High-end and consumer UAVs

I recently wrote two articles for Gizmag about UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). The market for these small, maneuverable drones is really taking off (OK, pun intended). The CyberQuad is a high-end industrial model designed for surveillance in areas that may be too dangerous for humans. For example, the CyberQuad has been used to investigate a burning oil rig.

The other UAV I wrote about is the AR.Drone, a hobbyist gaming drone that you control using your iPhone with augmented reality!

Paronomasia, Writing /

Writer avoiding crash blossoms

I just read a great post on the New York Time’s On Language blog about misleading headlines. I’ve always loved those humorously ambiguous headlines such as “Man helps dog bite victim,” or “Local high school dropouts cut in half.” It turns out there’s a term for these bloopers, and they’re called “crash blossoms.”

Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.)

Check out the rest of the piece for more info, including the dangers of removing “little words.”

Writing /

I once saw a party gorilla do it

Great post on The Oatmeal called “How to use a semicolon – the most feared punctuation on Earth“.

The article pretty much covers it all and in an easy to understand way. Also available as a poster. Two opposable thumbs up!

Writing /

I made Gizmag’s Top 20 list for 2009

The article I wrote about Honeywell’s new Windgate wind turbine made Gizmag’s Top 20 for 2009!

The article originally ran in June, and according to Gizmag’s database logs it was one of the top 20 most read articles during 2009.

Thanks to everybody who clicked through to read the article. I enjoy the work I do for Gizmag, and it’s nice to be noticed when folks find my work interesting.

Tech Writing, Writing /

DITA 101 book review

I got a lot out of Scott Abel’s book review of DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers on The Content Wrangler — and I haven’t even read the book! I think Scott really nailed the progression of structured writing over the last decade or two.

… The personal computer, the World Wide Web, desktop publishing, … have transformed not only the way consumers interact with content, but these advances have also altered the way professional communicators work. … Technical writers and editors have been forced — like it or not — to move to a more formal method of creating content, often for a global audience. Gone are the days of the free-for-all approach to creating technical documentation products one-at-a-time … The advent of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and rapid adoption of topic-based content standards like DITA have forced [technical communicators] to separate content from format and end our addiction to desktop publishing. Today, technical communicators must learn to write modular, topic-based, context-independent content using a new breed of authoring tools.

While Scott focusses on DITA (the subject of the book he is reviewing) I would add Information Mapping to the modular tools and techniques that are enjoying a resurgence in the write-once-publish-many boom.

The modular approach to technical writing is nothing new, although the names of the concepts have changed and shifted. I remember HP’s writing system was based on modular building blocks of information.