Listen to this post: You can download the MP3 file, subscribe in iTunes, or listen with Stitcher. About the Census Survey Researchers at Concordia University (including Saul Carliner) are conducting a “Census of Technical Communicators.” The survey takes a while to complete (20 min.), but it’s well worth the time, and I’m fascinated to see the upcoming results. You can take the survey here: Census of Technical Communicators Survey. Some of the census questions will prompt some serious reflection. For example, these two questions: As a technical writer, where do you feel the most pain or friction? How do technical writers in your organization feel the most pain or friction? There’s also an entire section about resources you consult for professional development, including blogs. The survey names several blogs specifically, including the one you’re reading: Advertising’s impact on the web’s original ideals I’m excited to see blogs listed as sources for professional development here, because in my view it celebrates the decentralization of the web. The very fact that I would be listed among other sources such as peer-reviewed journals, formal conferences, or other trade magazines for professional development suggests that the dynamics of the web have destabilized the hierarchy of information in interesting ways. Given that a Decentralized Web Summit just ended (I didn’t attend but there are recordings), it’s worth making a few extra notes on decentralization. In a post summarizing highlights from the conference, Computing summarizes takeaways from two key speakers (the speakers were Mitchell Baker from the Mozilla Foundation and Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive). Computing explains: The ideology of the web’s early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. “Money was considered evil,” she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. “Advertising is the internet’s original sin,” Kahle told the packed room. “Advertising is winner-take-all, and that’s how we’ve ended up with centralization and monopolies.” At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem – recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally – the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine. (Can We Decentralize the Web?) In other words, the web was founded on free software and open source, but advertising ruined the purity of these ideals. While web enthusiasts have traditionally celebrated decentralization, the recent political scene has caused many to question the value of decentralization. Given that external entities (e.g., Russia) can destabilize our sense of real news by injecting fake, polarizing news stories circulated through social media channels (e.g., Facebook), many have called out the downsides of a decentralized web. In a centralized web, presumably these fake stories would be filtered out by judicious editors. So given this context, I can only wonder whether there are downsides with my blog appearing in this list of professional development resources. Maybe the editors of TC peer-reviewed journals look at my site and shake their heads, thinking there goes that crazy blogger again, cranking out more new posts that have people spinning around like wild chickens. While I would never intentionally post fake news on my blog, there are some undeniable characteristics inherent in blogging that are questionable. For starters, you have to crank out a lot of content on a regular basis. For exa