Alan Brandon

Interesting post on Anne Gentle’s blog, Just Write Click, in which a technical communications student from the University of Minnesota asks:

Can Twitter really be used for documentation…?

The answer, of course, is no. Or is it? It depends on how you want to describe “documentation”.

Your customer is not going to look up CLI command using Twitter, but Anne sees some “documentation” use cases that could possibly be met with Twitter:

Sure, people are using Twitter for posting tips and tricks and … for Twitter chats…. Twitter can be used for the goals met with traditional documentation when the goals are customer support or service, engagement, adoption, research and feedback loops, …. So yes, Twitter can be used for documentation, when documentation’s goals align with some Twitter use cases.

I think most of those use cases fall under “customer support”, which is where your customers go when your documentation fails. (And “engagement” seems more like marcomm than tech comms to me.)

Twitter is closer to the telephone or radio than it is to electronic or paper publishing. And as such, it’s more suited to customer service and support, and marketing, than it is to instructional or reference documentation.

I wish they’d had this competition when I was in college: The SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge has teams of college engineering students competing to produce greener sleds without sacrificing performance or handling. I had a great time researching and writing this piece for Gizmag.com

I’ve been doing some work for nPulse Technologies, including this datasheet for their Dragonfly FlowMeter sensor. nPulse designs and builds high-performance network monitoring systems that can capture, record, and process traffic up to 10 Gbps. The FlowMeter is available now, and I’ve done some more collateral that will be released soon.

I just discovered Gabriel Smy’s blog and the first post I read was a doozy. The principal of “show, don’t tell” is key not only for website design, but for good writing and Smy’s got a great summary of why it’s important and how to make it work for your online writing.

You simply don’t need to talk at your visitors so much. Don’t write ‘click here to download the document’– simply write the name of the document and make it a link. Don’t write ‘to get in touch with us click on contact’ – simply put the word contact somewhere prominent and expected, say the menu bar.

Good stuff! And I can’t resist one more quote:

People are after something. If you’ve got it, give it, instead of asking them to solve your web site clue by stupid clue.

Over at Gadget Review I have a hands-on review of the Toshiba Satellite A665 laptop. The A665 is spacious 16-incher with an Intel Core i7 CPU, 4 GB of DDR3 memory, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics. I liked the A665, and i think it would make a nice high-end entertainment computer for home use. It’s not that rugged, so I wouldn’t get one for business, school, or chronic Starbucks use. Also, I hate the off-centered keyboard.

The last Toshiba I spent any time using was probably a T4600 or thereabouts. It had the side-mounted tiny trackball that you worked with your thumb. Ah, the memories….

Toshiba T4600Cs with thumb-ball (image: CRN)