Alright – so this weeks writing assignment was “the FAQs”. And that got me to wondering… what is a “FAQ”?
The loverly Wikipedia (fountain of knowledge that it is!) offered this up:
“The FAQ is an Internet textual tradition originating from a combination of mailing list-laziness plus speculation and a separate technical and political need within NASA in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On the SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would ftp archived past messages. In practice, this never happened. Instead, the dynamic on mailing lists was for users to speculate rather than use very basic original sources … Repeating the “right” answers becomes tedious. … The acronym FAQ was developed in 1983 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list. The format was then picked up on other mailing lists. Posting frequency changed to monthly, and finally weekly and daily across a variety of mailing lists and newsgroups.
Usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug (in Don’t Make Me Think) have mentioned … that too often these FAQs are written from an internal vantage point in place of putting true thought into the user’s perspective and what information typical users may want and need.”
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Ah ha! I thought so! Anytime I have ever tried to use a “FAQ” it was always “gobble-de-gook”. Or a quick out for a really bad web site…
And has anyone else noticed that the acronym is the word? FAQs vs facts??
… OMG! …
What if Eugene is actually the inventor of “txt speak”??? The godfather of SMS?? Should we revere or loathe him?
4col this tng is evrywhr! I jst want to esc! Maybe it’s a gnr8n tng…
u cn ask “hru?” and say “gb”. U cn even lol !
wtf?? … i gtg … tlk-2-u-l8r
