Sunday, February 11, 2007

Technical Writing and Web 2.0

The theme for the January issue of Intercom was technical writing and Web 2.0. The best articles were "Writing and Web 2.0," "Podcasting: A New Layer of Communication," and "Using Wikis."

In "Writing and Web 2.0," Keith Hoffman discussed social networking, AJAX-based web sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS, as well as web-based word processing. There are several items in his list of "Suggested Readings" that I'd like to look at.

The authors of "Using Wikis," Brenda Huettner and Char James-Tanny, along with M. Katherine Brown, have used a wiki, It's a Wiki Wacky World, to write a book titled Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools. I bought a copy of their book, along with copies of Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration by Jane Klobas, which I've already read, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Change Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

These should be useful for the formal report assignment I'm planning for my technical writing class.

I decided that to find time to read these books and others related to my work, I had to stop reading the murder mysteries I was getting from the library.