Alan Brandon

This is cool. Researchers at Columbia University have developed an augmented reality device that can provide live, hands-on guidance for maintenance and repair tasks on military or other equipment. The ARMAR system combines sensors and a head-mounted display to guide technicians through repair and maintenance procedures while they perform the procedure. This eliminates the need to flip back and forth between a manual and the task at hand.

But here’s an idea: What if instead of leafing through pages or scrolling through an online manual, you could simply see your way through a task? Just slide on a headset and work your way through a bit of customized, augmented-reality education.

Check out the full article at O’Reilly Radar.

I just read a great post on the New York Time’s On Language blog about misleading headlines. I’ve always loved those humorously ambiguous headlines such as “Man helps dog bite victim,” or “Local high school dropouts cut in half.” It turns out there’s a term for these bloopers, and they’re called “crash blossoms.”

Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.)

Check out the rest of the piece for more info, including the dangers of removing “little words.”

Great post on The Oatmeal called “How to use a semicolon – the most feared punctuation on Earth“.

The article pretty much covers it all and in an easy to understand way.  Also available as a poster. Two opposable thumbs up!

The article I wrote about Honeywell’s new Windgate wind turbine made Gizmag’s Top 20 for 2009!

The article originally ran in June, and according to Gizmag’s database logs it was one of the top 20 most read articles during 2009.

Thanks to everybody who clicked through to read the article. I enjoy the work I do for Gizmag, and it’s nice to be noticed when folks find my work interesting.

In the last couple of months there has been some great discussion inspired by Michael Hiatt’s blog post about the “myth of single-source authoring”.  I love Michael’s summation of the nearly 20-year history of single sourcing:

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

In my experience at companies large and small, I have never seen a successful implementation of a single-source process. Like so much else in writing (and life) one size does not fit all. Sure, single-sourcing has its place and can be a great tool for some types of information delivery. But different audiences need different communications channels, and different channels need their own approach to crafting information.

Also check out Tom Johnson’s podcast and interview with Michael at Tom’s blog, I’d rather Be Writing.