A couple of years ago, I was using RoboHelp X5, a help authoring tool (HAT) that was several years old. In the software industry, letting your product go that long out of date is bad for business. RoboHelp still had a lot of users for a couple of reasons: Many had used RoboHelp and its predecessors for years, and there weren’t very many alternatives.

Macromedia had shelved RoboHelp and disbanded the product management team and RoboHelp developers in 2005. Mike Hamilton, the product manager, left about that same time. On the Internet, Hamilton criticized Macromedia, and by extension Adobe Systems, who had purchased Macromedia. He announced his joining a new company, MadCap Software, and that they would be releasing Flare, their flagship product and new HAT.

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After hearing about the kerfuffle around Sarah Lacy’s interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg (I read about it first on Tom’s blog), I finally watched some of the interview yesterday. Interviewing is an important skill for technical communicators, who spend much of their time gathering information, so that is the approach Tom took.

Lacy did talk too much, I think, but one of the things that jumped out at me in the interview is that she teased Zuckerburg for writing ideas down by hand in books. I do that myself, so I don’t know why someone who likes and uses computers can’t do things the old-fashioned way sometimes. For me, writing things down by hand helps the ideas feel more personal because they’re in my handwriting. I feel more connected to my ideas.

On the other hand, I tend to do that more for creative pursuits, not for technical writing projects, where handwriting equates to inefficiency.

I’ve just finished reading some Middle Eastern mythology, mostly from the Sumerians and Babylonians. Not the most uplifting stuff, what with gods intermarrying and trying to overthrow each other. The myths we do have from those areas were fragments found written in cuneiform on clay tablets that are a few thousand years old.

Not much else was left behind by these civilizations: some deeply buried building foundations, the practice of irrigation, and so forth. Powerful societies have come and gone throughout the ages. It is interesting to me that of the few things that last, writing is a prominent one, and it is the writing that scholars rely upon to piece together a picture of these societies.

The ancient priests and scribes found it important enough to preserve facts (and fiction, in some cases) by writing them down. Much has been learned about ancient civilizations through little more than discovering and deciphering their writings.

It makes me wonder what future generations, having nothing else to go on, would learn about our society through its writings. If all they found were newspapers, they’d find a bleak picture. Would they be able to access the myriad texts stored in electronic formats, such as disk drives and Web servers?

Obviously, we are living in an era where nearly all of the entire world is in touch, and I imagine that it would be difficult for an entire society to cease to exist without affecting the rest of us and readily leaving behind knowledge about it. The Internet and other technology through which we communicate so quickly has broadened community to the point that I doubt any of us could disappear as completely as some of the ancients did.

Still, I think it’s important for us to write as if that’s the only thing that would give future generations any idea about what life is like for us. Ancient civilizations may have failed to make enough of a mark to be remembered until archaeologists stumbled upon their remnants, but one impression they can yet make on us: A society that leaves behind no writings may hardly be counted to have existed at all.

The common perception that all technical writers do is produce instructional manuals isn’t totally undeserved; after all, that is where the profession got its start. While the field of technical communication has branched out considerably, a technical communicator’s job still involves giving directions of some sort.

It can be a little exasperating when people run into trouble because they tried to accomplish a task without reading the instructions that the technical writer crafted so carefully. Therefore, it stands to reason that the same tech writer would take the same care in reading and following directions himself. Given his understanding of the one who produced the instructions, a technical writer ought to adhere to the Unspoken Rule, which is to give deference to those instructions.

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When I told my brother that I was starting a blog and writing the first post, he asked, “What next?”

“The second post,” I answered.

Deciding whether to start a blog was, for me, similar to wandering through a bookstore while thinking about writing a book. There are so many blogs out there of every conceivable ilk that starting a new one is like letting fall a drop of water into the ocean. What possible difference could my drop make? Why would anyone read what I have to say when there are so many choices?

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A colleague of mine, Tom Johnson, has convinced me of the virtues of blogging, so you have him to thank for this latest expansion to the vastness of the blogosphere. It has been one of those things that I couldn’t put out of my head once he started suggesting it to me.

I asked, “What do I blog about?” The fact that my wife and I just sold our horse, or that our black Lab hops like a rabbit when we bring the food or the leash? You see that kind of thing out there all the time.

A blogger’s subject should be what he or she is passionate about, my friend says.  I can’t say I’m passionate about the horse or the dog. The answer’s pretty easy. I’m passionate about writing.

But a blog about writing? Isn’t that something akin to using a word to define itself? Or running your sprinklers while it’s raining? It smacks of redundancy.

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