Thank you Neil Perlin for putting together an exciting issue of Intercom this month. Neil is president of Hyper/Word Services (www.hyperword.com) of Tewksbury, MA. He has 35 years of experience in technical writing, with 29 in training, consulting, and developing for online formats and tools including WinHelp, HTML Help, JavaHelp, CE Help, XML, RoboHelp, Flare, and others now long gone. Neil is Adobe-certified for RoboHelp, MadCap-certified in Flare and Mimic, and ViziApps-certified for the ViziApps Studio app development platform. He is an STC Fellow and the founder and manager of the Beyond the Bleeding Edge stem at the STC Summit.
April 2014 Intercom focuses on The Bleeding Edge—a title formed as an allusion to the similar terms leading edge and cutting edge. Bleeding edge tends to imply advancement at a risk of metaphorically cutting until bleeding because of the newness of the software or other technology. A technology may also be considered bleeding edge where it contains a degree of risk, or, more generally, where there is a potential downside to early adoption, such as a lack of consensus on whether the technology is here to stay, whether it has been properly tested, or whether industry is resistant to adoption of said technology. Take Google Glass as one example from this issue—it has been heavily criticized in the press, but many users and businesses are embracing it nevertheless.
All of the articles in the issue emphasize the ways in which technical communication work has changed as a result of the bleeding edge, whether via new tools or emerging communications methods or the advancement of the Web. Regardless of the reasons, it is clear in reading these articles that technical communication work is as important as ever. Whatever their industry, technical communicators will find much opportunity here: via the mobile Web, multi-screen content authoring, wearable technology like Google Glass, adaptive and responsive design, eBooks, analytics, and gamification.
I plan to continue to publish articles on bleeding edge topics in future issues of Intercom. If you see a bleeding edge topic we’re missing and want us to focus on it, please let me know!
—Liz Pohland
