The way in which we compute has been changing over the last three or four years. In fact, I think I can safely say that what many people are doing now isn’t computing in the traditional sense of the word.
They’re accessing and using apps, whether on the Web or on mobile devices. The networks is becoming the computer for more and more people.
I won’t debate the merits and perils of going mobile and using the cloud, but things seem to be heading that way. Not just with smartphones and tablets, but also with hardware like Google’s CR-48 notebook and with operating systems like Jolicloud and Peppermint OS.
As Aaron and I, and a number of others, have been saying for a while, this move will have a profound impact on the way in which we do our work.
Back in the mid to late 1990s, I didn’t have much money to buy new hardware. Actually, my computing was done on older desktops and laptops. Of course, that hardware wouldn’t run the latest versions of Windows (at least not too well) and I hadn’t started my journey to Linux just yet.
While at a 
The table of contents. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. It’s a classic way of organizing and navigating through information. But I find the beginning-middle-end structure of the ToC to be limiting.
We love slapping tags on things. A name gives us an idea of what those things are supposed to do, and also allows us to add a bit of gravity or levity to that thing. Take the world of tech comm, for example. How many different titles have you heard for the job we do? Technical writer, technical communicator, documentation specialist, documentation engineer, technical publishing specialist, technical author, guy or gal who writes the manuals that no one reads.
We all know how to do that, don’t we? The problem is the options that we can give our readers. Tagging, tag clouds, search, a table of contents, an index. But what is the best option?