it will turn into the Dreaded Page-Turner, because you just don’t have time to create the 17 different problem-based scenarios to account for all of the different exceptions she’s describing. It turns into a battle, where you keep trying to cut things, and she keeps saying “but they need to know this!” So who’s right? Well, you both are, depending on your perspective.

The Power and Peril of Online Communities

Community is discussions, people, passion, alignment, emergent, support, connections, and relationships.

Three Tweets for the Web

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The new brevity has many virtues.

Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric

This article develops a rhetorical theory of delivery for Internet-based communications. Delivery, one of the five key canons of classical rhetoric, is still an important topic for rhetorical analysis and production. However, delivery needs to be re-theorized for the digital age. In Part 1, the article notes the importance of delivery in traditional rhetoric and argues that delivery should be viewed as a form of rhetorical knowledge (techne). Part 2 presents a theoretical framework for “digital delivery” consisting of five key topics—Body/Identity, Distribution/Circulation, Access/Accessibility, Interaction, and Economics—and shows how each of these topics can function strategically and heuristically to guide digital writing.

Dumping the Manual

I honestly can't remember the last time I picked up a user manual, an honest-to-god paper book of technical documentation. Actually that's a lie, it was just last week when i was tidying up. I picked up several user manuals and moved them to a lower shelf on my bookcase. So why do we still maintain a traditional view of how information should be provided?

Using the EServer TC Library for Course "Outside Readings"

Almost two years ago, I posted a rough note here about teaching my intro to technical communication course using the TC Library as a supplement to the textbook. Here's a more detailed essay on the method, which is working quite well so far.

Research Automation as Technomethodological Pixie Dust

Timothy de Waal Malefyt’s recent article in American Anthropologist details how corporations are turning to “multiple ethnographic vendors to compete for projects in bidding wars.” I am more interested in how such technomethodolgies are being touted. They supposedly offer efficiency gains through transformation, compression, or automation of research process. Technologies of automation have always been coupled seductively with cost savings, and this area is no exception; there are plenty of services competing for business by offering quicker, faster (often capitalized: FASTER) results-time is money and less time is cheaper. So what is cut to save money, and what technologies allow for services to compress research strategy and plan, research engagement and analysis, and research reporting?

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Bantamweight publishing is popular among those who feel brevity is a virtue. But when an entire work of art is bounded in 140 characters, even brevity has its limits. Sometimes, squeezing in a proper attribution through editing content can change the original meaning, when the edits unwillingly shift from cosmetic to substantive.

Model Based Heuristics for Constructivist e-Learning

Many e-learning applications and games have been studied to identify the common interaction models of constructivist learning.

Electronic Research and the Rhetoric of Information

This class will explore the social and cultural role of information. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the self and society shape and are shaped by our information networks, and will look at the structure of these systems. We will examine such topics as social and collaborative networking, information retrieval, database structures, tagging, and copyright issues. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to understand the function and limits of rhetorical choices within information production and retrieval.

Discovering Relationship Tables

Lately I’ve been creating context-sensitive help for an online application. As part of my strategy, I’ve been trying to follow Theresa Putkey’s advice in “Usability in Context-Sensitive Help.” In her article, Theresa recommends providing more than just the steps for a specific task in the context-sensitive help window. Instead, she says to show more contextual links, including answers to why, when, and who questions, because too frequently the user who searches for help may have needs outside the specific task you describe.

Do Business Communication Technology Tools Meet Learner Needs?

While institutions of higher education are enthusiastically embracing technology-mediated learning (TML), little research has been conducted to identify factors that influence student use of TML tools or determine whether use of them increases student learning. This study of business communication students at two universities found that (1) students tend to be sensing, visual, active, and sequential learners; (2) perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of TML tools are positively associated with perceived learning success; (3) learning styles do influence the students' usage behavior of certain TML tools; and (4) students' sensing/intuitive learning style is related to their perceived learning success.

How Embedded User Assistance Impacts Documentation

Embedded user assistance is only part of a complete documentation plan. It does not replace the need for other types of content. For example, embedded user assistance is not a good delivery mechanism for comprehensive concepts and detailed discussions of a topic with strategy and best practice guidelines. However, with a strong design, embedded user assistance can support the immediate needs of the user and provide a valuable, contextual link that steers the user into the other parts of the documentation as needed.

A Brief Orientation to E-Learning

What is E-learning? E-learning is a general term that refers to education delivered using various forms of digital media such as the internet, video conferencing, audio, animation, and virtual environments. A course delivered using these tools, combined with face-to-face learning from an instructor, is referred to as blended learning.

Best Practices for Online Review

Marking up paper is still the most common way to review documents, but online review is critical if you work as part of a distributed team. There are advantages to online review even if you sit only a cubicle away from your reviewer. Here are few tips for making your online reviews go smoothly.

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

Enabling Collaborative Design-and-Decision Discussions, Online

What if it were possible to manage the tendency of discussions to branch ad infinitum? What if it were possible to use those discussions to surface the important issues, identify the alternatives, make reasonable choices and, above all, provide a readable history of discussion that made it easy for someone coming along later to understand the basic architecture and find out why things are the way the are? There is an interesting coalition of technologies that could provide those very benefits.

Content, Standards, Learning and SCORM

Within content domains, the key themes of the information age are being adopted: Modularisation, specialisation, integration and interoperability. Our communication is changing in volume, purpose and channels. The emphasis is more on collaboration and less on expert-to-novice teaching. And there’s a stronger emphasis on openness.

Online Resources

A collection on links to online resources of use to technical communicators.

Web 2.0 in Schools: Policy and Leadership

This report documents the beliefs, perspectives, and practices of educational administrators which help or hinder effective use of Web 2.0 in K-12 education. The study collected data from nearly 1,200 school administrators on the role of Web 2.0 in American schools and was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Generational Effect on Social Media

In his first column for Intercom, Rich Maggiani discusses the onset of social media as a significant new form of communication, and how the youngest generation is now setting the tone while Baby Boomers struggle to keep up.

Kindle Content Design

Writing for Kindle is like writing for print, the Web, and mobile devices combined; optimal usability means optimizing content for each platform's special characteristics.

Fifteen Online Financial Tools for Freelance Designers

Efficiency and organization are critical for freelance web designers. Managing finances and tracking down payments is not what drew most freelancers into this line of work. Fortunately, while handling finances is a necessary part of the business of freelancing, there are many tools and resources to that can help to simplify things. These tools can be critical to keeping your business running smoothly and efficiently. In this post we’ll look at 15 online tools and services that can offer freelancers some help in the area of finances and billing. Most of these tools are paid, but limited free plans or free trials are available in most cases.

Comparing Featured Article Groups and Revision Patterns Correlations in Wikipedia

Collaboratively written by thousands of people, Wikipedia produces entries which are consistent with criteria agreed by Wikipedians and of high quality. This article focuses on Wikipedia’s Featured Articles and shows that not every contribution can be considered as being of equal quality. Two groups of articles are analysed by focusing on the edits distribution and the main editors’ contribution. The research shows how these aspects of the revision patterns can change dependent upon the category to which the articles belong.

Wikipedia and the New Curriculum

Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities. Just check the entry on Global Warming.

Let Them Eat Tweets - Why Twitter Is a Trap

Twitter can be entertaining, and useful — and, really, who doesn’t like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company? I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked.

Learning-on-the-Go: Anytime, Anywhere Access to Course and Study Materials

The key objective of Duquesne University's "Learning-on-the-Go" program is to break down the barriers that make studying and attending class difficult for adult students. "Learning-on-the-Go" will accomplish this by providing convenient access to course materials, developing technologically-supported pedagogical tools to foster student learning, and creating a framework for faculty exchange of effective practices in mobile education.

University Publishing In A Digital Age

This paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.

Building Your Slides Online

Some Web entrepreneurs have made strides by developing Web-based tools for creating slides. The four that this TechTip highlights have a number of things in common.

A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely

Provides advice on how to effectively collaborate with remote teams through communication, flexibility, sensitivity, and courage. He also points to the use of tools, such as email and videoconferencing, as a significant method for managing remote teams.

The Perils of Our Digital Communications

When 90% of what you do for work is based online, there are bound to be some glitches, and not just the technical ones. How do you handle the inevitable misunderstandings that come with today’s rapid-fire digital conversations and communications in the workplace? I’ve put together a few ideas for how we can all minimize misunderstandings or at least diffuse the fallout.

Can You Be a Web Worker From a Small Town?

Part of the promise of working independently is to able to live and work where ever you choose. Getting away from the big city sounds great, but can you really work remotely from a small town? Can the technology support it?

What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers' Decline

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.

Think Simple: A Fresh Approach to User Assistance

Online help. User assistance. That thing that pops up when you press F1. No matter what you call it, user assistance is an important element in the experience of a user. It can mean the difference between a frustrated user and a productive one. But is today's user assistance all it can be? Are we giving users purposeful information at the right time, in the most effective format, and ultimately in the way that they need it? Unfortunately, no.

Can You Teach Me Moodle?

Teachers are a very pragmatic lot and love to borrow good stuff. Give’em a good one in Moodle and they will come! If a science teacher has a great solution using Moodle for a problem or idea her class and say, an English teacher sees it and ‘gets it’ - you can bet the English teacher will at least try or ask how to go about it. And coming from a colleague and a fellow ’struggler’ is a much more powerful thing than coming from the school’s main Moodle peddler like me.

Annals. Computer Science Series

Annals. Computer Science Series (Romanian original title Anale. Seria Informatică) was founded in 2003 by the collective of researchers of Computers and Applied Computer Science Faculty in "Tibiscus" University of Timişoara, being an annual – in printed form - international journal. The journal publishes scientific research papers presented in the framework of the International Conference "Actualities and Perspectives in Hardware and Software", event under the high patronage of the Romanian Academy, as well as research articles exposed on the "European Conference on Computer Sciences & Applications". Annals. Computer Science Series is an e-journal with free publication of original scientific work in any Computer Science area, as well as its applications to other domains such as Mathematics, Economics, Technical Sciences or Medicine. We accept to publish, after reviewer’s evaluation, theoretical and applicative studies, wishing to offer to interested audience interpretations and analyses of most recent approaches and results in above mentioned areas.

Off Site Reviews: Six Ways to Exchange Edits

Coordinating a document review can be a tedious process. However, the task is even more difficult when reviewers work in another location and can't quickly exchange comments via paper. Fortunately, technology is presenting writers with new options for handling off-site reviews.

How XML is Enabling the Next Generation of E-Learning Systems at Cisco

Cisco relies on Elearning for much of its training. So much so, that Cisco has become one of the largest Elearning providers in the world. In fact, Cisco provides over 120 courses in 152 different countries around the world. The courses and related assessments are often subject to frequent change, and the content must be produced in multiple languages or formats, combined into different courses, or efficiently searched and retrieved from large volumes of similar material. Early on, they realized that in order to keep that content current and manageable it was important to build an architecture that scaled well and was easy to maintain.XML became a clear choice for the data format. Cisco’s RLO (Reusable Learning Object) data model provides for flexible data modules that can be reused in many different contexts and driven to many different formats.

Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business

You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with their Terms of Service.

Should Your Help Be Moved to a Server?

As broadband Internet access becomes increasingly available, software providers are minimizing the local installation of help topics and instead moving some or all help to Web servers. While this approach may alienate users who have no Internet connection or lack broadband access, there are many advantages. Web servers offer features and options that aren't available with locally installed help.

Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content

The failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Communities are different than audiences in fundamental human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.

The Emergence of Intelligent Content: The Evolution of Open Content Technologies and Their Significance

This paper traces the history of open content technologies in an effort to understand the nature and significance of intelligent content. What is illustrated is that a common thread runs through SGML, HTML, XML, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, DITA, and OOXML and that the evolution of open content technologies has enabled the emergence of intelligent content and with it a new form of organizational agility. This whitepaper has been prepared as a corollary to the presentation “Content Fusion: There’s a Piece of Data Lodged in my Document” at Intelligent Content 2009, Palm Springs CA, January 29-30, 2009.

A Question of Trust

Last month, Forrester Research released results from a survey on how much consumers trust different sources for information. They didn't include online Help or knowledge bases in the survey, so we don't know how well or badly they would have come out in the survey.

COMMUNEcating in the Spaces In-Between

This essay describes the authors' efforts to engage disciplinary calls for greater diversity through the construction of an international online community and conference, COMMUNEcation. They describe the commitments and goals of the community and conference, the construction of the COMMUNEcating space, and their encounters with disciplinary, geographically, and linguistically diverse scholars in their mutual exploration of global and organizing practices in their local contexts. The conference contributions and conversations prompted the authors to ask three salient questions around scholarly understandings of the Other and Othering practices of organizing and communicating across the globe—Where is the Other? Who is the Other? and What is the Other? The second half of the essay discusses these questions in detail and concludes with the authors' reflections on creating "spaces inbetween" through technology and an introduction to the multiauthored collaborative essay and conference product from the Scholars of the COMMUNEcation Network that follows.

The Impact of the Internet and Digital Technologies on Teaching and Research in Technical Communication

Technical communication practices have been changed dramatically by the increasingly ubiquitous nature of digital technologies. Yet, while those who work in the profession have been living through this dramatic change, our academic discipline has been moving at a slower pace, at times appearing quite unsure about how to proceed. This article focuses on the following three areas of opportunity for change in our discipline in relation to digital technologies: access and expectations, scholarship and community building, and accountability and partnering.

Where to Start With HTML Help

Knowing HTML alone is not enough to create HTML Help. What deliverables does the client need? CHMs (HTML Help)? Web-based Help (HTML files + other things that create the Toc, Index, Search tabs etc.)? Java Help? Oracle Help? Be aware of the limitations of some formats.

"So What Shall We Talk About": Openings and Closings in Chat-Based Virtual Meetings

Using the framework of conversation analysis, the author examines the structure of interaction in computer-mediated team meetings, focusing on the openings and closings of the team's four virtual meetings. The author describes how the medium, quasisynchronous chat (QSC), disrupts the temporal flow of conversation and makes beginning and ending these informally structured meetings difficult. The author finds that the team, as a result, evolved a two-stage process for both opening and closing the meetings, which allowed them to make consistent use of certain linguistic and conversational devices to mark possible transition points for openings and closings. The author discusses how these virtual meetings compare to face-to-face interactions and some possible implications for the use of QSC for virtual team meetings.

After Launching 300 Content Websites, These Are My Observations

To help those people who are considering going online and to offer some thoughts to those who already have a website here are 10 observations I’ve made over the last few months.

Paid Versus Free Content Is Back in The Headlines

Earlier this year Chris Anderson, who is best known for his book The Long Tail, wrote an article in Wired Magazine called ‘Free’. As the title suggests it is about the “inevitable move towards a price point of zero for content and services on the web.”

The Real State of The Blogosphere 2008

A few weeks ago Technorati came out with their annual State of the Blogosphere 2008 numbers. They revealed that 133 million blogs have been setup since January 2002. That means, on average, over 72,000 blogs have been setup every day since the blogging phenomena started. Staggering numbers!

The Pendulum Returns: Unifying the Online Presence of Decentralized Organizations

A number of smart businesses are realizing that the organizational characteristics that lead to their successes — such as agility, decentralized decision making, and fast growth — have made their Web sites unworkable through poor development processes and inconsistent user experiences. This frustrates any attempt by visitors to find meaningful information.

Could You Repeat That in English?

Frequently, error messages are totally uninformative -- or, worse, just plain wrong. Here, we look at how meaningful error messages can make it easier for users to correct problems without having to rely on technical support, and how poorly chosen messages can turn users into ex-users.

Eclipse: Don't Get Left in the Dark

Offers a detailed look at Eclipse—an open-source integrated development environment—and also discusses why it is becoming increasingly important to technical communicators in the software industry.

Information Management and Hazard Analysis

As a technical communicator, how can you “stay in the loop” throughout the life of a project? Frampton discusses the ways in which TCs can contribute their expertise from the very beginning.

Alternatives to Software Documentation

Software documentation such as Help systems and user guides may be the best method of helping your customers to use your software effectively. However, one or more of these alternatives may be a better solution.

FAQs: Do Better Solutions Exist?

Documentation sometimes contains a section titled, 'Frequently asked questions' or 'FAQs'. The TechScribe website used to have a page of FAQs, but better options exist, and therefore, we removed the FAQs.

Paper and Online Documentation Trade-Offs

This article explains the relative merits of paper and online documentation from a usability perspective. First, we look at the different types of user. Then we look at typical paper documentation and online documentation with respect to these user types. Finally, we present the relative merits of paper and online documentation for different user types.

How to Publish Without Perishing

One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines.

Ethical and Legal Aspects of Human Subjects Research on the Internet

Many IRBs recognize their unfamiliarity with the nature of Internet research and their lack of technical expertise needed to review related research protocols. To both protect human subjects and promote innovative and scientifically sound research, it is important to consider the ethical, legal, and technical issues associated with this burgeoning area of research.

Online Experiments: Ethically Fair or Foul?

Online experiments may be helping researchers gather more data faster than ever before, but those advantages are coming with greater ethical challenges--threats to participant confidentiality, questions over whether the participants really understand what they're getting into and the possibility that less scrupulous researchers could steal your ideas.

Reading Electronic Text

Reading text from electronic displays has now become a routine behavior in the workplace and elsewhere. As the computer replaces paper documents, the problems of reading text from electronic displays becomes increasingly evident. A decline in performance in display reading performance can be as high as 40 percent or more when compared to the same text read from paper. This report provides a review and analysis of recent studies of reading from electronic displays. Factors examined include not only display variables such as flicker, spatial resolution and image quality, but also the effects of autoscrolling, single and multiple word sequential presentation, color, font characteristics, and other factors. Of particular note are the effects of display presentation methods on text legibility and comprehension. Conclusions and recommendations for user interface design are provided.

Eight Tips for Writing Informative Overview Topics

Overview topics play an important role in creating a positive user assistance experience. Unlike procedures, which deliver critical information on how to solve a problem quickly, overview topics fill in the conceptual details and background "story." Here are some tips for writing thorough and informative overviews.

Comparison of Two Computer Fonts: Serif vs. Ornate Sans Serif

This study compares reading performance between an ornate sans serif font (Gigi) and Times New Roman. The traditional measures of reading speed, comprehensibility, and subjective preference were employed.

The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News

This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed, comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles. Twenty college-age students read news articles displayed in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line (cpl) from a computer monitor. Results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed. No effects of line length were found for comprehension or satisfaction, however, users indicated a strong preference for either the short or long line lengths.

Gallery of Onscreen Help

A collection of screen captures from online documentation, to permit technical writers and documentation designers to review a variety of visual styles.

Nine Trends in Online User Assistance

Whilst applications are becoming more complex, many people believe that online user assistance hasn't changed much since WinHelp was introduced with Windows 3. This is a misconception. There have been many developments in this field aimed at increasing end-user productivity and satisfaction.

Ode to Balloon Help

Just as a romantic poet might choose to pen an ode to a single rose as opposed to the entire garden, perhaps we should look to the simplest elements of usability for inspiration. Perhaps it’s time to recognize the contribution of a single humble helper. Yes, it’s time for an ode to Balloon Help. You may smile, but it can be argued that Balloon Help is not only one of the most ubiquitous implementations of modern technological performance support but it is also one of the most underappreciated.

Can Wikipedia Be Trusted?

The intention of this article is to open the readers eyes to the issues with trusting user edited content. Over time, the Wikipedia may balance out. Eventually, or possibly even now, user tests are being performed to see how much content is credible. Also, the academic communities could step up and decide unanimously that the Wikipedia is not a trusted body of information to use for research. Once this happens the Wikipedia will have to change the way information within their pages is handled to maintain existence.

Digital Politics: Engaging Voters Online

The 2008 Presidential election's brought a new battleground to the forefront of the political arena - online. The online activities of both Barack Obama and John McCain, and their UK counterparts, highlights the increasing reach and influence of online channels and seems to be setting a trend for elections to come.

Which Type of Online Manual is Best for You

So, the mandate has come down from senior management to "put those manuals online!" Now what do you do? As you know, there are many types of online manuals—but which is best for your situation? This article discusses the options.

A Life Online: Living Decentralised

As the computing world becomes more and more decentralised, people are realising more and more ways to free themselves from a single PC, work socially, and live a life online. This paper discusses how you can take to this new way of working, how you can decentralise your tasks and methods of working. It discusses the online applications you can use to replace your PC‘s programs, identifying both benefits and drawbacks.

The Publishing House: An Exploration of the Internet Publishing Revolution

This paper will discuss the state of new media before describing solutions to the problems introduced by instant publishing. Two prolific sources of information, news articles and research, are the focus of this paper.

Show and Tell: Building Usability into E-Learning

Most major producers of e-learning are not doing substantial usability testing. In fact, we don’t seem to even have a way to talk about usability in the context of e-learning.

Implementing Onscreen Editing: A Four-Step Process

Four technological or organizational barriers interfere with change, each leading to an implementation step. To overcome resistance to change, harness the energy of existing processes rather than trying to fight them.

How Does the Internet Work?

This article covers the underlying technologies that power the World Wide Web: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); Domain Name System (DNS); Web servers and web browsers; Static and dynamic content.

Exploring Human Factors in Virtual Worlds

Why are virtual worlds increasingly relevant to technical communicators? What human factors influence the design of virtual worlds? This article explores these two important questions from a technical communication perspective.

Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources

Google, the largest search database on the planet, currently has around eight billion web pages indexed. That's a lot of information. But it's nothing compared to what else is out there. Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.

Research Methods 'Beyond Google'

When “Google” has become a synonym for “research,” how should faculty respond? And if the answer doesn’t lie in musty books and stacks of journals, are libraries still part of the answer? The problem is near-universal for professors who discover, upon assigning research projects, that superficial searches on the Internet and facts gleaned from Wikipedia are the extent — or a significant portion — of far too many of their students’ investigations.

Knowledge Organization Trends in Library and Information Studies: A Preliminary Comparison of the Pre- and Post-Web Eras

Qualitative analyses were used to launch a preliminary exploration of the dominant knowledge organization (KO) trends in the pre- and post-web eras. Data for this study was assembled by searching the Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts database for articles that have used the term `knowledge organization' or `information organization' in their titles, abstracts, or descriptors. Taken as a whole, these preliminary results suggest that the content of the KO literature has shifted since the advent of the web. Although classic KO principles remain prominent throughout both eras, the presence of new content areas, such as metadata, denotes a shift in KO trends. In the pre-web era, the literature was related in large part to indexing and abstracting. In contrast, cataloging and classification issues dominate the landscape in the post-web era. The findings from this paper will be of particular use to those interested in learning about upcoming trends in the KO literature.

Bibliometrics to Webometrics

Bibliometrics has changed out of all recognition since 1958; becoming established as a field, being taught widely in library and information science schools, and being at the core of a number of science evaluation research groups around the world. This was all made possible by the work of Eugene Garfield and his Science Citation Index. This article reviews the distance that bibliometrics has travelled since 1958 by comparing early bibliometrics with current practice, and by giving an overview of a range of recent developments, such as patent analysis, national research evaluation exercises, visualization techniques, new applications, online citation indexes, and the creation of digital libraries. Webometrics, a modern, fast-growing offshoot of bibliometrics, is reviewed in detail. Finally, future prospects are discussed with regard to both bibliometrics and webometrics.

LinkedIn: A User's Perspective: Using New Channels for Effective Business Networking

Blogs, mailing lists and networking sites are much in the news, but how effective are they for business users? David Thew is Joint MD of an executive search and recruitment consultancy with an active need to identify and contact people on a targeted basis. In this article he profiles LinkedIn, the business networking membership site that has become a key channel for him and his staff. David looks at key features and benefits and also discusses areas where he feels there is room for improvement.

Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling

This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular its potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. It is argued that mediatization (developed, for example, by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz) is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the open-ended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling.

Web Robot Detection in the Scholarly Information Environment

An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots.

Access to Web-Based Special Education

Although, web-based distance education programs address geographical and cost barriers, they usually ignore access barriers to students with special needs (i.e. those with sensory, motor or cognitive disabilities). Distance education programs should ensure that conduits, and not barriers, to information are created. When planning a web-based special education program the following concerns should be considered: how to increase Web access to persons with disabilities by addressing access issues on both the client and the service side; how to optimize the use of innovative web technologies to transmit interesting yet accessible learning materials; how to increase community amongst special education students and teachers.

Converting Courses to Online

In all honesty, it really isn’t that hard to put an online course “online” and offer it to the public as an alternative or supplemental learning tool. What has given online learning the perception of difficulty, however, are those issues that were unforeseen, or, more precisely, unplanned.

DETC Member Survey on Online Learning

Survey respondents reveal the focus on change and growth. Almost every responding institution disclosed plans for improvement – new course designs, additional online options, or experimentation with various Learning Management Software. DETC schools are prepared to embrace the changes in technology and increased online delivery while continuing to provide superior education to the distance learning student. The results also demonstrate reluctance to abandon a synchronous, print-based method of learning.

The Content Pool

The 4J's Group Blog featuring, thoughts and observations on the many facets of corporate publishing.

Eliminating the 'End Game' from Electronic Deliverables

Once you start looking at your publishing process separately from your content and style considerations, you will have identified how your “End Game” impacts your production process. Then, you can take the necessary steps to eliminate it.

Digital Rhetorics and Writing

The class English 396D: Digital Rhetorics and Writing covers contemporary digital writing practices and rhetorical theories about those practices. This space is a metasite intended to aggregate class content.

Tooling Around: Favorite Web Sites

Here are a few of my favorite Web sites (a baker’s dozen). What are some of your favorites?

Literature-Space Vs. Cyberspace

Stories are so hardwired into our subconscious that it would not surprise me if we did indeed inhabit a story-space that is different from our web-based reading-space. This is a testable proposition. Do our brains work differently when we are in the middle of a story versus when we are in the middle of web surfing? I would be astounded if they were the same. But if that was all the happened -- different strokes for stories than for links, then the solution to exiting the web and entering stories is easy -- just read, listen, or watch more stories.

Too Connected: Utopias and Dystopias of Communication

The more you blog, the more people you attract through Google. The more search-engine-optimized your posts are, the more people find you. The more tweets you send, the more people follow you. The more social networks you join, the more people add themselves to your page. The better posts you write, the more people subscribe to your RSS feed. The more content you generate – in whatever form and media – the more trackbacks and links people generate about you. The more you produce, the more emails and questions you get. You become like a content cloud – attracting Google searches.

Social-Psychological Influences on Opinion Expression in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Communication

This study used an experiment embedded within a Web-based survey to examine the influence of contextual (i.e., face-to-face vs. online chat room discussion) and social-psychological factors on individuals' willingness to express opinions. In this experiment, respondents were asked whether they would be willing to express an opinion if they were placed in a face-to-face discussion group in one condition and in an online chat room discussion group in the other condition. Results indicate that print news use, fear of isolation, communication apprehension, future opinion congruency, and communication setting significantly predict willingness to speak out. In addition, not only did fear of isolation have a negative main effect on opinion expression, but this effect was significantly attenuated by computer-mediated discussion. Findings suggest that computer-mediated communication may avoid some of the dysfunctional social-psychological influences found in face-to-face interactions and create a forum conducive for public deliberation.

Time Well Spent: The Magazine Publishing Industry's Online Niche

This article compares the uses of the print and online versions of the same magazine by its readership. Combining surveys of the readership and commercial data from the publisher and web designer, the study examines how one magazine has developed an online publication for its readers. Group Leisure is a niche magazine which has been in print for over a decade and online for two years. This article analyses the usage of the magazine in terms of age, gender and modal occupation of its readers and examines how their understanding of spending and saving time on the magazine underpins their perceptions of its value. The results and conclusions of this research have relevance to the publishing industry and to the study of online journalism.

The Hidden Power of the Online Manual

Writing software manuals is boring, isn't it? We often think, "My software is easy to use. The user interface is intuitive. Why should I waste so much time writing documentation which nobody will read anyway?" Sometimes it's true. I've never read the WinZip or Internet Explorer manuals. Everything seems clear enough without further explanation. Nevertheless, even if your manual isn't being helpful to your software users, it may be helpful to you. Publish your manual online and turn its hidden power into a real benefit for your business.

Windows Software Help Files Formats

Are you still wondering which help file format to use for your Windows software? The selection depends on your software and on the information that is in your help files. Each help file format has its own unique features that may be useful in certain situations.

A Dozen Techniques to Improve Your Software Online Help

There are several main reasons why putting your software manual on-line is necessary. It makes your web-site attractive for search engine crawlers and therefore brings you targeted traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines. A good online manual presents your product as serious and credible. Moreover, if a user faces difficulty using your software and asks for technical support, you may easily resolve the issue by referring that user to a certain page of your online help. Simply give the page's URL. With just one click the user will see screenshots and explanations which will help them to resolve the issue.

Building and Managing Virtual Teams

Chris Nagele’s run Wildbit, creators of hosted Subversion app Beanstalk, for 8 years virtually. He lives in Philadelphia and his team is all over the world. So, he knows a few things about virtual teams and shares them in this article.

Workspaces, Collaboration, and Information Sharing — Interview with Emma Hamer

IT project teams often need to increase collaboration and communication, but they’re hampered by the cubicle walls and other physical silos they set up in the workplace. These physical obstacles force teams to have frequent meetings — which can be long and inefficient — just to keep each other updated. In this podcast, Emma Hamer talks about both physical and virtual workspaces that project teams need to increase their performance. She also outlines the rationale for teams to gather better feedback from users, project members, and others who aren’t domain experts.

Long-Distance Editing

Check out seven tips that will help you and your team remain busy and useful when you have extra time or gaps between projects.

Net Collaboration on the Cheap

Web conferencing without corporate support -- how to take advantage of ways the 'net can facilitate meetings in real life.

Software-as-a-Service: Changing The Benefit Packages IT Organizations Offer

If you work in the information technology industry, for instance, especially in the software industry, chances are you are accustomed to having the same days off from work as everyone else: bank, religious, and national holidays—and, if you are creative about your planning—vacation days that you take before and after these holidays to create an extended break, usually coinciding with times others in your life are also away from work and school. But, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model will likely change all that. And, the changes don’t bode well for family vacations or extended holidays with your sweetheart.

Eliminating the END GAME from Electronic Deliverables

While executive management may sometimes believe that anyone can write and that a technical writer's job is to "Just Publish It", it may be time for technical writers to look at what they can do to improve the "end game" process, which Porter describes as "All the steps needed to create the desired output format – HTML, PDF, online help system, etc. – from the source content." By taking a closer look at the publishing process, without regard to content, technical communicators may discover ways they can streamline the steps it takes to get content published and ready for the end consumer.

Making Connections: An Intercultural Virtual Team Project in Professional Communication

This presentation reports on an intercultural virtual team project conducted by students in two management communication courses, one at the University of Delaware (USA) and one at McGill University (Canada). The goal of the partnership between the two classes was to enhance students' ability to collaborate across cultures using a variety of technologies for collaboration, a skill they need in order to succeed in the increasingly global and technologically mediated environment of work. Each team, which included students from both universities, compared communication practices in a company or type of business that exists both in the United States and in Canada. Their task was to analyze how the practices reflect and shape the particular environments in which the businesses operate. During the project they advanced and monitored their work through different technologies, including blogs, email, and a designated collaborative Web-based workspace, and they produced several genres of documents reporting their achievements. This presentation first analyzes the advantages, vulnerabilities, and faultlines of virtual intercultural teamwork as students experienced them. We then describe conditions that help teams overcome the risks of virtual work and assess how well we were able to create these conditions in the courses.

The Growing Power of Internet-Driven Public Relations

Many people don't realize the extent to which public relations has increased its influence since the growth of the Internet. This influence continues to grow as does the popularity and utility of the Internet itself. Literally millions of new web sites are added every month, and they represent the most extraordinary way to target your audience. Today's journalists, radio and television news producers and editors all prefer to receive news via e-mail and to instantly access web sites to secure the facts.

Internet Public Relations and Messaging Can Drive Visibility and Sales

Today it’s harder than ever for companies to get above the noise and get their messages heard. Many consumers are so overwhelmed with advertisements about new products and marginally improved releases that they automatically tune out anything that sounds promotional. While it may seem like there’s no time to learn new tools and technologies, there are many sites that offer useful guides, quick tips and case studies on how to achieve measurable results.

This Is NOT Your Father's Online Newsroom

When companies first put their corporate and marketing information on the web in the mid to late '90s, it was mostly static content that was painful for journalists to use (horrible navigation, tough to download text and little or no images available). It's lucky for the corporate world that it took time for journalists to warm up to the web. Since we all know how gifted the PR community is in math, science and computers, it was no surprise that the company’s online publicity destiny was left in the hands of its IT staff—which was about as familiar with PR as PR is with the latest software patches that somehow magically appear on our desktops. You need a more effective news and information web site, but what will it include and how will you show the ROI to secure the necessary investment?

Business Development Through Online Networking

Recently, business networking has been perceived negatively due to its widespread use in the network marketing industry and the proliferation of “lead generation clubs” that focus on impersonal lead referrals rather than on building relationships. The surge in popularity of social networking sites on the Internet, however, has sparked a renewed interest in meaningful discussion and research on the value and importance of “networking,” particularly to mainstream businesses.

Talking Without Speaking: the Pleasures and Perils of Instant Messaging

Let’s face it, the honeymoon between you and your inbox is over. Finished. As spam and e-mail-borne viruses comprise a staggering 70 percent of all e-mail traffic worldwide, it is clear that we are all at our wit’s end. As our frustration with unsolicited e-mail has skyrocketed, our attention span for reading legitimate e-mails has plummeted. So what’s a conscientious e-communicator to do? As anyone in this business can tell you, silence is not an option. While there currently is no silver bullet to solve the growing e-mail problem, one technology that provides an alternative is instant messaging.

You Can't E-Mail Face Time—Employees Want Bosses Up Close and Personal

Face time. According to the fourth annual survey of the North American workplace, from Netherlands-based staffing organization Randstad, those two words best describe the most preferred way for employers to communicate with employees. The 2003 Employee Review is based on findings from 2,826 telephone interviews conducted by RoperASW, making it one of the most extensive employee attitude surveys conducted in the U.S. “E-mail is far behind face-to-face meetings as the means of communication most preferred by employees,” said Joanne Reichardt, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs for Randstad North America. “In short, everyone wants face time.”

Communicating Effectively in Intercultural Virtual Teams

Organizations with virtual teams have invested vast resources in recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce, offering cultural diversity training and providing the technology that makes the functioning of these teams possible. To ignore the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of these teams would minimize this investment.

Conflict in Virtual Communication

Conflict is an "expressed struggle between at least two interdependent parties who perceive incompatible goals, scarce resources and interference from the other parties in achieving their goals." We'll look at each of the components in this definition.

E-Communication Resource Links

E-Communication is quickly becoming the primary avenue for many individuals and businesses to distribute and access information. Understanding the legal and practical applications of e-communication is essential for maximizing the use of this emergent trend. Below are links related to various aspects of e-communication, including legal issues, e-marketing and spam.

How Companies Are Using Online Surveys to Measure Employee Satisfaction

With technology improving rapidly and costs continuing to drop, businesses are conducting more sophisticated online surveys. No longer confined to traditional paper-based surveys, companies are reaching out more than ever for employee feedback. These surveys include employee satisfaction, upward or "360" evaluations and the performance review process. Online surveys now contain open-ended questions, multiple formats and complex branching tools, giving businesses the potential to gather more insight about employees, corporate culture and business processes than ever before.

Using E-Mail as a Management Tool

We’ve all heard stories about people who clicked “send” too soon. But here’s a story you may not have heard. One of our clients described an e-mail message he recently received from upper management at his company. The message had some information about how to request annual leave and plans to landscape the building. The message ended with these words: “By the way, you have a new boss. The product development team’s new director will be James Yang. Margie Esposito, the former director, left last Friday.” Obviously, the cardinal rule of using e-mail as a management tool is “know when to use e-mail.” Some messages, like a sudden change in upper management, should be delivered in person.