This is the first time a Kachina Chapter president has used the new chapter blog to address its members. Blogs have been around since “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, proprietor of the Robot Wisdom Weblog. (Source: “Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web,” by Daniel J. Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig.)

Blog soon became synonymous with individuals taking to the web to offer their free piece of advice or opinion or two-cents worth. I know several co-workers who write blogs on various subjects of value or interest to them: raising children, ebooks, history, astronomy, writing, and more. And so, the Kachina Chapter joins the 21st century, at last, with a personal note from this blogger.

Mary Ellen Bates, a well-known author, columnist, and a self-proclaimed “information professional,” writes that “The value we add isn’t solely in our ability to retrieve the information but to then make it relevant and usable to a client or a user.” While she addresses this to librarians, it’s the same goal we technical communicators strive to achieve. We take our raw data from interviews, specs, drawings, web sites, and then mesh and blend it to create a new, more easily digestible form of content that is palatable to our readers. This hasn’t changed since tech writing began. What has changed is the sheer amount of data that bombards us.

She writes: “The seeming overabundance of data isn’t the problem as much as it is developing tools to sift out what is relevant for us. The value of blogs is that they are created by people who are sifting through data and highlighting what’s most relevant to them.” Just like this blogger has extracted something from my personal reading and has “sifted through” the information and is now “highlighting” what’s important to me.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently pointed out to an audience at the Special Libraries Association conference that the Hubble Space Telescope streams 4GB of data every day. One office is devoted solely to making that information available to the public, in the forms of images, videos, educational resources, and multimedia displays. This is the role of info pros, says Bates: “to provide guidance in filtering the relevant information and to provide the tools to interpret the information.”

As technical communicators, we need to be leading the way to mold complexity into simplicity. I will use this blog to help further that cause and to share those things that I find interesting to me, in hopes of presenting something of importance to you. I’ll be the sifter and highlighter. This blog will be my megaphone.  I promise not to shout; but I will speak out.