Walk When You Talk

"Walk When You Talk" is the subject of an ad from !dea Cellular. There's even a Walk n Talk Meter that tells how many calories you could've lost if you walked while you talked on your cellphone:-)

While I am not endorsing !dea Cellular in any way, I will strongly suggest the "Walk When You Talk" concept when communicating with colleagues. So instead of sending an email or talking on the phone to a colleague who is in the same location, just walk down to your colleague's office and talk to him/her. This helps to:

o Get your job done faster,
o Reduce any confusion,
o Know your colleague better, and last but not the least
o Keep you healthy

So go ahead and Walk When You Talk!!

Understand your search engine to design better search metadata

Somebody commented that one needs an understanding of the strengths and limitations of search engines to design better search metadata and that you might even need to add search metadata to work around the limitations of search engines.
For example, if your search engine does not display the results for some specific keywords that you expect users to search for, you will need to add such keywords as metadata.

DITA Quick Start

Gone through articles and presentations on the web and got a half-baked understanding of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)?

Refer to my DITA Quick Start presentation for the 2007 STC India Conference to learn to evaluate, plan and start implementing DITA.

In this presentation, you will learn about the following:

• Structured authoring and XML
• Key DITA concepts: topics, maps, specialization
• DITA architecture and content model
• Authoring in topics
• Organizing content using DITA maps
• Creating relationship tables
• Conditional text and reuse in DITA
• Metadata support in DITA
• DITA tools, standards and processes
• Publishing with the DITA Open Toolkit

Am I a Doctor?

A few days back I got a frantic call late in the evening. Someone in the family was behaving as if he has lost his mind after being administered some eye drops at a hospital. And the call was to ask me to check out the documentation for the eye drops to confirm if it caused such side effects.

Websites like http://www.drugs.com give detailed information about medicines and their side effects. While these websites are never a substitute for advice from a doctor, I found them very useful on several occasions.

Getting Good at Life!!

You must have watched videos demonstrating the use of software products.

If you are wondering whether videos are available to help with the things you want to do in your day-to-day life such as using chop sticks, playing your keyboard, and zillions of other stuff, check out http://www.videojug.com.

Going Ga Ga Over Microsoft Office Communicator?

A lot of folks are going ga ga over Microsoft Office Communicator. Office Communicator is basically an instant messaging (IM) software that integrates with Microsoft Outlook and even phone systems to support IM, audio and video conferencing and a host of other productivity, collaboration and communication related features.

Office Communicator is just one more example of Microsoft's unrelenting focus on usability, productivity, and last but not the least, in-depth user documentation and support resources.

And it is one more reason why you must start thinking of applying the same focus to the products that you develop. And for that you need to understand what went wrong and what needs to be done. Here are two resources that can help you with this:

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity gives an insight into team dynamics that create products that "drive us crazy".

• Institutionalization of Usability provides a road map to set up a user-centered design process.