just write click

For the first time in history, there are four generations in the workplace. Adobe is working on technologies that bring elearning to the newest working generation. Adobe is hosting a virtual tradeshow in Second Life tomorrow, May 8. I can’t find a link for more information, but his slide showed it would be staffed from 9am PST to 4 pm PST. They want to welcome the new generation and meet their expectations.

RJ showed embedding video into PDFs - plus showing the 3D animations of a brake disassembly imbedded in a PDF file, very cool demonstration. It drew a round of applause, even. I really appreciate that there was no additional plugin to download - it just works.

Also demonstrated Adobe AIR applications. There is a list of AIR applications at airapps.pbwiki.com, and come to find out, Twhirl is an Adobe AIR application that lets you post from multiple Twitter accounts - a use case that my coworker and I were discussing just last week. What if you wanted different Twitter accounts to follow different groups of people? For example, I could have an ASI Twitter account and only follow ASIers, an OLPC Twitter account that tracks OLPC happenings, and so on. I did finally come to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily need to compartmentalize all of my online activities, I guess – the more of “ourselves” we put online, the bigger the overall picture that people can get of me. Just like smalltalk in the office, Twitter can be the smalltalk/water cooler area for “web worker” employees. Twitter is useful for conferences, also, and we’ve started a #doctrainwest tweme that you can view on the web.

Another tidbit from RJ’s talk is that Youtube dominates Internet video more than Google dominates Internet search.

More posts to come from DocTrain West, so stay tuned.

I finally have an exciting handful of stories from South By Southwest based on the really neat people I met. Yesterday I wrote about the awesome attendees. Here’s a story about Twitter used in a way I hadn’t heard of before.

At Tom Parish’s social media metrics panel, I sat next to Summer Huggins, who works in Austin for Hammock, a media company based out of Nashville. We chatted about Austin, how I feel like a tourist in my own town when I come downtown, and laughed about the Compass Bank building when she said it looks like a giant nosehair trimmer. (Yes, it does.)

When she left the talk, she accidentally left her digital camera on her seat. I noticed it and asked both the guys in front of me if they caught her last name so that I could try to find an email address for her in the SXSWi attendee directory. None of us could remember her last name, though.

So, I took the camera in its cute case to the SXSW information desk to be placed in Lost & Found, telling them that someone named Summer from Austin would hopefully pick it up. They said they’d be open until 8:00 and it would be kept in a safe place overnight.

Later that night, I started searching on twitter for someone named Summer from Austin who maybe just maybe had talked about attending the social media metrics panel. Sure enough, SummerH posted a tweet marked with #SXSW saying she had lost her digital camera! I immediately sent her a direct tweet, clicked through to her blog, found her email address, and sent her an email telling her she could pick up her camera at SXSW Lost & Found. Problem solved!

Summer was very excited and also noted the power of the Twitter and SXSW attendees! The power of SXSWi attendees was certainly not lost during the metrics panel, but this story has a feel-good ending to it.

I say I don’t listen to many podcasts, but I’m currently listening to Design Critique’s podcast with Gerry McGovern at the User Interface 12 conference. Timothy Keirnan was a MTSC classmate of mine and does an excellent job interviewing usability professionals for us all to learn from.

One of Gerry’s comments that really hit home to me is that Google’s entire ad revenue generation is based on 17-word ads. Seventeen words! I complain about the 140-character limit in Twitter, yet, lots of money is being made on seventeen words.

Also, they both noted that generally, web site design is so flat - rectangles and boxes are pretty much all you get. So websites should be useful and functional. And words matter. For example, if you are a non-native English speaker approaching a website for information, you’ll be more successful by recognizing the word “search” quite quickly.

I was also reminded of Harry Miller’s podcast, The IM Model of Technical Writing, about writing end-user documentation as if you were responding to a friend’s Instant Message (IM). Topic-oriented writing such as DITA encourages you to encompass ideas in discrete bundles - topics contain only as much information as is needed. From the specification: “A topic is a unit of information with a title and content, short enough to be specific to a single subject or answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and be authored as a unit.” Very IM-like, I’d say.

An enjoyable couple of podcasts, and quite appropriate for my current thoughts about the value of good writing along with good design.

I am enjoying twitter except for the fact that I think I’m quite bad at it. I’m annegentle on twitter if you want to add me and judge for yourself. Writing “tweets” with only 140 characters really makes me work hard. And then sometimes the end result makes me think the re-writing just isn’t worth it. Without editing, well, I just have to adjust to it.

Maybe my problem is that I always want to actually answer the question “What are you doing?” It’s right there above the post field and I want to answer it every time. But in reality, I think the more interesting tweets are clever, funny, entertaining, all in the span of 140 characters.

I haven’t mastered twittering but I intend to keep practicing. And reading all the good tweets I can get my hands on. Anyone have suggestions?

I have a fascination with the “live” sites where you can visualize what’s going on across an entire site such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or Del.icio.us. It appears to be mostly for entertainment value, although I’m sure that researchers and journalists have these toolkits in their toolbelt when they need a fresh take on a story. I find it also sparks creative ideas or sends you along paths you never would have found otherwise.

Here are some of my favorites to watch. Check out the screenshots for a preview of what awaits behind the link. The map-based visualizations are enabled by Google Maps geo-developers, and they recently had a conferenced named “Where 2.0″ (great name).

• Twittervision - I managed to capture one from Austin, TX, while I too was hiding from the thunderstorms that were coming through. Since there’s often a rate of over 20 Twitters in the time period that this algorithm uses, I only tried a few times to capture one of my own twits. This is the 3D version with a glowing globe that spins around and then marks each twit. Very cool.
  
• Flickrvision - This is the classic view of the flat world map. This particular picture is of a chipmunk and I apologize for the poor screenshot quality but the layout that I’m confined to won’t like even this size of graphics, so I encourage you to click the Flickrvision link and see it for yourself.
  
• LiveMarks - This visualization lets you watch the bookmarks as they’re being added by all users of del.icio.us. One of the neatest visualizations that I believe was popularized by del.icio.us is tag clouds.
  
• Digg’s API contest winners for visualizations - This screen shows Digg Charts, which isn’t nearly as fun as the winner, Digg City, but it looks so much like a dashboard I had to include it. BSM Dashboard offers views not of popular stories but of high priority
  
• These aren’t “live” viewers, but TouchGraph offers neat visualizations of connections between objects, such as books or movies on Amazon, or connections between “web 2.0″ or major retailer’s websites via Google’s related links database.
  

Wow, I think we need these types of visualizations for all the connections that BMC’s products have because we have done so many integrations to get the BSM story just right. I suppose Topology Discovery has the closest match to these types of visualizations.

I’d better tear my eyes off of TwitterVision long enough to post this entry… what visualizations help you with your job lately?