Wednesday, January 12, 2005

"Command Line" revisited Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has always been a great read. Of course, you don't need to look very far (say, the top of this page) to get a sense of my opinion  of Stephenson generally. Now this semi-recast history of modern computing has been updated, sort of, by Garrett Birkel, with Stephenson's permission. I'm working my way through it. It's still fun. Thanks (as always) BoingBoing. 1:45:24 PM    comment []

Blogs and wikis as documentation? It's a really short piece, but Application Development Trends magazine has an editor's column with some interesting ideas. Michael Schrage at the MIT Media Lab apparently thinks that someday "blogs and wikis ... will supersede FAQs and traditional documentation." Those ellipses are important, so you'll see the full quote shortly. He also suggests that these tools may wind up being the way corporate knowledge management happens. The full quote: Michael Schrage, co-director of the MIT Media Lab’s eMarkets Initiative, says a blog, "if it’s managed well, can be a tremendous tool" in the workplace. For instance, Schrage would like to see blogs that can offer pointers on ERP implementations that can even help a vendor. "I would say it would be worth a hundred million dollars to SAP to be able to get to two or three companies who use {blogs}," Schrage says. Schrage says blogs and wikis can make application deployment more effective. "I think that blogs and wikis, if they’re done with craft and care, will supersede FAQs and traditional documention" that has often held back effective app deployment, Schrage asserts. Unfortunately, the ideas are not fleshed out. They seem to be random quotes for a deadline-driven editor who needed a column. So let me provide a similarly not-completely-thought-out reaction. ;-) Blogs are wonderful things, and can serve as a way to get into a developer's head when a user is frustrated and dying to know "What was s/he thinking when s/he implemented this feature??" But the reason technical writing has bloomed as a discipline in these recent decades is because developers can't successfully write instructions for the user. Blogs are not the most searchable documents and are certainly not indexed so you can find exactly what you want when you need it. Wikis are another thing entirely, and I can certainly see into that future. Using wikis, developers and writers could each do their own take, and the user finds things on his/her own level. There's something of a structure, and hypertext allows you to jump around that  structure in a non-linear way if you need to.  The sticking point is distribution: must we wait until everyone has an always-on Internet connection, or do you store the wiki on the desktop, and send updated pages on a weekly basis like virus signatures? This could be the beginning of an interesting conversation. 1:24:38 PM    comment []