Wikipedia to Add Editable Video Functionality
Game over. Print is on its way out. I just read an article about Wikipedia adding video functionality down the road that will enable people to edit videos.
I’ve been figuring that video is key, and that people would take some video already made, come up with their own version, and post it somewhere. I’ve seen such videos on YouTube – not for docs, but for other topics. Functionality for people to “annotate your video, edit your video, and improve upon it–in the same way people have been doing to your text posts” makes it a whole new ball game.
See the article in Technology Review:
Wikipedia Gets Ready for a Video Upgrade
Use of Flexible Screens in Documentation
Lately, I’ve come across two articles about flexible screens. One is for small touch screens, the other is about video.
What’s particularly interesting about the video flexible screens is that the article in Technology Review states that there is a possibility that such screens could be “worn on wrists, and plastered on clothes.” Now imagine this for docs: what if, perhaps, you are working in a manufacturing facility and need some instructions on how to run a machine or something. What if you could just push a button on your sleeve and see a video about how to complete that task. Or who knows what else there might be? Could we really have video docs on our sleeves? The article doesn’t give much detail about types of information, but imagine the possibilities…(http://beta.technologyreview.com/computing/22758)
The other article, also from Technology Review, is about small, flexible touch screens. Perhaps you could have a device that fits in your back pocket that maybe could have an online quick reference guide on it? Or other instructions? Docs have to be designed with small devices in mind. (See link in the “A New Doc Strategy” post.)
Let’s Reinvent Technical Writing
More and more, I think it’s time to discard main approaches to tech writing and come up with new methodologies. The world and technology is changing so much that I think it’s time to start fresh. Just as sometimes when you’re working on a sentence and you tweak it and change it, but it’s still not quite right, and you finally just drop it and come up with something different. Perhaps it’s time to drop existing methodologies and develop something new instead of trying to tweak what’s there to fit what’s happening now. Perhaps the old methods no longer work.
The old print book model won’t do any longer. While I realize that there has been movement away from that for a while, I think that more is needed.
Let’s toss everything out and see what we can develop. Let’s use the modes of delivery that are out there now and pretend that books and their chapter formats don’t exist, online or otherwise – and that screens will remain small. Let’s cut content even shorter (using the 140-character limit in Twitter as an example). Let’s think more about how people are going to create and access content and plan accordingly.
More and more, I think that databases are key. So I’m going to start a section about that. It’s time to move forward.