Author: Brian

Starting To Think About The Disposable Computer Culture

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Yesterday I was listening to NPR Morning Edition and one of the top stories was about the unveiling of the iPad Mini. Something inside me finally snapped- why does NPR consider a product launch to be news? Instead of constantly talking up Apple’s product launches, why don’t they do investigations into the environmental concerns caused by their products?

A couple of weeks ago, I heard Kyle Weins speak at the Content Strategy Workshops. Kyle is one of the founders of iFixit, a company/ online community that creates and publishes the world’s largest collection of online repair manuals in addition to selling the parts and tools. The company was started in 2003 by Kyle and his business partner Luke Soules when they were students at California Polytechnic State University. they also founded Dozuki, which sells the software platform they use to write the iFixit repair manuals to other companies. Here’s an interesting article about them from Mother Jones.

iFixit has turned into a large and vibrant online community of people who like to fix things who have created thousands of manuals for different products, not just Apple products and other computers. There is a companion blog site, iFixit.org, that features teardowns of new prodcuts like the Retina MacBook Pro and activism around issues like trying to promote a culture of fixers rather than consumers and the very important issue of E-Waste.

During his talk, Kyle showed an iPad he had taken apart and explained how difficult it was to repair it. Apple has been at the forefront of the sleek and exciting computer revolution of the past decade. While everyone celebrates Steve Jobs for creating products with elegant user design, few people seem to notice that these i- and Mac- Things are slowly starting to become less fixable and more disposable. Kyle has been talking about these issues for many years and writes regularly for Wired, including this recent article entitled “Unfixable Computers Are Leading Humanity Down a Perilous Path.”

Hearing Kyle speak was a real revelation as he put into words the nagging feelings I had about the other side of the information revolution. Kyle mentioned that even with electronic waste recycling, there were still necessary rare earth elements that cannot be recovered. We are increasingly dependent on these devices that are made with rare earth elements that are hard to mine and will eventually run out. What are we going to do then? During the Q&A, I asked whether there was such a thing as green computing and his answer was basically no.

These issues, especially the ones surrounding the mining of the necessary rare earth minerals, are only going to get more important the more we become dependent on computers. Will our dependency on foreign-mined rare earth elements replace oil as a national security issue?

You can’t really call either of us are anti-tech, Luddites, or Apple player haters (this post was written using a MacBook Pro), yet we are both concerned with the way things are going. I thank Kyle, Luke and everyone at iFixit for getting me to really start thinking about this complex tangle of issues. I am only at the very beginning of my journey to learn about these issues that he has been discussing for years and plan to write more about them in the near future.

The 21st Century Viking Lives!

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In 2008, I started writing freelance articles for my local newspaper, the Ballard News-Tribune and writing a column that I called “The 21st Century Viking” in honor of my (Finnish) and Ballard’s Scandinavian heritage.

At the time, I was trying to kick my writing career into a higher gear while applying to grad school at the same time. I got into grad school, the demands of homework and projects kicked in. The freelancing and 21st Century Viking columns dwindled for awhile, but never truly died. Once during a random conversation it came up that I was the 21st Century Viking. The person told me how much they liked the columns and asked when I was going to do another.

Well, here we are a couple of years later. Grad school is over with, I’m married and ready to really, actually kick my writing career into high gear.

Earlier this summer I did my first article in a long time for the BNT, which was an interview with Ryan Gabriel, a primary candidate for one of Ballard’s State Legislature seats. The popularity of that interview has led to the resurrection of the 21st Century Viking column. Whereas before, they were mainly observations about life in Ballard, I have been asked to do columns with a more political bent.

Here are the first of the new batch, a meditation on the 36th Legislative District general election race entitled “Two Candidates, No Choices.”

I will post links to some of my older columns soon.

How I Won The Content Strategist Lottery: A Report From the 2012 LavaCon and Content Strategy Workshops in Portland, OR

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You know what they say they say about lotteries- you can’t win if you don’t play. Well, this is the story of how I won a trip to the 2012 LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies and the Content Strategy Workshops. The prizes in this lottery were the opportunity to meet a lot of wonderful, intelligent and generous people and four days of exposure to lots of great information that is already changing the course of my career trajectory.

This story begins back in late July when I went to the Seattle Content Strategy Meetup. I am an information architect who specializes in taxonomy but is interested in content strategy, and attended because Scott Abel aka The Content Wrangler was giving a presentation.

Scott challenged the assembled content strategists to think of themselves as “business consultants who deal with content,” to apply Kaizen principles to content strategy and how XML can help with this. It was a really interesting, call-to-arms- type presentation and well worth the price of admission.

At the end he drew some names off of the attendee sheet to win door prizes, including the biggie, tickets to LavaCon and the Content Strategy Workshops. I was finishing up my pizza, figuring that my usual luck around winning drawings would hold up- and then he called my name!

LavaCon is an annual conference on digital media and content strategies with a focus on technical communications and the tech that goes into creating it. Being a well-established conference put on by Jack Molisani, it was a much larger, had a wider array of panels on a variety of interesting subjects with a lot of leading people in these fields in attendance.

This was the first of the (what I hope will be annual) Content Strategy Workshops. The Workshops were much more focused on the actual in-the-field practice of content strategy with sessions led by many leading content strategists. The people behind the creation of the Content Strategy Workshop are Scott Abel and Rahel Bailie, with help from Trey DeGrassi.

I talked with Scott for a while about his presentation and the fact that the conventions started two days after my wedding (!), but that I would make everything work. None of it would have worked of course without my beautiful new wife Elenka, who saw what an amazing opportunity this was and let me go to conferences right after our wedding (it helped that we did a pre-honeymoon in September).

After our wedding, I hitched a ride down to Portland with some friends who dropped me in front of the Portland Hilton and Executive Tower on Sunday afternoon and started a four-day binge of learning, doing, and meeting.

That first afternoon, I heard an acronym that was new to me- DITA. The next day, I went to a panel to learn more about it and discovered the existence of something that I should have known existed but there it was. Here was the practical application of XML that I had been looking for.

Now that I had something to find out about, I had to find people to talk to and see if they could point me in the right direction with DITA and XML. I talked to a lot of great people at the conference, including several leading people in the DITA field who very graciously walked me through the basics and where to get started.

Without a doubt, the Content Strategy Workshops and LavaCon are the best conferences I have attended bar none.

LavaCon was a very intense and informative experience. For someone at my level, it was just what I needed and even if I had lots more experience, there were opportunities to learn at every turn. Given that there were five panels covering a wide breadth of topics going on simultaneously, it was wonderfully overwhelming, but gave me exposure to ideas that were completely new and exciting to me.

The Content Strategy Workshop was smaller but just as intense and informative but laser-focused on the subject of content strategy. For someone at my level who is pretty new to it all, it was a great practical crash course in how to get out there and do it that were useful for newbies and professionals alike. There were two panels going on simultaneously and my only regret was that I was not able to clone myself and attend both.

I got a great deal out of attending LavaCon and the Content Strategy Workshops. I have only been in the information architecture field for a couple of years, and I got more out of these conferences, from the panels to the keynotes to the vendors and even the great schwag than I can express. I don’t know what else to tell you except to say they are awesome and I plan to attend both of them again in the future. I’m even starting to brainstorm a presentation that I could give and thinking of other ways to give back to this great community that I have discovered. Thanks again Scott, Rahel and Jack!

If you are remotely interested in content strategy, technical communication, XML, DITA, and the ever-changing world of digital media, start clearing your schedule so you can attend these conferences next year!

Cross-posted on my Infogration Consulting blog.