One of the biggest challenges facing a technology writer is making the abstract as real and immediate as possible. Bits, bytes, networks, software, data. Scalability, security, availability and usability. The list goes on. Back in the good old days we used to send writers down to the Metia IT room and get them to look at servers occupying measurable space in the physical world. Which was fine until virtualisation technology started taking over the data centre abstracting everything.

So we'll take every opportunity to get a clear view of what we're writing about. If you can't pick it up, you should be able to look at it. Get your clients and their customers to send you physical architecture diagrams, schematics and screen shots. Or use your imagination. See the world through the eyes of a field engineer or a police sergeant as they switch on a 3G mobile device.

One of our writers took this approach one step further when writing an article on a new global logistics customer. In the space of two paragraphs she had to describe the shipping gateway at a major American airport. Using one of the popular mapping applications she was able to zoom down to the docking ports, study the railway link to the airport and get a clear idea of the scale of the operation. Rendering buildings in 3D really put things into focus - the copy was even sharper.

By the way we tried this out with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Google was slightly faster to the address, Microsoft had better images, especially in 3D.