Writing Resources

What do you do when you're researching information for clients, and some of the source you need is historical. We all know wikipedia isn't always the best site to reference, and when I need a guide to who invented something, or who the first person was to make a discovery, well, I just need to know that my source has researched the subject to the best of their ability.

Unfortunately a lack of credibility is something that affects too many online resources, so when I stumbled on the Who Guides website something attracted me to their articles that I couldn't explain. Perhaps reading about who invented the toilet, or who invented lego appeal to me because I rarely encounter these sorts of topics.

For some of my clients I am often asked to write about who invented fireworks, in fact I think I've written three or four articles about the subject in the last six months, and probably if you're writer you will have done so as well, but have you ever read about who invented velcro? Yeah, me neither!

Who Guides mentions in it's homepage that the guides are not intended to be a complete all encompassing historical reference, instead they are intended for your average person who just needs a quick history of who invented something. I guess the site is aimed at those of us who get involved with quizzes, or like me, have a need to share our general knowledge when we have the chance.

Some of us are good at sport, others retain useful facts. I believe I'm in the second category although I rarely do well at trivial pursuit, but frequently astound my friends with knowledge of unusual topics. After looking at some of the categories listed on Who Guides I might even submit a few short articles to them myself, and if you're reading this post because you're a writer, then why not join me.

I'm a writer, I send documents to clients all the time, and I also have documents emailed to me all the time, mostly to edit and shoot right back to the client, and I have to tell you that incompatibilities between document file formats drive me nuts. Especially this new docx format from Microsoft.

I tend to use OpenOffice so for the most part I don't even notice what format I've opened a document in, and the same thing when I save a document, it doesn't matter much to me whether it's in docx, doc, or odt, but it matters a lot to clients who historically use doc and then discover to their horror that a document is returned to them in docx format.

The difference is huge, especially when the client then sends the docx to someone like a local newspaper or a business colleague who isn't able to open the file. Explaining how to convert docx to doc seems easy but a client who is used to working with doc doesn't want to be bothered understanding new file formats.

The problem isn't on my part, I simply work with the format I'm sent, but the client rarely notices their Office suite has switched format until they see the extension on the attachment, then I often get a phone call asking me how to how to open Docx files.

Of course docx is no different to any other format, but docx does require either the latest version of MS Office, or the patch that Microsoft provide to allow older versions to work with their new format. Sadly, too many people haven't updated their software yet, so expect a lot of incompatibilities and surprised recipients, or just save everything in doc format, at least you won't have to deal with the fallout.

They say history repeats itself, certainly the current financial crisis has a lot in common with the great depression of the 1930s, greed was to blame then as it is now, and then as now, the crisis was global in nature. Personally I'm finding the parallels quite interesting, so I'm reading a fair bit about the History of Things. You should too.

History for most of the people I know is something that they learned at school, it was one of the easy (or difficult) subjects that everbody either loved or hated, sadly I think most people probably hated it. In today's times surely more time spent in the computer lab, or learning a trade would seem to be a better use of time.

That is an opinion I don't agree with, I think if history os studied a lot about human civilization starts to make sense. Take the situation in Mexico, Colombia, or the US with gangs having so much power or ability to cause major problems.

Compare gang warfare today with the 1920s and gangsters like Al Capone, or gangs in London or Sicily in the 1800s, or powerful trading gangs of the medieval ages, even the Roman Empire wasn't immune to their vice-like grip on society. Reading about the History of Gangs makes you realize that wherever there are people, gangs and unsocial behavior follows.

My hope is that we fully embrace the computer age that we'll see more peace, and less war, more equality, and less greed, but I know from reading about every major revolution in civilization that nothing much changes, although for the first time ever, when I was reading the history of the internet I started to believe maybe this time things might be different.

For the first time in recorded history people from all walks of live have a voice, and in many cases just as much ability to be heard than in the past when only those with power or money could have their voices heard.

The incredible effect that social networking is having, the wonderful power of blogging, even the ability to twitter is making a difference and politicians are starting to notice. I think we might be onto something here, lets hope history starts to change, perhaps not repeat itself quite so often.