Editor's Message

End of the Year? Already??

With this issue of the newsletter, we’re coming up on the end of 2011. For me, at least, it’s been an eventful year, with changes and challenges, some good and some difficult. I’m looking forward to 2012 – a year that will certainly have its own challenges, but hopefully mostly the good kind. (I wouldn’t want a year with no challenges – I’d be bored!)

This time of year many people create resolutions for the New Year. I’ve never been one for resolutions, I suppose because I’m really bad at keeping them, or even remembering what they are after a few weeks. Because the past year started with a difficult work situation and included a few more difficulties, I think I’ll remind myself about the good things from the past year and focus on the potential a brand new year brings. The local Presbyterian church holds a labyrinth walk on New Year’s Eve, complete with a way of to symbolically leave behind the negative of the passing year. I like the idea of leaving behind all the stresses and bad times of this past year and clearing the way for exciting challenges and pleasures to come.

About the Issue

This issue ended up having a blogging theme. I spent some time combing the Web for articles I thought would be interesting to the membership to reprint in the newsletter. Although I didn’t find suitable newsletter articles, I did find that there is a wealth of technical communication blogs on the Web. Many bloggers, writing about all different areas of technical communication. Most of the blogs have a “blogroll” that points to other blogs they admire.

If you’re interested in looking at some of the blogs, Mindtouch comes up with a list of the 25 most influential bloggers (you might have seen their booth at the STC Summit last May). This newsletter reprints a post from one of the 25 – see below. The list is well worth a look and a little exploration. I also found Mindtouch’s description of how they rank bloggers and determine which are the most influential quite interesting. I discovered there are social media sites I had never heard of!

Another short newsletter – two articles:

Roz Rogoff, a former East Bay member and past chapter President, now blogs for the San Ramon Express. In The End of the Tri-Valley Science and Engineering Fair, Roz wrote a blog post about the presentation by Nadine Horner of LLNL and our own T.R. Girill at the November meeting. Nadine gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the history of the Tri-Valley Science & Engineering Fair, and T.R. showed us some of what he helps students learn about successfully presenting technical information.

We also have a post from blogger Anne Gentle on the topic of how social media have become a part of a product’s documentation. She shows that it isn’t so much something that a company decides to do, it’s more that social-media-savvy users have caused the evolution of the help and documentation process by how they look for help. Check out Stories of Social Media Sticking in Unlikely Places.

Many thanks to Susan Moxley, editor extraordinaire, for all her careful editing. Thanks also go to Joe Humbert. For some time he has done double duty, or rather triple duty. He is not only the chapter’s Treasurer and our Webweaver, but until recently he has also published the newsletter to the Web.

A new year is starting, and I would love to see articles written by our members! The next DMV deadline for the Jan/Feb 2012 issue is January 10, 2012, but sooner is better. Send your articles or ideas for articles to me at jane.olivera@att.net.