karen.a's blog

Technical writers often talk about SMEs, but subject matter experts are actually (gasp!) developers, programmers, scientists, innovators, and product managers. Today’s SMEs are young, smart, and quick. This is not your father’s SME – this is the SME of Generation Y. The smartphone generation. The startup generation. The instant generation. These SMEs will not be impressed by your 1200 page PDF full of screen shots and explanations of self-explanatory features.

Here's a short summary of this week's top technical writing news articles from around the web:

Can programmers write?

The world of technical content

Technical writing overview and food for thought for experienced as well as aspiring technical writers and documentation managers.

Techstars: What startups are looking for

For the documentation managers out there

What is professional development? Why is it important? And how can documentation managers help their technical writing teams work more efficiently by nurturing professional growth?

Structured authoring: without it, you're spending way too much time creating content

What is interaction design?
Being attuned to the five dimensions of interaction design not only explains what interaction design involves, but can help technical writers relate better to their audience and improve their documentation.

Is crowdsoucing in your documentation future?
An associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute is designing crowdsourcing frameworks that combine the best qualities of machine learning and human intelligence, in order to allow distributed groups of workers to perform complicated cognitive tasks. Those include writing how-to guides or organizing information without a central organizer.

Today, Tech-Tav is celebrating the State of Israel’s 68th birthday by highlighting this week’s top technical news articles from the startup nation:

The growing area of smart cities

You’ve heard of open source, what’s open hardware?

How to get SMEs to share their knowledge: Technical writers who work with SMEs know the challenges. After outlining the difficulties, this article offers some tried and tested tactics to overcome them.