Twenty-five years as a technical communicator and until today, I thought that you needed to buy a special "Dvorak keyboard" to type with the vaunted Dvorak keyboard layout. As it turns out, however, the Dvorak layout is built in to every major operating system. You can enable it in less than a minute, and then easily switch between Dvorak and QWERTY any time after that as needed. You can use the keyboard you have right now for either layout.

Don't know the Dvorak layout? No problem. You can print out a simple quick-reference card and tape it somewhere near your monitor. There's no need to re-label your keys, because you should not be looking at them anyway. And if you get frustrated or need to do something in a hurry while you are still learning the layout, you can instantly switch back to QWERTY when needed.

Has your curiosity been piqued? You can learn more at DVzine.org. (And yes, this blog entry is my first attempt at writing anything in Dvorak.)

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen makes some compelling observations about the current trend of Web 2.0 design (which includes frequent use of mash-ups) in an excellent BBC news article from yesterday. In case the target of this link ever becomes defunct, I've included a reprint of the entire article below the break.

From my own perspective as a technical communicator involved with web site design and online information architecture since the inception of HTML, I could not agree more with Mr. Nielsen's observations and warnings. Even though I consider myself a fairly advanced user of the newer Web 2.0 technologies, I have sworn off several sites entirely now, such as Amazon and eBay, because they've become extremely cumbersome and hard to use. Nor do I even bother with My Yahoo! anymore. I'm an avid blogger and wiki contributer, but you won't find me anywhere near sites like Myspace, and there are certain wikis I never use because there's no central editorial oversight keeping the wiki organization streamlined and usable. If I can't "get in, find the information I want, and get out" I never return to a site again. (Which is exactly one of the points Mr. Nielsen makes in the article.)

A very recent (as of Monday, June 12) email harvesting worm has managed to successfully infect many users of Yahoo! Mail. The worm works simply by reading the email--you do not have to actually open the attached file. Fortunately the payload is relatively harmless; it simply harvests your email address and sends it to a server, then it replicates to all other @yahoo.com addresses in your contacts list. Note that the latest version of AT&T Yahoo! Mail Beta seems to be protected against the exploit used by the worm, but many people do not yet use the new Beta version of Yahoo! Mail.

This is a heads-up to anyone currently using IntraVnews or who is thinking about using IntraVnews as an RSS reader. I saw the program recently on Angie Moore's desktop and thought it seemed really useful. It's an RSS reader plug-in for Outlook and its best feature is that it treats the feeds like email messages, so you end up with an archived history that is sortable.

There is a small problem with it, however. Namely, that the My Subscriptions feed from the iMIS Community will not resolve in version 2.0 (beta) of the product. (Angie is using version 1.2, in which the feed does resolve okay.)

As RSS publishing feeds have become more prevalent on the Web, I've changed my information-gathering habits to take advantage of the power and time-savings of RSS readers. I almost never "surf" the web any more. When I want to catch up on all my usual information sources, I use my RSS reader to see what's new. One-stop shopping for pretty much everything. I even find myself shunning sites that don't have an RSS feed, because I don't want to be bothered with "going to them" just to see whether there's anything new for me there. How quickly things change, eh?