Because the Internet has provided a way for millions of people to self-publish, the amount of information available has become astronomical in a matter of a few years. I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone who is at least casually acquainted with the Web.

The Bursting Dam and the Flood

We wonder why our users’—and our own—attention spans have shriveled, why our audiences won’t read the manual or help. I think it has a lot to do with what I’ll call the “information deluge.”

Think of how many ways we have to get the loads of information on the Web:

• RSS feeds
• Twitter
• Browsing
• Search engines
• Email
• Listservs
• Online newsletters
• Forums
• Chat
• Others I haven’t thought of

So much information is out there to be ingested and digested that we can’t possibly do it all. But we want to get a lot of it. Even when we’re not voluntarily looking for a bit of information, we can still be pummeled with it (such as flashing sidebar ads). Advertisers and others are trying to get our attention all the time.

It’s a constant battle for me in this arena. I want to be in touch with what’s going on in my profession, but then I don’t check my RSS feeds for a few days for various reasons, and suddenly I’m up over 100 unread items. I try to keep my list of people I follow on Twitter relatively low so as to keep the stream at a decent rate, but I still add people sometimes. The potential to be drowned in the flood is real. Or at least for there to be enough water that it washes over the plain and none sinks in to nourish the soil.

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I’ll admit it: I’m not huge on social media, particularly where they intersect with technical communication. I’ll clarify that statement. I use Twitter, I have this blog, and I have a LinkedIn profile. But I don’t use Facebook, Digg, or anything else. I’ve only recently investigated using a wiki for a support site with one of the projects I work on.

I think a major reason that I haven’t gotten excited about using social media in tech comm is that no one has shown me or explained to me specific techniques that I can use and how they can be effective. No one has provided me a list of criteria I can use to determine whether a particular project would benefit from a social media strategy as far as user assistance goes. If there’s something like that out there and you know about it, please point me to it.

I’m interested in having things like a weekly tip blog. Part of the trouble that we have in our organization is that the technologies that social media usually run on—such as PHP and MySQL—aren’t supported by our infrastructure group at this point. This makes a long-term strategy difficult because people change positions, so an application service engineer who volunteers to support your wiki at the beginning may not be around to do so in a year.

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Twitter has different uses for different people. For me, it’s primarily a professional development tool.

I follow a number of technical writers. I also follow the #techcomm hashtag. I keep Twitter open while I work (to this point, we’re allowed to do so). When someone I follow posts a link on a subject that I’m interested in, or an interesting link is posted to the #techcomm tag, I copy the link to my tasks list in Gmail with a few words from the person’s tweet so that I remember what it’s about.

I usually don’t follow these links while at work for a couple of reasons. First, I’m in the middle of working and don’t want to derail myself by clicking the link; second, the links are typically shortened, and I have no way of knowing where they’ll go (at least not with Twhirl, the Twitter client I’m using). I don’t want to follow a shortened link to a questionable site at work, so I leave them for reading on my personal machine at home so I’m not taking any professional risks.

It is a bit annoying, though, when you’re following a hashtag, and after one person tweets with that hashtag, a bunch of other people retweet. Then you get a broken record clogging things up. But that’s the price of following a hashtag, I suppose.

Out of the people I follow, @dmnguys is the most prolific poster of links to tech comm information and related subjects, such as user experience design and usability. Thanks, Scott and Aaron. I don’t read everything, but you give me a good variety to choose from.

Sometimes I post something that’s just a thought I find humorous. But most of the people I’m connected to via Twitter are technical communicators, so Twitter is a way for me to interact with people in my field with whom I may not interact otherwise. I probably don’t offer them as much as they usually offer me, but over time, I hope that will change.

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