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Channel: The Web is a Colloquium – Every Page is Page One
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On Being Misconstrued

If you write, you will sometimes be misconstrued. If you read, you will sometimes misconstrue what you read. These things are part of the human condition. If you speak, you will often be misconstrued,...

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The Long Tail and Why Docs are Frustrating

It is often a matter of some perplexity to technical writers that more and more people seem to prefer searching the Web rather than looking for information in the documentation. It is perplexing...

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Desert Island Docs

There is a long-running radio program on the BBC called Desert Island Discs that asks celebrities what recordings they would take with them if they were going to be stranded on a desert island. Today,...

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Proactive Tech Comm

Traditionally tech comm ended when the product was released to manufacturing. We are slowly moving away from that outdated approach and towards an approach that supports the product throughout it life...

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How the Web Restores Civilization

There is no doubt that the Web is highly disruptive. Nicholas Carr thinks it is rotting our brains. David Weinberger, on the other hand, thinks it is fundamentally changing (for the better) they way we...

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How the Web Designs Information

John Carroll, in Nicky Bleiel’s recent interview in Intercom, suggests that there has emerged a theory that the advent of the Web means that information does not need to be designed anymore: I do think...

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Correcting our Publication Skew

Technical communicators and content strategists tend to have a skewed view of communications. We tend to think of communications principally in terms of publications. But publications have never been...

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The Value of Collegiality in Technical Communicaiton

Society’s attitudes towards written communication are changing. This is not simply a matter of the eternal development of language, though that, of course, goes on, and at an accelerated pace in any...

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The Key to Organizing Web Content is Stickiness

The most important thing you can do to organize your Web content so that people can find it is to make it sticky. Making it sticky is more important than categorizing it or placing it in a hierarchy or...

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The Web Leaves You Smarter, But Feeling Dumber

Is the Web making us smarter or dumber? Kath McNiff sums up the dilemma beautifully: I fear that the web is not making me smarter. It’s distressing my synapses and dumbing me down. Not because the...

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The Nature of Hypertext

Hypertext means more than just text with a bunch of links in it Hypertext is something of a neglected subject these days. Everyone is talking about the Web, but nobody is talking about the class of...

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Getting Past the Linear/Hypertext Hybrid

A lot of the information design being done in technical communications today is what I think we can fairly call a linear/hypertext hybrid. Perhaps this is a necessary stage in our evolution from static...

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Any technology you use should be “Googlable”

‘Any technology you use should be “Googlable”‘. These are the words of Bill Scott,  VP Engineering, Merchant | Retail | Online Payments at PayPal, as reported by the amazing Sarah Maddox. (I say...

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The Role of the Manual and the End of Civilization

An interesting article in Popular Science charts the rise and laments the fall of the manual. Instructions Not Included: What the Disappearance of the Common Manual Says About Us, traces the origins of...

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Good Enough Solutions Fast and Easy

It is easy to set an ideal for technical communication that it should deliver the best solution — the ideal solution — to every problem. Many critiques of Web search as a tool for finding technical...

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Search ranking and bottom-up architecture

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Bottom-Up Information Architecture Q and ADoes a bottom-up information architecture improve search ranking? This is another in a series responding to questions...

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Structured vs Unstructured Hypertexts

One of the questions I am often asked about Every Page is Page One is whether it simply means write articles instead of books. But while articles are certainly much closer to the EPPO model than books,...

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Taxonomy Won’t Save Us

One of the great hopes of content management is that taxonomy will save us. Developing a consistent and rigorous taxonomy, it is hoped, will remove inconsistencies from how describe and label things,...

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The Key to Organizing Web Content is Stickiness

The most important thing you can do to organize your Web content so that people can find it is to make it sticky. Making it sticky is more important than categorizing it or placing it in a hierarchy or...

View Article

The Web Leaves You Smarter, But Feeling Dumber

Is the Web making us smarter or dumber? Kath McNiff sums up the dilemma beautifully: I fear that the web is not making me smarter. It’s distressing my synapses and dumbing me down. Not because the...

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