the visual society

Do you remember way back when, in grade school, as an excuse for poor performance, students would say "well I'm a visual learner." And then I suppose sometime in the 80s or 90s it became accepted that some people have an easier time understanding concepts if they don't have to pull the meaning out of pure text. I always felt that with the rise of the GUI, we as a society became more and more visually oriented.

Anyway, this website, graphjam, is cute because it indicates how easily we're able to encode pop culture in visual forms. You could probably also say that visual data presentation is so ingrained in our culture that we've reached the point of parody. Interesting to note, often you'll run across a graph where the author either didn't pick up on the subtleties of the saying or lyric, or doesn't quite have a perfect understanding of the visualization technique.

more graph humor and song chart memes

cool tech

OK, here's a simple question:

What is (one or two of) the coolest, most interesting, got-your-blood-pumping, technology or concept you have ever documented?

Two of mine (working on the big bad production network, no not BBN): 

1. Multicast
   
2. Network performance vis a vis jitter, latency, and packet loss.
   

wiki this and that

I'd say that the days I don't visit wikipedia are rare and definitely the outliers. Have you contributed to wikipedia? (I have in 2 minor ways)

My post and question on the role of wikis in Technical Documentation is short. Let me first contrast between wikis and formal documentation:

• Wiki-Generally non-hierarchical collection of documents that can be edited by the wiki's audience.
• Formal Documentation-Rigidly organized collection of documents that can not overtly be edited by the audience.

Without laying out some pseudo formal frame work to elicit responses, here is my question:

The tech writer generally wears 3 hats: Content Manager, Editor, Technical Writer. Are all three of these hatted people cheering for wikis to supersede formal documentation? If not, what is the balance that should be maintained

I ask this as someone who generally acts as a Tech Writer and sometimes Editor, and in general doesn't really like the idea of wikis invading the realm of formal documentation.



*Maybe this three-hatted person is known as a Content Professional, but UGH on that title*