There is nothing more important for your career than information. You could even say that information is at the heart of “street” smarts, assuming you agree with me that information is at the heart of intellectual smarts. One of the biggest challenges of my work as a Technical Writer is the researching and discovery of relevant and useful information. You see, it is important that I write documents that my readers will grasp and remember. Technical Writers are not in the business of re-presenting existing blog posts, book information, or articles. Rather, it is our business to understand what we are documenting, so that readers can see things with a new degree of insight and understanding. And that begins with the development of one’s knowledge base.

I remember when I got my first Pentium One machine back in 1996 and American Online was still the leading dial-up web access around. At that time, you needed to order a copy of Encarta from Microsoft, or a similar encyclopedia-type program to have access to latest and most relevant information for your career, generally speaking (unless you were in graduate school, of course, then you would need your university’s library). Since then, times have changed drastically, and there is information available to you on the Internet that is absolutely incredible, and mostly for free.

I have downloaded over the Internet probably close to one-hundred e-books of all types: business, programming, database management, word processing, website development, and much more. When I say e-books I am talking about books from great publishers like Addison Wesley, Microsoft, Wrox, and McGraw Hill, some of the most prominent names in the publishing industry. How have they been able to provide such incredible books online? I’m sure that these books are posted hoping that one day you will actually buy the hard copy, and then they make money at that level. That is the extent of my vision about that.

The benefit of having great e-books like these, along with websites like Wikipedia and Wiktionary, are beyond measure. I have been able to challenge my current and present understanding of things continuously and to the point where I am constantly revising documents that can be improved, due to new understanding on my part.

This was the original vision of Bill Gates when he started his career with computer technology: the more information that people have at their disposition will radically help them with their lives, especially their professional lives. Information helps us to evolve as people because our minds are always wanting to achieve new levels of understanding. It will be fascinating as the Internet moves into its next phase beyond Web 2.0 called “The Symantic Web”. Huxley was right, it is a “Brave New World” and the availability of information helps us stay up-to-date and able to participate in this amazing period of technological history.

All The Best,

Keith