Freelancing out of necessity?
I’m not sure I agree with all of this article, but it’s a fascinating perspective on outsourcing, freelancing, and virtual corporations.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s not worth a lawsuit.
We sometimes use stock images for marketing materials, book covers, and the like. We recently found a stock photo site that sells some high-quality images for a fraction of what of you pay at better-known stock photo firms. Buying a royalty-free image for $3 instead of $300 seems like a really good deal…until you read the fine print.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
In his blog, words / myth / amper & virgule, Dick Margulis focuses mostly on writing and editing. But in today’s entry, he discusses relationships between consultant and client, and I think he summed it up most excellently:
“If you are the sort of person who yells humiliating insults at servers in restaurants, I really would rather not work with you. “
Honor among….er, consultants
Many of our clients are surprised when they discover that I have close working relationships and friendships with other consultants. They seem astonished to discover that we don’t all despise each other.
Internationalizing XML
Via Cafe con Leche (Elliotte Rusty Harold), the first public working draft of Best Practices for XML Internationalization has been released by the W3C Internalization Tag Set Working Group.
Standard for user assistance?
There’s growing interest in establishing a standard for user assistance. Microsoft’s announcement that Vista will not include a new help viewer may be largely responsible.
Non-technical problems
Norm Walsh has posted a provocative discussion of DITA and DocBook on his blog (a writeup of a presentation he delivered at the recent DITA 2006 conference).
To DITA or not to DITA?
In a recent discussion on the STCCIC-SIG list, Mark Baker of Analecta Communications provided an excellent analysis of DocBook, DITA, and how they are not the same thing as XML. (The discussion is reproduced here with Mark’s permission.)
Printing and economics
Before the invention of movable type, book publishing was technologically possible, but prohibitively expensive. Printing involved carving the contents of a page onto a wooden block — backwards — and then basically stamping that ink-covered block onto a page. Each wooden block was usable only for a single, specific page. Movable type, developed by Johannes Gutenberg and others, took the granularity of print technology from the page down to the character level. This innovation changed the economics of printing, and led to affordable books and the spread of literacy.
Joe Welinske on STC localized dues structure
This morning, Joe Welinske of WritersUA posted an excellent assessment of the STC’s localized dues structure to the ReformSTC list. I’ve reproduced the article here.
