I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of months now. I’d resisted it for a long time. People would invite me to join, but I’d always refuse. It wasn’t until my friend Robert told me he’d reached another old friend we’d been looking for through Facebook, and that I could reach him too if I’d join. Well, I finally broke down and joined and it’s been great. I should have joined sooner. I was linking up with people from throughout my past … old schoolmates, former co-workers, long-distance buddies, even faraway family members. 

I got to see pictures of everyone and their kids and grandkids, view funny videos my friends would post, learn everyone’s political leanings. Plus, now I have a forum to spout my own perceived witticisms. Seriously, it’s been really fun.

But I’d been wondering what Facebook was actually good for. I mean, I know it’s good for staying in touch with people, some people even on an hour-by-hour basis. But I was wondering if was good for anything “good.”

Ghost blogging means that someone else writes your blog for you. It's kind of like ghostwriting where you hire someone to help you on a writing project, but that person isn’t going to get credit for any of the work, just a paycheck.

Often in business, marketing and PR writers will spend an entire career working in obscurity with no byline or any mention at all of their contributions, while the business they work for claims authorship. Technical writers, too, work on writing very large amounts of documentation and never get public acknowledgement. No one seems to question the ethics of those practices. So why couldn't the CEO of the same company that produces huge amounts of marketing and technical writing use an un-credited writing source for the corporate blog?

The World Wide Web changed the world in the 90s, and now Web 2.0 is changing things again. Back in the early 90s, when I was first working on the Web, you would build a Web site, crank up a server, and anyone who came by your site could view the information you provided. It was a one-way deal. One party provided information; another party consumed it, alone but for their portal into the Web. Then came Web applications, software served up via web application servers with browser front ends. But it was still a one-way deal. The user would make a request to the server, the server would provide results.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, instead of one entity providing information and another single entity consuming it, now lots of different people can be contributors AND consumers on a single site ... and it doesn't have to be just information either. It can be almost any form of data. Not only can the data be shared; it can also be processed. When users submit data to a web site for processing, it's called cloud computing, or Software as a Service (SaaS). When lots of people compete to contribute solutions to a problem the Web site is dedicated to solving, it's called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the hottest new software development technique and currently is at the forefront of the next wave of commercial software development. And cloud computing may be the solution to providing user assistance in a crowdsourcing world.

A couple of years ago, while I was still at my former employer, I thought I'd seen every problem I would ever encounter in software user assistance -- at least twice -- and had a pat solution for every one of them. As an almost 20-year veteran in software startups, with five companies under my belt, I thought I'd seen it all. And just when I was starting to feel pretty smug about my skills, I was hit with two of the biggest challenges I'd seen since learning single sourcing for a standards project at Tivoli back in the early 90s: how to provide user assistance (UA) for a new open-source product our company was sponsoring, and how to provide user assistance for our commercial product using the Agile development process after having used a waterfall process for almost five years.

If so, it might be time to start thinking about one. Often, product user assistance is the last thing on a Product or Development Manager's mind. You're trying to get a release out in time to capture your market before your competitor does, and the tech writer is working on the online help files that describe how to use the product interface. As far as you know, everything is going fine.

Anti-Tech Writer, huh? People have asked, "Are you really anti-tech writer?" And the answer is yes, but ...