Killing XML and IA with social media

Back in October 2013, the IBM editor for my writing team forwarded her enlightening observation about the meteoric rise of mobile media and the potential fall of topic-based authoring. I hadn’t created this blog yet, but I knew that her thoughts might be the seed for an intriguing post someday. Over a month after creating my blog, I still didn’t know how to frame the subject. This is, until now.

With over 20 years of IBM experience, my editor wrote: “Highly technical information that’s delivered on YouTube is widely accepted by technical users… More and more, users will be accessing our products from mobile devices. To learn something new, would you rather watch a YouTube video on your mobile phone or read several topics in an information center?”

TRIRIGAPEDIA: Hosted by the MediaWiki-powered Wikia.com

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. After publishing a dozen entries, I realized that my editor’s compact yet powerful observation overlaps my blog posts about dissecting DITA, breathing Oxygen XML, plugging into WordPress, searching Big Blue, and probably a few more. Do they collectively predict the downfall of topic-based XML authoring and topic-based information architecture? Let’s find out.

Rethinking Big Data as Transient Data

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon an intriguing Verge article about self-destructing electronics and almost forgot about it. But recently, after strolling through the tech tweets about big data, social media, and the multi-billion-dollar Snapchat offers, I remembered that Verge article and a new brainstorm hit me. What about the trends toward self-destructing social data? Thankfully, I’m not the first one to recognize this pattern.

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. In a previous post, I discussed the epic Switch SuperNAPs. With the accelerating trends in big-data analytics and its skyrocketing demand for high-density computing, let’s think against the expected grain and pose the less-predictable questions.

Snapchat CEO, Evan Spiegel (Wired.com)

Will we generate social data faster than we can handle technologically and sociopolitically? Are we already there? If we must slow the pace, then what if we defined an expiration date or time limit for all of our social data? Instead of big data, what if we generated self-destructing data, ephemeral data, or transient data?

Plugging into WordPress security

As some of you might already know, I’ve also been a blogger for ages. Since 2005, I’ve played with nearly a dozen blogging accounts from LiveJournal to MySpace to Blogger to WordPress to Connections. But by far, my favorite platform is WordPress.

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. With nearly half a million employees worldwide, IBM easily has thousands of teams of all shapes and sizes. So I’m not surprised to hear recently that a few IBM teams might be migrating areas of their social media sites from Connections to WordPress. While I love the WordPress interface, I also understand the concerns that other colleagues might have about the security issues in WordPress, particularly in its plugins.

Jay’s WordPress “word cloud” (Wordle.net)

But here’s the thing about plugins. Just like installing and uninstalling fun or functional third-party apps on your smartphone, you can also install and uninstall fun or functional third-party plugins on your WordPress.org blog. In other words, your blog is only as strong as its weakest plugin. Fortunately, there are countermeasures. You can uninstall your weaker plugins, and you can also install security plugins.