The Art of Documentation

Things are hectic here at The Art, but I wanted to share some really brilliant thinking of some of the brightest minds working on communication and new media.  I give you:
Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens
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One of the first steps in researching and writing about a topic should be to identify the audience and the purpose of your message.

You may be the most intelligent human to have ever graced our gorgeous green and blue marble.  But if you mangle the language like a well known national leader was prone to do, people will tend toward thinking that you are a blithering idiot.
Misuse of the language damages your credibility and reduces your ability to [...]

Social Media Time
Nielsen’s research states that 18% of time spent online is spent on social networking sites and services. At first glance, this seems a bit high – especially considering the figure is 3x’s greater than last year.
However, if accurate, it provides strong support to the reports claim that
“This growth suggests a wholesale change in [...]

On October 19, 2009, Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Founder and Chief Librarian, introduced what he calls his “BookServer” project. Why should you care? Because this is quite possibly one of the most revolutionary moments in publishing since the advent of the printing press.

If DocumentCloud lives up to its promise, this could be a massive paradigm shift for researchers and journalists.
From the Calais Blog:
The DocumentCloud initiative – winner of this year’s largest grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – has lined up some two dozen partners, everyone from Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal [...]

The questions most commonly asked about white papers are “What are they?” and “Why do we need them?”
The broadest definition of a white paper is a persuasive document that usually describes problems and how to solve them.
The term originated in government use, as an offshoot of the term “white book”, which were official documents bound [...]

Users have gotten a bad rap. It’s often assumed by developers that if they do a good job coding a project, then users should just be able to use the software without any assistance. When users fail to use the software (or hardware) as designed, developers throw up their hands and mutter about the stupidity of users.