The April issue of Intercom is now online. This issue is guest edited by Neil Perlin and has theme of “The Bleeding Edge: Emerging Trends and Technologies.” Below is a copy of the note from the guest editor. Take advantage of one of the many benefits of STC membership; read the April issue of Intercom!
In 1998, I began a session at the STC Summit called “Beyond the Bleeding Edge.” The session provides a venue for topics that missed the proposal submission deadline or were not mainstream topics in technical communication but still relevant. Since then, Bleeding Edge presentations have introduced topics like JavaHelp, XHTML, print-on-demand, and haptic interfaces. One attendee described the session as an “early warning system for tech comm.” The Bleeding Edge session continues at the 2014 Summit in Phoenix.
The Bleeding Edge extends new themes with this issue of Intercom. Seven authors have written on tech comm’s philosophy and emerging technologies. The topics and their authors are:
- “We explain things”—a tech comm philosophy for a nervous era, by Rick Lippincott
- HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript—the technical foundation of new online content, by Alan Houser
- Mobile—the PC’s replacement, by Joe Welinske
- Analytics—to learn whether users use what we create, by Massimo Paolini
- eBooks—the printed book’s replacement, by Scott Prentice
- Google Glass and alternative interfaces—science fiction couture hits tech comm, by Marta Rauch
- Gamification—adding play elements as motivators, by Tom Johnson
This issue of Intercom doesn’t have room to cover all the bleeding edge technologies. For example, responsive design has been with us for several years but only appeared in our authoring tools in early 2014. Responsive design recognizes that our output has to display on different devices and look good on all of them—be “device agnostic,” or from Implementing Responsive Design by Tim Kadlec (2013), “use media queries, fluid grids, and scalable images to create sites that display … at multiple resolutions.”
Responsive design probably includes mobile but doesn’t have to. Mobile is exploding to the point where sales of mobile devices have overtaken PCs (see www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/08/smartphones-outsell-pcs-f_n_820454.html). Just as tech comm inexorably went online with the advent of the PC, so too is it likely to go mobile.
The cloud has been penetrating tech comm for years with tools like Google Docs and is slowly but surely changing how we distribute our outputs and literally how we work. Topic-based authoring and structured authoring aren’t on the bleeding edge, but they’re crucial parts of tech comm’s future.
Why focus on the Bleeding Edge now? Technical trends often exist in channels, like a meandering river. But occasionally, those channels merge to form a torrent that changes the landscape. That happened first in the early 1980s when word processing software and PCs turned the typewriter into an antique. It happened in the late 1990s when the Web, browsers, and Microsoft’s shift of online help from RTF to HTML created today’s browser-based tech comm landscape. It’s happening again today with these bleeding edge technologies. We may never use some of them, or not use them for years, but knowing about them lets us forecast how they may affect our companies, which may get us involved at the strategic level. And knowing about them will help us guide our own careers. Consider some possibilities:
- Using HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design to create content that can be read on any device from a PC to mobile devices to wearables.
- Collaborative work with SMEs and other writers through the cloud.
- Acceleration of the release cycle as more and more projects move into the cloud.
- Using HTML5′s improved searchability to create content that can compete with Google.
- And, at the foundation, topic-based and structured authoring coupled with good coding and consistent content to support rapid and flexible output of our material.
The result of all this? Significant and fun new opportunities and a way for tech comm to get off the sidelines and have a strategic role in our companies.