Technical communication news, links, articles, and resources.

I’m absolutely amazed at some of the writing jobs that get posted at the various freelance marketplaces: companies looking for highly educated and experienced people for a pittance; individuals looking at 5pm for someone to proofread and copyedit their badly written, 300-page paper by 8am tomorrow; or buyers looking for people to spam blogs and forums or churn out low quality, high quantity articles in the interests of raising their PageRank a little.

Today, I saw an ad on oDesk that had even the cynic within me appalled. A “publishing company” (*snort* no comment) is looking for a writer to churn out 4 short stories a day and a minimum of 20 short stories a week for approximately 5 weeks — for $3 an hour or what amounts to $6 per story (and you get nothing if you don’t churn out at least 20 a week). The company in question keeps all of the rights to the stories.

Let’s face it: It’s a sweatshop for writers, a piecework slave factory of creativity. The buyer is also looking for a virtual assistant to spam social networking sites in the interests of getting people to sign up on the buyer’s sites, again paying only a pittance for the effort, so it appears they’re just chintzy all around. I expect that $3 an hour might be an adequate sum of money in some parts of the world, probably the same parts of the world where manufacturing sweatshops exploit a desperate workforce. Imagine my surprise at seeing a Canadian place a $3 an hour bid on the project. I think that might be more shocking than the fact that the job was posted in the first place.

I wonder at the companies paying $1.50 or $2.00 an hour for someone “with excellent English” to edit documents. You’re not going to get someone with a professional level of understanding of English for $2 an hour. You’re just not. At best, you might find a non-native English writer (or mediocre native English writer) in an economically depressed area to take advantage of. But remember the old adage that you get what you pay for.

Haven’t visited the Dilbert.com site in weeks, if not months — I get daily e-mails so don’t usually need to go to the site. But I went there today. Some of it is annoying. It now gives Active-X errors because of my security settings, which I’m not changing. And it’s slow to load.

But you can now search all of the Dilbert archives by character. That means you could search for all Tina the Technical Writer strips since 1997. How cool.

Via I’d Rather Be Writing: Announcing WriterRiver.com, a Digg-like Social News Site for Technical Communicators

It’s still very much a fledgling site, having been just created by Tom Johnson, but the concept looks promising. The intent is for it to act like a specialized Digg for technical communicators.

I’m constantly looking for information and news that is relevant to technical writers: I have a shed load of RSS feeds in Trillian and I have a variety of Google alerts and the like, but you have to wade through a lot of crap sometimes. I generally hate Digg but I could just get behind a site like Writer River, especially as I try to build this site.

Whoohoo! I’m the 6th person to register.

Cool!

Found this really nifty Wordpress random quote plugin from Zombie Robot. It allows you to maintain a database of quotes that are then randomly displayed wherever you want them to be displayed. I’ve installed it and added a few writing-related quotes, but I’ll need to find some more to add — 9 isn’t really sufficient.

I’ve scrupulously kept my other sites free of affiliate links, Google Adsense, banners, and other forms of advertising, for a variety of reasons. I’ve decided, for this site, to play around with that. I’ve gotten interested in marcom writing recently and that led to an interest in marketing in general. Not a strong interest, granted, but I think I’ll play around with things here a bit.

Not sure about the context Amazon ads widget — I only have a couple of posts here so I can’t tell how bad the links will be. For what little I’ve seen, I doubt I’ll be keeping them. If they were at all targetted to a technical writing audience, I wouldn’t mind so much but we’ll see whether I keep those as time goes on. But the Amazon ads aren’t too bad — one little box in the sidebar and a bigger box (both showing “technical writing” related results) on the main library page. And of course text links on each book page, since the graphics on those come from Amazon.ca. I’ll probably add another ad or two — always relevant to technical writers. Frankly, I’m finding the Amazon ads dangerous to me personally — makes me want to go on a shopping spree.

Installed the Now Reading plugin. Looks OK in IE but looks horrible in Firefox — somehow or another it’s caused the theme footer to appear up near the top of the page. *sigh* Yet another thing I’ll have to either fix or disable. ‘Bout time I learned PHP, I suppose.

[Edited to add: Woohoo! Managed to get it fixed in Firefox. The plugin creator's help page on the subject wasn't really all that helpful, but playing around with the code finally did the trick -- trying to visualize PHP output when you (a) don't really know PHP and (b) can't see anything until you've uploaded it to a server is tough so I just kept tweaking and uploading, tweaking and uploading, and finally sorted through the logic of it after seeing what some of the changes did. So, no having to haul out the PHP manual that's on my bookshelf. That calls for a nap -- it's almost 8am and I haven't been to bed yet.]

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I’m still working on site content and so what you see is a partially-completed, well, mess. It’s growing daily but probably won’t be complete (as complete as a work-in-progress can be) for another month or so. When is ready to go, the root of the domain will redirect to this blog folder and I’ll submit the site itself to Google. At that point, it will have some original articles, a passel of posts, a fully-annotated collection of links, and other TW-related content. While it’s being worked on, I’ll be posting (so feel free to grab the feed) but pretty much everything else should be considered under construction.