Tianyu Fang researched a long and detailed essay called Whose Domain Is It?, detailing the politics of the Internet’s domain names, especially the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) that you might not realize are actually associated with countries. The unexpectedly popular ccTLDs can operate like a tourism effort, at least in terms of...
Most of the Internet is held together by best practices and good intentions, and WHOIS servers are one of those. One security company was investigating vulnerabilities in WHOIS and got a whole lot more than they bargained for: Each TLD (the bit at the end of the domain), you see, has a separate WHOIS server, and there’s no real standard to...
The UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius: Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally. The Chagos Islands are also known as the British Indian Ocean...
A recent post from the American Alpine Club has me considering the potential duty of care that websites like AllTrails and Mountain Project owe to their readers. In The Prescription—July 2024, the editor Pete Takeda describes two incidents, one where two people were stranded due to their inexperience climbing snow, and another where one person in...
What’s next for you in your career? It’s tempting to focus on the bare minimum — staying employed — but identifying new areas of professional development or focus can help you grow your career and find whatever enjoyment you can from the capitalist toil that is an obligation of modern life. While I was at Splunk, Susan St. Ledger gave a talk...
Docs as code is a much-vaunted workflow and toolchain for writing, publishing, and maintaining technical documentation — but in practice, docs as code doesn’t deliver on its promise. What is docs as code? According to the Docs as Code page in the Documentation guide for Write the Docs: Documentation as Code (Docs as Code) refers to a philosophy...
After I published Should you add screenshots to documentation?, I got some comments from folks who prefer GIFs to screenshots because GIFs can more clearly show how to use a complicated user interface. I agree that GIFs are cool and useful, but they’re also MUCH harder to keep up-to-date than screenshots and have extra accessibility...
2023 has been a weird year in music for me! I discovered a lot of new-to-me corners of music, didn’t go to very many shows by my standards, and largely flitted between new and familiar artists all year. Let’s dig in… Each section of this post is pretty standalone, so feel free to skip around: Top artists of 2023 Hey...
Inspired by Matt Webb’s post 10 blogs for your newsreader, I decided to share my own favorite blogs to follow. I also use RSS feeds to consume most of the content I encounter, and always get sad when a site doesn’t provide an RSS feed to let me follow new posts. I end up following many newsletters through RSS as well, because I’m better about...
Most web content is designed to display with a strict hierarchy, tree-based or otherwise. What if it wasn’t? What does it mean to display content as a graph? Why hierarchies are common Why use something different? Serve multiple mental models Write better documentation Improve content...
Screenshots in documentation can be a contentious topic — some people really like them and think they add a lot of value, while others dislike them due to the maintenance burden and accessibility issues. As a technical writer, I avoid adding screenshots to documentation as often as possible. In my mind, an outdated screenshot is one of the...
For months, there have been reports on deteriorating search quality 1. As the quality of search results deteriorates, so too does an important factor that makes technical documentation so useful — its findability. In an era of web-first authoring and product-led growth marketing strategies, organic documentation findability matters. For some...
How you choose to make technical content available online sends a message about how you do business and what you think about your content and customers… 🌐 Available fully for free on the web: You want your technical content to be as easy to find as possible. You want it to be easily searched, shared, and copied. You don’t mind if competitors...
Heather Buchel’s post It’s 2023, here is why your web design sucks about the current state of web design (and web app design) resonated with me, especially this quote: “Design decisions can only be pushed so far to the left before we realize the system is broken” If you bisect design and development into different professions, you can end up with...
As a tech writer, I’ve encountered a number of different processes that teams and companies have used to add documentation to their product development processes. Some of these are intentional and others are incidental—but all are used to create documentation across the software development industry. At its most basic, the product development...
There’s been some discussion about the challenges of implementing LLMs, but I haven’t seen any comments about the effect a large language model-based chatbot could have on a company’s user community. Implementing an LLM-based chatbot seems like an excellent way to do two important things: Help people find information about your product Collect...
Products use machine learning and “artificial intelligence” to do things like recommend a song to listen to, offer a quick response to an email, organize search results, provide a transcript of a meeting, and more. Some products rely on ordinary data analysis to construct insights about things like your business performance in a market, or the...
I follow as much discourse around ethics in machine learning, data analysis, and artificial intelligence as I can. These are the resources I’ve used over the years to help me gather knowledge and perspectives and form my own opinions about these types of technology and implementations. I’ve co-presented two talks on machine learning bias, and...
There’s value in the holes. If you search for information about a topic and don’t find very much about it, it can be a clear signal that more research is necessary or desired to find the answers. A research gap is exactly how Dr. Tina Lasisi, interviewed for the Melaninology episode of the Ologies podcast, describes how she got into this field of...
The next time you’re in a meeting, wishing you weren’t, you might want to consider why the meeting feels so insufferable. Often it’s because no one has bothered to consider the purpose of the meeting. Cam Daigle devised a classification system that provides an excellent framework for improving meetings. They declare that There are three types of...
As a technical writer, I have a mixed opinion of chat applications like Discord and Slack. On the one hand, they make it easy to quickly get ahold of someone who can answer your questions, which is a relief if you’re struggling to gather information you need to write a draft. On the other hand, because it’s easy to quickly get ahold of someone...
Gwen Windflower asks Are you actually measuring data quality?: Data is a woven net thrown over the world, capturing it in a grid of variable resolution. We want to capture as much detail as we possibly can, but it’s then crucial to make judicious decisions about how we translate what we capture into a useful map. Documentation involves a similar...
In 2022, I had no true “obsessions” in my music listening, unlike last year. Instead of any standout artists, I flitted from artist to artist as they released new albums or other things prompted me to rediscover how much I enjoyed their music. This was a year for breadth, rather than depth, and also for discovering the limits of my music data...
It’s time for another deep dive into this year’s Spotify Wrapped! I’ve been doing this for almost as long as Spotify Wrapped has existed. Check out the past years' posts: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. I collect my music data using Last.fm, and then I wrote a custom Last.fm add-on for Splunk to send my listening data to Splunk. I then use the app I...
It’s tough to find helpful information about analyzing website metrics for technical documentation sites. The goals of technical documentation are different from those of a marketing blog or a company website. You’re not optimizing for maximum traffic. No one is clicking “Add to Cart” on your API reference topics. You need to use slightly...
Image generation tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney or interfaces built on top of Stable Diffusion have gained a lot of popularity, both due to the quality of images created and the novelty of transforming text input into a visual output. The other aspect of their popularity is that these tools let people without art or design training use text to...
If you’re writing documentation for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that releases constantly, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of new functionality being released that needs to be documented. But do you really need to document all of it? Nope. Instead, document the hidden, document the weird, and document the why. Consider every...
Matt Webb wrote a post about organizing data and mapping the experience of the web, and that made me consider how the decisions about documentation structure, especially in the early stages, require similar decisions. Technical documentation functions as a map for your product. For specific users, your documentation provides wayfinding guidance...
I’ve frequently seen product thinking discussed in product management and user experience design contexts, but haven’t seen it applied to technical writing and documentation. And yet, by applying product thinking to documentation, we can write more useful, relevant, high quality documentation. What is product thinking? Product management thought...
It’s been another unexpected year. Thinking about how I had a January and February stacked up the same way I spent all of my 2019, and booked up an April 2020 to be more of the same, and then whomp, pandemic, and all of my priorities changed. I’m back with my yearly music data rundown, featuring a comparison with my Spotify Wrapped data (as...
I’ve been listening to the Farnam Street podcast, The Knowledge Project, recently and enjoying the guests that have talked about The Personal MBA or Relationships vs Transactions. But I noticed a pattern. I realized that the guests were largely telling stories about men, mentioning books by men, and I didn’t see myself in these conversations....
More and more startups and enterprises are recognizing the importance of high quality product documentation, but it’s tough to know where to start. I’ve taken a few enterprise software products from “nothing to something” documentation and this is the framework I’ve built for myself to create MVD—minimum viable documentation. If you’re a...
As a professional writer, I frequently get asked, “as a ______, how can I get better at writing?” I’ve never had a good list of resources to point people to, so I finally decided to write one. I’ve worked hard to become a good writer, and I’ve had the privilege of many good teachers along the way. If you’re not really sure why your writing isn’t...
Another year, another Spotify Wrapped campaign, another effort to analyze the music data that I collect and compare it to what Spotify produces. This year I have last.fm listening habit data, concert attendance and ticket purchase data, livestream view activity data, my SoundCloud 2020 Playback playlist, and the tracks on my Spotify top 100 songs...
This is the eighth and final post in a series about how missing data biases data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. In this post, I’ll cover the following: Define the question you want to answer for your data analysis process How does data go missing when you’re...
This is the seventh post in a series about how missing data biases data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. When you’re gathering the data you need and creating datasets that don’t exist yet, you’re in the midst of the data collection stage. Data can easily go...
This is the sixth post in a series about how missing data biases data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. In this post, I’ll cover the following: What is data management? How does data go missing, featuring examples of disappearing data What you can do about...
This is the fifth post in a series about how missing data biases data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. When you do data analysis, you’re searching and analyzing your data so that you can answer a specific question with the data so that you can make a decision...
This is the fourth post in a series about how missing data can bias data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. Visualizing data is crucial to communicate the results of a data analysis process. Whether you use a chart, a table, a list of raw data, or a...
This is the third post in a series about how missing data biases data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. Communicating the results of a data analysis process is crucial to making a data-driven decision. You might review results communicated to you in many ways: A...
This is the second post in a series about how missing data biases data-driven decisions. Start at the beginning: What’s missing? Reduce bias by addressing data gaps in your analysis process. Any decision based solely on the results of data analysis is missing data—the non-quantitative kind. But data can also go missing from data-driven decisions...
We live in an uncertain world. Facing an ongoing global pandemic, worsening climate change, persistent threats to human rights, and the more mundane uncertainties of our day-to-day lives, we try to use data to make sense of it all. Relying on data to guide decisions can feel safe. But you might not be able to trust your data-driven decisions if...
Teams that build security and privacy tools like Brave Browser, Tor Browser, Signal, Telegram, and others focus on usability and feature parity of these tools in an effort to more effectively acquire users from Google Chrome, iMessage, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, and others. Do people fail to adopt these more secure and private tools because they...
Back in 2013 I wrote a blog post reacting to Cristina Vanko’s project to handwrite her text messages for one week. At the time, I focused on how Cristina introduced slowness into a digital communication that often operates as a conversation due to the immediacy and frequency of responses. Since 2013, texting has grown more popular and instant...
The world is, to varying degrees, sheltering-in-place during this global coronavirus pandemic. Starting in March, the pandemic started to affect me personally: I started working from home on March 6th. Governor Gavin Newsom announced on March 11 that any gatherings over 250 people were strongly discouraged, effectively cancelling all concerts for...
I’ve been thinking for some time about the derived metadata that Spotify and other digital streaming services construct from the music on their platforms. Spotify’s current business revolves around providing online streaming access to music and podcasts, as well as related content like playlists, to users. Like any good SaaS business, their...
Ticket buying in the modern era is pretty brutal. You find out your favorite artist is coming to town, and with any luck, you discover this before the tickets go on sale. Then you start planning to get tickets. Set up a calendar reminder with a link to the site, then you get ready. If there are presales, you ask friends or you check emails — if...
Google has created a dataset search for researchers or the average person looking for datasets. On the one hand, this is a cool idea. Datasets are hard to find in cases, and this ostensibly makes the datasets and accompanying research easier to find. In my opinion this dataset search is problematic for two main reasons. 1. Positioning Google as a...
Spotify’s 2019 Wrapped aims to give you an overview of your past year’s listening habits. It proclaims: these were your top 5 tracks and artists! You spent this much time listening to your favorite artist! This year (the last year of the decade) they also expanded to all of the 2010s, sharing the top artists and tracks for each year in the decade...
Splunk software provides powerful data collection, analysis, and reporting functionality. The new slogan, “data is for doing”, alongside taglines like “the data-to-everything platform” and “turn data into answers” want to bring the company to the forefront of data powerhouses, where it rightly belongs (I’m biased, I work for Splunk). There is...
Several years ago I wrote about fragmented music libraries and music discovery. In light of the overwhelming popularity of Spotify and the dominance of streaming music (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and others), I’m curious if music libraries even exist anymore. Or, if they exist today, will they continue to exist? My guess is that...
As the music industry moves away from downloads and toward building streaming platforms, international sovereignty becomes more of a barrier to people listening to music and discussing it with others, because they don’t have access to the same music on the same platforms. As Sean Michaels points out in The Morning News several years ago: one of...
If you’re thinking about changing careers, or want guidance in determining whether your career is right for you, I hope this post can help you! It’s all about how I defined my career values and reframed how I thought about my career and my future. Why I needed to define my career values A couple years ago I was comfortable in my position at work....
Data analysis is a valuable way to learn more about what documentation tasks to prioritize above others. My post (and talk), Just Add Data, presented at Write the Docs Portland in 2019, talk about this broadly. In this post I want to cover in detail a number of different data types that can lead to valuable insights for prioritization. This list...
This is a blog post adaptation of a talk I gave at Write the Docs Portland on May 21, 2019. The talk was livestreamed and recorded, and you can view the recording on YouTube: Just Add Data: Make it easier to prioritize your documentation - Sarah Moir Prioritizing documentation is hard. How do you decide what to work on if there isn’t a deadline...
I just finished reading How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard. It discusses fascinating concepts about measurement and observability, but they are tendrils that you must follow among mentions of Excel, statistical formulas, and somewhat dry consulting anecdotes. For those of you that might want...
An article covering the “Sober Curious Movement” was published in the Chicago Tribune a few weeks ago. My brother shared it with me, and I’m still thinking about it. The article discusses a “sober curious” movement in America and interviews a number of people in Chicago that have chosen to quit drinking. Apparently because they quit drinking for...
This past year I added some additional datasets to the Splunk environment I use to analyze my music: information about tickets that I’ve purchased, and information about upcoming concerts. Ticket purchase analysis I started keeping track of the tickets that I’ve purchased over the years, which gave me good insights about ticket fees associated...
I moved to San Francisco from the Midwest a few years ago, and I’d been missing a strong sense of history since then. I’ve been to a few events in an attempt to learn more about my new home, such as a Dolores Park history day, or a history-relevant event in the Mission as part of Litcrawl, but I struggled to absorb a history for the city that...
Disclaimer: I’m a Splunk employee, and I’m not a Cribl customer, but I do know the founders (including the author of the blog post). I figured I’d write this exploration up here rather than as an exceedingly-long Twitter thread. My reactions are all to the content of the blog post, not actual use of the product. If I’m reading this blog post from...
The annual Noise Pop music festival starts this week, and I purchased a badge this year, which means I get to go to any show that’s a part of the festival without buying a dedicated ticket. That means I have a lot of choices to make this week! I decided to use data to assess (and validate) some of the harder choices I needed to make, so I built a...
If you’re interested in becoming a technical writer, or are new to the field and want to deepen your skills and awareness of the field, this blog post is for you. What do technical writers actually do? Technical writers can do a lot of different things! People in technical writing write how-to documentation, craft API reference documentation,...
This past year has been pretty eventful in music for me. I’ve attended a couple new festivals, seen shows while traveling, and discovered plenty of new bands. I want to examine the data available to me and contrast it with my memories of the past year. I’ve been using Splunk to analyze my music data for the past couple years. You can learn more...
The wave of chatbots and virtual assistants like Cortana, Siri, and Alexa means that we’re engaging in conversations with non-humans more than ever before. Problem is, those non-human conversations can turn inhuman when it comes to social norms. Interactions with virtual assistants aren’t totally devoid of human interaction. Indeed, they often...
After a breakup, how do you rediscover the activities that you enjoy and make you you? if someone does not want me it is not the end of the world. but if i do not want me the world is nothing but endings. — nayyirah waheed For myself, I spent several years in a relationship where I slowly let my own needs, wants, and desires be subsumed by those...
Thinking lately How do you decide to make a big change in life? How do you rediscover what’s important to you? How many concerts in a week is too many? I’m struggling with the first one, working on the second, and am pretty sure the answer to the third one is “three”. Reading lately The very white ways of the top 40 The American Top 40 chart...
Some countries have trendy ccTLDs, and startups buy in to their domain space. Vox Media has more details: Even very small countries get ccTLDs. Here’s a close-up of the area around Australia and the many small island nations that have their own domain names. Some of these countries realized that they could make a lot of money if they opened their...
My favorite shows of 2017. Here’s to more great ones in 2018! October 27, 2017: DJ Aaron Axelson, Lewis Ofman, Yelle Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco CA Popscene became my favorite concert sponsor this year, in no large part because of the skills of their DJs. This show surpassed my low expectations to be a great time of dancing and grooving and new...
The best books I read this year, loosely categorized. Favorite Book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture Fantastic. Jace Clayton has an unnervingly well-placed finger on the pulse of modern music culture, in a way that makes you feel out-of-touch no matter how much music you listen to. I feel like I understand the music...
I used my music data to look up my favorite artists that I discovered in 2017. These are the ones that are the memorable favorites, beyond the statistical favorites. Pional This one is a surprise but a good reminder that small obsessions can make a big difference in overall statistics. I have The Burning Ear to thank for this discovery, and...
I recently crossed the 10 year mark of using Last.fm to track what I listen to. From the first tape I owned (Train’s Drops of Jupiter) to the first CD (Cat Stevens Classics) to the first album I discovered by roaming the stacks at the public library (The Most Serene Republic Underwater Cinematographer) to the college radio station that shaped my...
As a companion to Finding Yourself on the Wall, sometimes what you need while climbing isn’t real beta or advice of what to do, but mental reinforcement. This beta can sound kind of like the mantras that someone might give you in the midst of a yoga class—yoga beta. Do what feels right Don’t forget to breathe Don’t look, just feel You are...
How climbing teaches me to manage my fear and love myself. Sometimes I find myself on the wall doing something I never thought possible: holding onto something that doesn’t seem to have a place to hold, or reaching something that looks out of reach. Other times it’s like I’m waking up to find myself trapped in what seems to be an inescapable...
It isn’t really possible to search the “global web” today. You can, however, try to use Google to search the web of another country by manually manipulating the ccTLD in the URL to divert your search to a different country service than the country you are located in. But starting recently, that’s no longer possible. Betanews points out...
Iran and Russia are becoming Internet provider nexuses to other countries. Dyn Research wrote about shifts in 2013 that led states in the Persian Gulf to seek out additional Internet providers. Sometimes, it takes a real disaster to create something genuinely new. March 2013 was a month of disasters in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East...
Romania is selling IPv4 addresses to make money, but how did they get so many in the first place? ComputerWorld explores How Romania’s patchwork Internet helped spawn an IP address industry. The roots of the Romanian IP address trade lie in the country’s peculiar Internet history. When commercial Internet service began in Romania around 2000, it...
Dyn Research interrogates the notion that the Internet is decentralized by looking at the actual state of infrastructure and routing resilience around the world. What did they find? The key to the Internet’s survival is the Internet’s decentralization — and it’s not uniform across the world. In some countries, international access to data and...
Per Al Jazeera, 95% of the world’s languages continue to be unrepresented online. The real problem is a digital architecture that forces people to operate on the terms of another culture, unable to continue the development of their own. The architecture of the web influences the languages and cultures interacting with it: He rightly homes in on...
Motherboard says The Internet Is Killing Most Languages: The great flat, globalized world of the internet operates pretty much as a monoculture, Kornai says. Only about 250 languages can be called well-established online, and another 140 are borderline. Of the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for...
Is homogenization of language on the web an instantiation of totalitarianism? Boston Review on Herta Müller’s Language of Resistance: Since language plays such an important part in the construction of the self, when the state subjects you to constant acts of linguistic aggression, whether you realize it or not, your sense of who you are and of...
In 2010, Irina Shklovski and David M. Struthers wrote an excellent article on Kazakh national identity and its reflection through top-level domain name choices. The article is titled: Of States and Borders on the Internet: The Role of Domain Name Extensions in Expressions of Nationalism Online in Kazakhstan and the Oxford Internet Institute makes...
Theorizing the Web 2014 included a panel on World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web. The participants, from the program, follow: Presider / Jillet Sarah Sam @JilletSarahSam Hashmod / Alice Samson @theclubinternet Panelists: David Peter Simon | @davidpetersimon | The Do-Gooder Industrial Complex? Jason Q. Ng | @jasonqng | Fit for Public...
The Atlantic, The Myth of a Borderless Internet. Political borders are re-enshrined on the web in a literal and metaphorical sense. Just like the cartographers of yore, multinational corporations—particularly Internet companies—play a role in defining and shaping political boundaries for the public’s consumption. This rise of huge, international...
Lawfare blog covers an interesting case that attempts to answer the question Are Top-level Domains Property? On December 28 [2015], the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in Weinstein v. Islamic Republic of Iran, a case pending before the D.C. Circuit. At issue is whether country-code top-level domains are the property of those countries’...
Search could be moving to images, in which case the languages may not play such a large part if images dominate web searches. Fast Company goes Inside Baidu’s Plan To Beat Google By Taking Search Out Of The Text Era In many cases, text-based search is not ideal for finding information. For instance, if you’re out shopping and spot a handbag you...
Political and legal borders interact to create a potentially balkanized future internet. Time Magazine says The Future of the Internet is Balkanization and Borders. Rousseff’s plan to create walled-off, national Intranets followed reports that the United States has been surveilling Rousseff’s email, intercepting internal government...
Chance the Rapper has a new fashion line full of clothing that celebrates Barack Obama’s presidency: https://www.thankuobama.us/ With obvious references to Obama (the king Obama t-shirt) and some more oblique ones (a jersey with 44, because he was the 44th president), it’s only appropriate that the URL contains some symbolism. He put the site up...
Model View Culture confronts “The App You’ve Never Heard Of”: Exploring Western Bias in Tech Media. It is flabbergasting that LINE–an app that beats out Messenger and WhatsApp in Thailand and Indonesia–or WeChat or even Alibaba would ever be so baldly described as “little-known.” Little known to Americans or Europeans? Perhaps, since they were...
The less infrastructure investments and diversity of connections that a country has to the Internet, the more control they can exert over the country’s overall connectivity. Most countries have gradually moved towards increased diversity in their Internet infrastructure over the last decade, especially as it concerns international connectivity to...
I attended my first Sofar Sounds show on Friday night. It was a great night, attending a show with a friend and making a few new friends with those that we were sharing a couch with. Sofar Sounds hosts shows in secret locations, from people’s houses, apartments, or even offices, that their community offers up. As someone who went to a lot of DIY...
Catalonia has its own top level domain, .cat. Not a vanity domain, this TLD provides an element of national identity in a region of Spain that has sought independence for many years. In the wake of the referendum, the office of the TLD registry was raided and computers seized. As reported by Internet News: The Guardia Civil officers entered the...
Google is working on improving translation to the point where we have a universal language translator. In the Smithsonian Magazine, Kissing Language Barriers Goodbye: “One thing that surprises people when we talk about Translate is our team doesn’t have any linguists on it,” Estelle says. “We’ve launched 71 languages, and I would say our team...
The web is sometimes spoken of as a borderless place. Through the ~magic~ of technology, the internet, the “decentralized” web, borders would be eliminated and the world would become truly flat. I’ll share links as part of this series that reinforce and challenge that notion. Linguistic borders, reinforced by lack of multilingualism yet...
The idea of data as a gift, and the act of sharing data as an exchange of a gift, has data ethics and privacy implications for product and service design. Recent work by Kadija Ferryman and Nick Seaver on data as a gift in the last year addressed this concept more broadly and brought it to my attention. Ferryman, in her piece Reframing Data as a...
When someone starts using your software, they need to build an understanding of how it works and how the pieces interact. The UI text you write and the feature names you choose can build or break a mental model. From a marketing perspective, the importance of the name is clear. You want something catchy, marketable, searchable, memorable, all...
For the second year in a row I attended the Bay Area Book Festival. A collection of authors, publishers, readers, and other bookish sorts also show up for the weekend in Berkeley. This year, like last year, I discovered some great sessions that led me to think about things from a new perspective and that I might not otherwise have learned about....
If you use Twitter and are attending an event that you want to share with your twitter followers, you can live tweet it as it’s happening. While you can live tweet basically any event, these tips focus mainly on talks that you might attend as part of a conference, a meetup, a sponsored speaker series, or another presentation. I’ve live tweeted...
In 2015 I made some resolutions. I haven’t followed up on them since. In 2016 I made no resolutions, but I listened to a lot of music. How the 2015 resolutions fared in 2015 and 2016 I did okay. 1. Stay off Twitter more, read fewer articles on the web, and create more I’ve continued to use Twitter over the past couple years. My use of it waxes...
I like to share with my friends. I’ll send them links to articles in Pocket, book recommendations on Goodreads, and music recommendations in Spotify. I’ll also post SoundCloud songs on Facebook, quote articles on Twitter, and email other articles to friends. All of these sharing methods augment word-of-mouth, letting me seamlessly share my...
Digital technology is central in our social and personal lives. Laptops, smartphones, and the apps installed on them allow us to communicate more frequently & at greater distances than ever before. This capability is reshaping those communications. This centrality of the role of tech mirrors the importance that churches once had in peoples'...
Some mentions in Zeynep Tufekci’s post The Politics of Empathy and the Politics of Technology got me thinking about crisis communications for incident response. Facebook will have to decide which incidents are “serious and tragic” versus which ones are “ongoing crises” where Safety Check would not be useful. Iraq is not officially at war, but...
As a tech writer, it’s hard to tell how users get to your docs at all. They might be clicking on in-product help links, searching the web, or getting sent links from support. But you can get proactive about it too. Help users of your product get their questions answered by meeting them where they are—on social media sites like Twitter. You may...
From awhile back, Brian Krebs talks to three researchers at U-M about their ZMap tool. An efficient and comprehensive way to scan the Internet, they’ve recently built a search engine called Censys that searches across their daily data collections from the ZMap scans. From Krebs' interview with the researchers (Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow,...
Benedict Evans pointed out in a recent newsletter, “there’s a story to be written about Apple feeling its way from a piecemeal legacy technology stack for services, evolved bit by bit from the old iPod music store of a decade ago, to an actual new unified platform, something that it is apparently building.” I’d argue for a focused set of...
Following up (finally) on a tweet-storm from March about music discovery and libraries now. I miss old school mp3 blogs. Music discovery feels broken now that it’s fragmented across so many services. Soundcloud, Spotify, iTunes… — Sarah K Moir (@smorewithface) March 23, 2015 I used to subscribe to lots of MP3 blogs. I had lots of free time in...
Security communicators can learn some lessons from national disaster communication. Motherboard interviewed Eli Jacks, chief of the National Weather Service’s Fire and Public Weather Services branch in The National Weather Service Wants You to Be Scared of This Blizzard, and Jacks shared many important elements of their communication strategy....
Several months ago, I saw Dr. Rosalind Picard give a talk on Affective Computing. I took notes and thought a lot about what she said but let my thoughts fester rather than follow up on them. Then last week, I read Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman, which reminded me of Dr. Picard’s work and my initial thoughts about affective computing. There...
In honor of #NCSAM, here are some tips for keeping your accounts and devices safe on the web. Don’t reuse passwords. Better yet, use a password manager like LastPass. Why? If someone gets access to your username and password for one account, only that account is vulnerable. But if you reuse passwords, they now have access to multiple accounts. If...
It’s been awhile. I’ve spent the last four months applying for new jobs, interviewing, getting hired, and moving from the midwest to the bay area. It’s been a long ride (drive, really). I’ve been out here three weeks now, and it still feels strange to call it my new home (new license plates on my car notwithstanding). I’m a tech writer by trade,...
I’ve recently started sewing again. After learning how in home economics in junior high school, I decided to pick it up again in order to have an offline hobby with more tangible results (like baking, but longer-lasting). Sewing has changed in the last twenty years, and a fabric wholesaler has witnessed the changes in his own warehouse....
Earlier this week I got an email from Google. One of my principles is to pay for things that I support. I can afford it, and things on the web are relatively cheap. Subscribing to ThinkUp, Pocket Premium, Feedly Pro, each cost about the same as a new pair of shoes, or a nice pair of jeans. To me, that’s a justifiable cost, so I pay it to keep...
My birthday was yesterday! To celebrate, I ate an overly large and overly expensive steak and sorely undercooked brussels sprouts. Do yourself a favor and always roast brussels sprouts until they are caramelized and crunchy, then put some reduced apple cider and maple syrup on top. YUM! Technology, while making the world more accessible than it...
David W. Butterfield (American, 1844 - 1933) Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad, about 1870 - 1880, Albumen silver print 42.2 x 56.6 cm (16 5/8 x 22 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Once upon a time (okay, the first one was in 1871), fish were carted across America in railroad cars. Of course, this was terrible for native fish...
Instruction manuals, and instructions in general, are incredibly important. I could be biased, since part of my job involves writing instructions for systems, but really, they’re important! As this look into the historical importance of manuals makes clear, manuals (and instructions) make accessible professions, tools, and devices to anyone that...
It may seem like a Hallmark holiday, but there aren’t any cards for it (if there are please mail me one). It exists to commemorate the 1981 signing of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data by the Council of Europe. Accordingly, Europe celebrates this day as Data Protection Day. Let’s...
Librarians are an underused, underpaid, and underestimated legion. And one librarian in particular is frustrated by e-book lending. Not just the fact that libraries have to maintain waitlists for access to a digital file, but also that the barriers to checking out an ebook are unnecessarily high. As she puts it, “Teaching people about having...
I didn’t start this as a resolution post, but here we are. It’s easier to write the introduction after the essay is written, so here I am to tell you this is a post of my 2015 resolutions. This year is all about purging the “someday maybes” and turning ideas into actions. Taking care of myself and moving forward. 1. Stay off Twitter more, read...
The Senate Intelligence Committee released hundreds of pages (soon available as a book) detailing acts of torture committed by the CIA. The New York Times calls out 7 key points from the report. The Atlantic takes to task leadership proclaiming that “this is not who we are”, by reminding us that torture is who we are. Surgeon and writer Atul...
Taylor Swift has been blowing up the music industry lately, first by surprising everyone with the beauty of her latest album. SNL dubbed it a result of Swiftamine, and I can certainly say I’m under the spell. Then, pre-release, she removed her entire discography from Spotify. The Atlantic reflects on this decision by pointing out, “Owning music...
I went on a bit of a Twitter rant last night, about how MyFitnessPal doesn’t give me much helpful data: Myfitnesspal is a good food-tracking app, but wish data were more helpful. (1/?) — Sarah K Moir (@smorewithface) October 16, 2014 While it’s called MyFitnessPal, it doesn’t feel much like a pal, and feels more like a diet app than a fitness...
Americans are still reading books, Internet and all! Younger Americans are actually reading more than older generations, which could be partially due to the fact that with the rise of texting and social media, so much of our communication is text-based, so everyone is doing a lot more reading (and writing) in order to communicate with their...
The Chicago Tribune reports on a recent study completed by OECD on Metropolitan Governance of Transport and Land Use in Chicago. As the Tribune describes: “The Chicago area’s transportation is hamstrung by a proliferation of local governments, the “irrational organizational structure” of the Regional Transportation Authority and the service...
Public health in the U.S. tends to focus on chronic diseases (like cancer or diabetes), but in other parts of the world, much of the focus is on drugs that either no longer afflict the U.S., or aren’t cost-effective to treat. Sickle cell anemia can be treated when it’s identified early. But that doesn’t happen much in the developing world, it is...
Hello! Long time no talk. I heard you all singing this song, and I’m back! Here’s some strange and utterly fascinating research: When a landfill was dug up to find out if Atari had buried its games there, it wasn’t a bunch of guys with a bulldozer. It was a team of archaeologists (and, of course, the media). Weather models currently use data...
Modern Farmer has an article about the “next green revolution”: “A lot of materials used in corporate agriculture have the capacity to enhance plant growth and performance, but they suppress soil biology,” he says. The scorched-earth tactics he’d employed with his pesticides and herbicides, he realized, had worked all too well. The microbial life...
It’s Thursday! Not Friday. Go to work tomorrow. When you don’t have to work, though, you can go outdoors! Because July is Park and Recreation month. So. If you’re not working, and it is nice outside, go outside. Weekend, planned. Just for you. National parks are a great place to go outdoors. The National Parks Conservation Association is taking...
The world is depressing. Let’s not talk about the plane that was shot down over Ukraine, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, or ISIS, or climate change. (those are all links to vox explainers I haven’t read, so beware maybe). Let’s instead talk about reading, writing, and gifs! Read books. Read as many books as you want. Read as few books as you...
Earlier this summer I vacationed in Germany and Switzerland. This was my third time in Germany, and my absolute favorite thing to eat there is Döner Kebab – a Turkish-German fast food that is flat bread, shaved lamb/turkey/chicken from a vertical spit, lettuce, tomato, onion, sometimes red or white cabbage, and a white sauce, and sometimes with a...
I completely forgot to send a newsletter last week, and for that I’m sorry. It was sunny, so I was actually outdoors. It has rained this entire week, so I have tabs for you now. Now, this evening, because I watched Return of the Jedi instead of writing this yesterday. So there’s that. On to important things… [Don’t do what you love](broken link...
Here’s what was important this week… If you have a child abroad, and you’re a U.S. citizen, you can get your child U.S. citizenship as well. However, as Tori Marlan investigates “the rules that determine what babies can become citizens seem to be butting up against the modern circumstances under which Americans are having babies.” Most notably,...
A lot has happened since last week. As a heads up, the first portion of this post is about misogyny and the UCSB shootings last weekend. If you’d rather not read about it, skip below the comic! Last weekend, a man murdered 6 people and injured 13 more. Misogyny is largely being credited (not much in mainstream media, however) as the primary...
Here’s what was important this week… The museum memorializing the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks opened this week. Steve Kandell wrote about visiting it: The Worst Day of My Life is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction. The photographer and people-person-extraordinaire behind Humans of New York spoke to someone who also went...
Every so often the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words. It adds them to its online dictionary with far more frequency than its physical tome, given that a physical dictionary is quite a bit more difficult to update. It [released a list of new words yesterday](broken link removed), and while a few are new words entirely (bikeable) others are...
Here’s what was important this week… Software is everywhere lately. My boyfriend asked me what I thought the next big website would be (after the success of Google, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and I realized it’s just as likely (if not more likely) to be a software application rather than a website. Paul Ford took some time to enshrine...
Here’s what was important this week…. Felix Salmon, a formers Reuters journalist, wrote a screed about why publishing news with the readers in mind is more valuable than breaking news. As he puts it, “when journalists start caring about scoops and exclusives, that’s a clear sign that they’re publishing mainly for the benefit of other journalists,...
Here’s what was important this week… I treated myself to ice cream last night (from the freezer, not a lonely ice cream shop date with myself) and it was delicious. While I gained weight from starting an office job after college, I still have the privilege of avoiding most body policing placed on women. However, men suffer their own share of body...
I am privileged enough to know a second language (although as the years pass, my proficiency is faltering…). The government and the military have a great need for foreign language proficiency for its employees (though apparently that isn’t much of a requirement for U.S. diplomats…). Given their need, they coordinated with the University of...
Pitchfork recently published a great longform essay on music streaming. It covered the past, history, and present of music streaming, and brought up a lot of great points. These are my reactions. The piece discussed how “the “omnivore” is the new model for the music connoisseur, and one’s diversity of listening across the high/low spectrum is now...
HEARTBLEED heartbleed my heart is bleeding about heartbleed…. How soon until someone writes a country ballad about heartbleed? Knowing the Internet, probably before all the [currently vulnerable sites](broken link removed) are patched. Researchers at University of Michigan previously produced a tool which was capable of scanning large swaths of...
Here’s what was important this week… I went home sick yesterday. Even though it is a good decision for my health, I still felt bad leaving work. Often I feel like I might be more productive though, working different hours, or even less hours. Other countries allow for leisure time throughout the work day, like a two hour long extended lunch....
Here’s what was important this week… More than you probably ever wanted to know about refrigerators and refrigeration: “Refrigeration is the invisible backbone on which the world’s food supply depends — and given our climate-changed forecast of more extreme weather events, it may yet prove to be its Achilles’ heel.” Oh how I wish this had come...
Here’s what was important this week… A discovery was made at the South Pole BICEP2 research lab that, if accurate, confirms the theory of cosmic inflation. Cosmic inflation explains the big bang, as an article in Symmetry Magazine details: “Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that...
In the spirit of @weboesel and being true to my whole identity, I am adding a picture to my blog and my twitter account. I’ve had a neutral (non-person) picture on both services since I joined. I relish the implicit neutrality that this sort of picture offers me, but I’m choosing to assert the whole of my identity across the services I inhabit. A...
Books are holding their own against e-books, vinyl is making a comeback, film if it isn’t making a comeback, is holding steady since the Kodak bankruptcy. This cycle gives voice to what we want from our technology, devices, and everyday contraptions. In my first post on this matter I reasoned that it comes down to the experience, and that “The...
Here’s what was important this week… Today is Pi day. Here is more than you probably ever wanted to know about pi day. Last Saturday, March 8 was International Women’s Day. Started as a revolutionary holiday to honor the achievements of women, International Women’s Day is recognized in many countries. However, in Nepal it is recognized by women...
Anonymity is valuable to the structure of the Internet, but as the identity of a person becomes fluid, the reputations and identifiability of someone’s online presence becomes increasingly valuable. While jobs rely on user-submitted references, as do academic applications, many also turn to your social media presence or to your search results to...
nananananananananananana BITCOINNNN I had to talk about it eventually, and Thursday’s news was a good impetus. Newsweek had a big “scoop” potentially unmasking the founder of Bitcoin. The magazine saved this story for the cover of their return-to-print issue. The story features stalking masquerading as investigative journalism, as the author...
Here’s what was important this week… I spend a lot of time writing, but it never seems like enough. Partially because I spend so much time reading the writing of others, and partially because a lot of the writing that I do is IT documentation for my job. I feel truly accomplished when I manage to finish a blog post (there are at least 11...
Here’s what was important this week… Are women being [infantilized](link removed) or [endangered](link removed) in the Olympics? Also, the Olympic medal count gets more interesting depending on whether you look at it in terms of [total medals](broken link removed), [number of gold medals](link removed), or [medals per capita](broken link...
Here’s what was important this week… Facebook now allows you to choose a “custom” gender option and fill in your own gender on your profile–to a point. Rather than being a free-text field, Facebook instead offers options which autocomplete. Slate went through the effort of tabulating all 58 of them. Facebook is likely avoiding a free-text field...
Here’s what was important this week… The Super Bowl was this past weekend, as you probably know. With the Olympics starting it’s old news, but one of the big topics in journalism in the lead-up to the event was how football (both the sport and the NFL) handles concussions. Football isn’t the only sport with a concussion...
Facebook has named its new app offering, which debuted today, “Paper”. As Lev Manovich points out, this naming signifies that “Old media metaphors are not going away” In fact, old media themselves aren’t going away. Nowadays, fears that e-books and mp3s will dominate the reading and listening landscapes are all over the media. These fears seem...
Here’s what was important this week… Former University of Michigan kicker Brendan Gibbons has been expelled from U-M for a sexual misconduct case dating back to 2009. The Michigan Daily has more information about the expulsion, while Washtenaw Watchdogs posted about the entire case in 2011. Both The Michigan Daily and the Ann Arbor News are...
Here’s what was important this week… As the web and technology become ever more ingrained in our day to day lives, the role of designers becomes more apparent. Designers have been around since things began to be created, and according to one man, they’ve destroyed the world. It’s a bold statement. But designers (architects, if you’re a designer...
Here’s what was important this week… An article in the Guardian makes the case for choosing OpenStreetMap over Google Maps: “Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you are giving them the power not only to tell you about your location, but to shape it.” There isn’t just a responsibility in the users of...
Here’s what was important this week… We’re all in recovery from the snow and frigid cold that gripped most of the United States this week. It’s been too cold in much of my city to properly use salt–the city has just had to spread sand and efficiently clear the snow, and hope for the best until it got warm enough yesterday to start spreading some...
This post is inspired in part by Cyborgology’s Autobiography through Devices series: Autobiography Through Devices (Part 1) Autobiography Through Devices (Part 2) I grew up surrounded by music. Dancing wildly in the living room to REM’s Don’t Go Back to Rockville and Rusted Root’s Ecstasy with my siblings as we were toddlers remain fond childhood...
Here’s what was important this week I wrote a really long link round-up piece about how technology and our memory interact in potentially damaging ways. And then I realized it was a blog post. So you can read that here:Transactive Memory and the Machines. It’s something I find endlessly fascinating, and will be interesting to see how it...
A reliance on technology is beneficial, allowing our brains to work harder, faster, and outsource more menial tasks such as keep track of which meetings are in which rooms at which times, to a web application. However, that reliance has sometime-damaging effects when coupled with a lack of understanding about how technology works and impacts us....
Here’s what was important this week… I killed a six day old tamagotchi today. I wasn’t attentive enough, and the next time I checked on him there was just an angel floating on the screen, instead of an adorable duck waddling back and forth. The experience reminded me that I’m too busy for a pet, and as my coworkers tell me often, that children...
The surge to eradicate polio is on, and one polio survivor is determined to help any way she can, because “an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere.” And while antibiotic resistant infections are on the rise, a new treatment is in the works for Hepatitis C. What is life, for an amoeba? Working at a university, the amount...
What would I say? Something you think when posting on social media sites, when offering up your opinion about something in the news, and now, the name of an app that emerged from HackPrinceton just a few days ago. So popular the server intermittently goes down, forcing you to access a cached copy of the site or not be able to post automatically...
I’m going to expand on some tweets of mine from earlier today aboutthis blog post. Cristina Vanko spent a full week responding to all texts sent to her with hand-lettered calligraphy notes, which she then photographed and sent back as her response. There is a vintage nostalgia element to practicing something of this nature, a throwback akin to...
Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings occurred, and once police identified the accused bombers, the manhunt began. The police and other teams scoured Boston and the surrounding area for the Tsarnaev brothers. Meanwhile, the rest of the country scoured the Internet for their Internet presence. However, this had a new effect in light of the...
Note: This post is crossposted from Medium. Working in tech support has its ups and downs, but is ultimately rewarding. Digital literacy—the ability to confidently and capably use and understand technology—is something that is often lacking from the people I support, from high school students to retirees. I mentally evaluate people on their level...
Using Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook Report tool, I can examine my own patterns of Facebook activity–and confirm suspicions of my own patterns and habits. I work an 8-5 job, so you see spikes of activity over lunchtime and after I get home from work. The majority of what I post to Facebook is links to share with my friends. I post a lot of links.
Don’t read books, buy shoes. Urban Outfitters knows what you really wanted, and it wasn’t reading. Sometimes, Facebook has the best ads. This, for example, is a real play. Disco pants let you be a Human Supernova. Minus the probable death that might be included in that. If you have a lot of tabs open, and it takes you awhile to get back to them,...
Jill Lepore, in her excellent examination of the current state of surveillance that we languish in, made this remark in reference to Jeremy Bentham’s essay On Publicity: ““Without publicity, no good is permanent: under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.” He [Bentham] urged, for instance, that members of the public be allowed into...
The potential benefits and issues of self-driving cars have been addressed by many magazines, from The Economist and The Atlantic, to Business Insider and Forbes; and more recently acknowledged by highway safety authorities in the USA. A hot-button issue as of late, using autonomous vehicular control to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries is...
Gap gets presumptive about the class of its cardholders. “In what city is your vacation home?” Also doesn’t believe in maiden names with apostrophes, apparently.
Newt might’ve been onto something. It’s jarring to see pieces about the “internet of things” written using a dumb vs smart dichotomy. Once something becomes networked it becomes a “smart” device where previously it was a “dumb” device. It attributes an odd sense of inferiority on mere “manufactured” devices which are excellent at what they...
A soon-to-emerge recurring theme… Also referred to as “datafication” by the authors of Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform how we Live Work and Think, metrication can be defined as beginning to see all aspects of our lives as valuable data points and metrics against which to gauge our worth, success, and productivity, a relatively recent...
I originally wrote that DPLA would be a digital library for the future, but it’s more accurately the present, or even a delayed present. Europe has had its own overarchingly accessible online library collection, Europeana, since 2008. DPLA is a fledgling effort, yet to be bolstered by many of the collections across America (most notably the...
My boss was discussing the differences of Microsoft, Google, and Apple today when it comes to utility for business. While Microsoft tends to be somewhat derided for people from my generation (the sometime-scorned Millenials) for their bulky software packages and security-hole-ridden Internet Explorer browser, they are an industry standard. Why?...
I wrote a weekly newsletter from December 2013 until September 2015, and then intermittently until 2018. I shared links worth reading. Read the archives in the Newsletter topic or on TinyLetter.
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I’m a writer working in tech in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. I’m endlessly curious about technical writing / documentation, music, data, ethics in tech and data analysis, a11y, inclusivity, and so much more. Follow me on Mastodon @smore@mstdn.social. Follow me on Github @smoreface. Check out my resume on LinkedIn. Follow me on...