Month: February 2011

Getting on track

Friday night, a delicious dinner at Stravaigin then on to drinks until the wee small hours.

Saturday a leisurely, lazy lie-in then it was off to Custom Inc to get booked in for some ink (roll on 8th March), and a trawl round DFS for a new sofa (delivered in 11 weeks, yes, cheap and cheerful, but it’ll do for now).

Visited my Mum on Saturday night, she’s much brighter every time I see her, and she’s starting to get some movement in her upper arm. Still slow progress, but it’s progress and that’s all that matters. Her sense of humour hasn’t ever really left her, and seeing her giggling away really helps us all.

Today, I’m going to finish off a couple of things that have been hanging over me for a few months now. Whilst they’ve not been the main cause of stress, they are still adding to a myriad of things that have made the last month pretty heavy going. I have been at my grumpiest, and certainly not firing on all cylinders but I’m determined to get past all that, get my head in a good place (as much as it ever is) and, in essence, get this year started properly.

Technology vs Emotion

Random thought: Has the rise of (talk of) emotional content (affective assistance) been driven by the concentration, over the last few years, on technological solutions?

Single sourcing, XML, DITA, DocBook, and all the rest have (rightly) taken our profession forward, so I guess it’s natural that the general trends, as well as refocussing on the content itself, are looking for how to better engage with a modern audience.

The evidence suggests that that modern audience is Facebooking, Twittering, and blogging, and wants content in easily digestable chunks.

That plays nicely into the hands of single sourcing (chunks) and the idea of emotional content through connecting to the user, using friendly language to make the content easily digestable.

So, if you’ve already got your technology sorted out, why aren’t you looking at how your content is presented?