Rude 5.4

I tried to look at STC's magazine Intercom but an the site required that I have an account to access any of the articles.
I looked at the TCCC mailing list, but it didn't seem to have any of the information I was looking for. But it did have a lot of CFPs for cloud computing. I think this might be the next be thing in technical communication. Web 2.0 sites like Google Docs and others that make online collaboration user friendly can be the next big thing. I recently used Google Docs to make a presentation (powerpoint style) with a classmate. The collaboration part of it was flawless. We lost no information and neither of us had any problems creating the document. On top of that, there is some added security as the document automatically saves itself every few seconds, so if your computer dies, or someone kicks out the power cord, there is no need to worry; you haven't lost anything. I'm not one hundred percent sure about securing documents from outsiders, but it seems like most documents can only be accessed through an authorized Google account. The program wasn't as sophisticated as PowerPoint but very useful.

I imagine that a technical communicator is going to have to be very comfortable with using these kinds of cloud programs; comfortable with putting there information "out there" instead of stored on their own hard drive. It makes sense in a lot of ways, but it is scary.