We love our maps. At first glance, people are shocked by them: the shapes look familiar, yet everything is absurdly distorted. Without even thinking, they have learned something about the world they live in.

Most of our data comes from sources such as United Nations reports and is often tucked away in appendices. No one wants to look at those figures, and it would be hard to provoke any excitement by confronting someone with spreadsheets filled with numbers. But you just can’t help looking at these pictures. After all, a new view of the world, rather like the famous Earthrise photo taken by Apollo astronauts, is a compelling sight.

The maps referred to here are produced by the statisticians and cartographers at Worldmapper.org, and they use a simple but powerfully effective method to convey information: they shrink or swell portions of the world map to indicate the magnitude of the statistics being shown.

Here’s a pair of maps that speak volumes:

New Scientist: Change the way you see the world (subscription required) If you don’t subscribe to New Scientist–and you should; it’s a very readable weekly that wipes the floor with every other magazine that even attempts to communicate with a lay audience–you can go directly to Worldmapper.org and groove on the mappage therein.

Related: Worldmapper.org

Hat Tip: BLDG BLOG via Althouse

Copywriting 101 is a set of articles about persuasive writing for the Web:

Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational style of marketing. Whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic by earning links from others, you’ll need to tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people. This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of copywriting in ten easy lessons.

Copyblogger

You think you’re a good communicator: You keep your users informed and you listen to their problems. So why is it that no one appears to read your e-mails or seems capable of following your instructions? Are you surprised to learn that the users have been living with computer issues rather than ask you for help? These are all signs of a breakdown in communication–which we, as support techs, frequently misinterpret as user indifference or even stupidity. Before long, we find ourselves on a downward spiral toward complete communications failure.

The 10 worst ways to communicate with end users (TechRepublic)

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. This architecture consists of a set of design principles for creating “information-typed” modules at a topic level and for using that content in delivery modes such as online help and product support portals on the Web. This document is a roadmap for DITA: what it is and how it applies to technical documentation.

Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (IBM.com)

Most information architects already take “known item” (you know what you’re looking for) and “exploratory” (browsing) searching into account in their site designs. 

Donna Maurer adds two new search types - “don’t know what you need to know” and “re-finding,” and provides some helpful design tips and thoughts.

Four modes of seeking information and how to design for them (Boxes and Arrows)

After almost 20 years languishing on the shelf, large companies are beginning to adopt ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library of IT services best practices guidelines (the British pronounce it “it-ill,” while Americans say “eye-till”). Forrester Research predicts that 40 percent of large organizations will rely on ITIL by 2006 and 80 percent by 2008, up from a mere 13 percent that had implemented it by 2004.

[Ed. note: Hand-waving and hype about the future numbers, which are anybody’s guess, and there are plenty of people in Europe who would point out that ITIL has hardly been “languishing on the shelf for 20 years,” but probably more accurate than not. So far, so mediocre.]

Addressing ITIL and related IT management frameworks COBIT and ISO, a recent Forrester report notes…

Bzzzzzz! Wrong. “ISO” stands for “International Standards Organization,” and you don’t even want to think about how many numbered ISO standards there are, more than 99% of which have nothing whatsoever to do with IT service management. “ISO,” to put it mildly, ain’t a management framework.

Such a little thing.

Such a massively important thing–if you’re trying to sell somebody on the idea that you know what you’re talking about, you just blew it.

I know that Forrester Research has better writers and editors than this, so I’m pretty sure that somebody over at “Intelligent Enterprise” dropped the ball here.

The writer, by the way, most likely intended to reference ISO 9000 (quality management) or, if exceptionally hip, ISO 20000 (IT service management) though there are other possibilities as well.

Governance Gauge: Don’t Worry, “ITIL” Be Alright [sic] (Intelligent Enterprise.com)

Today I want to talk about the all-out assault on the English language and the role technology plays in that unprovoked and dastardly attack. I especially want to talk about the ways dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo.Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, “Well, at least people are writing again.” Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.

[…]

Business jargon is simply the art of saying nothing while appearing to say a lot.

As a result, we have CEOs of major corporations who lack the basic writing skills to pen a simple, in-house memo in plain-spoken English. We see marketing swine get paid princely sums to lie about their products in language so bloated with jargon that their lies — and even their half-truths — are unintelligible. We see company flacks churning out impenetrable press releases that no editor in his right mind would consider reading, let alone using. We see business reporting reduced to the trite and formulaic because the reporter is either too uncritical or too lazy to take a hard look at what lies behind the smoke and mirrors.

Wired News: Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone

• Research, write, edit and refine technical and marketing documentation, either as lead authors or as team participants.
• Policy and procedure manuals
• Proposals and RFPs
• Training materials
• Web pages
• Product manuals and online help
• White papers
• Reports and presentations
• Project documentation
• Research and recommend best practices for communications.
• Set and propagate documentation standards and style guidelines.
• Manage your documentation library and collaboration tools.

Why should you care?

An experienced technical communicator can help you save money, make money, establish and maintain a competitive advantage, and comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

Save money

• Reduce support and overhead costs by delivering improved training material and reference documents.
• Increase buy-in from colleagues and clients by delivering persuasive and easy-to-understand policy and procedure documentation.
• Help your staff “do it right the first time” by providing clear directions, reducing the necessity for costly rework and revision due to ambiguity and misunderstanding.
• Bring new employees and client staff up to speed quickly by providing clear documentation and training material; they will become more productive, faster.

Make money

• Win new business by crafting more compelling proposals and RFPs.
• Add considerable value to the services that you deliver and the processes and tools that you support by being able to offer high-quality training and documentation and turning it into a selling point.

Establish and maintain a competitive advantage

• Clear communication helps you align business and IT goals and practices to improve your organization’s effectiveness.

Comply with legal and regulatory requirements

• Stay out of the liability zone by clearly documenting your policies and procedures and communicating them to clients and staff.
• Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and related global and industry-specific statutory requirements.

Hiding confidential information with black marks works on printed copy, but not with electronic documents, the National Security Agency has warned government officials.

The agency makes the point in a guidance paper on editing documents for release, published last month following several embarrassing incidents in which sensitive data was unintentionally included in computer documents and exposed. The 13-page paper is called: “Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF.”

Instead of covering up digital text with black boxes, it is better to delete any information you don’t want to share, the NSA suggested.

Editing tips from the NSA: CNET News.com

Update: On the TECHWR-L mailing list, user Sue Gallagher points us to a very useful redaction tool for users of Microsoft Word 2003:

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Microsoft Word 2003 Redaction Add-In