ReadWriteWeb

Technical documentation. I doubt it's something any of us would list as our favorite genre, either to write or to read. But it's one of those necessities we often curse then begrudgingly accept when we have to wade our way through it in order to solve a problem or when we have to write it in order to explain a technical product.

Good documentation is hard to write. There are a number of forms in which technical documents can take: very general or high-level overviews, step-by-step walkthroughs, or auto-generated documents, for example. Add this to the variety of users who might need your documentation - their different needs, technical expertise, learning styles - and you'll probably find there is really no one single format that will work for everyone.

UK government officials won't have to rely on randomly tweeting without any official guidance anymore. Neil Williams, the Head of Corporate Digital Channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills just published a first draft of an official guide to using Twitter for UK government officials. The guide clocks in at 20 pages, 5,392 words and 36,215 characters - or approximately 259 tweets. The guide explains what Twitter and related social media tools are and how to use them at a very basic level. One section of the guide also explains third-party tools like bit.ly, monitter, and tweetbeep.com.