K. writes, Dear Mr. Tom Johnson, I am a Post Graduate in English. Recently I am working in a leading public house as writer. How can I become a successful TECHNICAL WRITER? Please reply me as soon as possible. K. Dear K, The best thing you can do to develop your skills and ability with technical writing is to actually do some technical writing. Find an open source project, such as WordPress.org or Pligg, and write some documentation for i...
In Publishing 2.0, Tim O'Reilly says Web 2.0 is "any network effect that makes a system better the more people use it." Web 2.0 isn't just user-generated content; it's harnessing the collective intelligence of your users to make your system better. O'Reilly's definition is intriguing because it's the opposite of the natural law of use. Your car doesn't get better the more you use it. A music track doesn't get better if more people listen ...
Update: I have since revised the writerriver.com site with a different implementation. This new version is more like Twitter than Digg. The concepts are still mostly the same, except there's no voting. I've been a long-time reader of Digg.com, but just last week it dawned on me that it would be really great if there were a Digg-like site for technical communication. So I decided to create one. It's called WriterRiver.com and it's pretty m...
On the eve of the highlight conference of the year, I'm out with two colleagues at a grill in Philadelphia, and the waitress is chit-chatting with us more than usual when I mention, in the context of the conversation, that we are all technical writers. "So you like work for the government? Tell me no," she says. And then in a split-second, she walks off, completely uninterested about our profession. Through this and many other experiences...
I wrote a guest post at Poewar.com titled "The Intersection of the Personal and Professional, or, Why My Attempts at Nonfiction Essays in Grad School Bombed." I described one of most significant things I learned at my nonfiction writing program at Columbia (and in life, actually). I encourage you to check it out, not only because there's a contest for the guest post that brings in the most traffic, but because I honestly believe it's the...
Listen here: A strange thing happens when you take an audio file of someone speaking and set it to music -- the two separate tracks combine such that the result is greater than the sum of the parts. For example, listen to the 3 minute track below that combines a 1981 speech by Shakespearean English scholar Arthur Henry King with Kiln's Fyrepond. I have not altered either track in any way. I simply layered them together....
Twemes.com is a service that aggregates tweets that have the same tag. A handful of twitterers at the STC Conference are tagging their tweets with #stc2008. If you go to http://twemes.com/stc2008, you can see a stream of all of these tweets. Right now the number of people on Twitter at this conference is abysmally low (less than 1%), but through one co-twitterer we were able to lower the AC in a room. It's a start. If you're tweets have a...
I'm excited about a panel that I'm going to be on with Scott Abel, Rahel Bailie, Chris Hester, and Ann Rockley tomorrow afternoon at the STC Conference in Philadelphia. The panel is titled "Evangelizing, Proselytizing, and Preaching: Strategies for Marketing Yourself and Your Expertise To Others." That's a mouthful. In simpler terms, we'll be talking about how to market yourself in a web 2.0 world. At first I didn't think I had much to s...
Listen here: In this podcast, rich media specialist Todd O'Neill explains how to add video to your training and documentation deliverables. Many technical writers are intimidated by the learning curve, equipment costs, and software they think they need to create video, but actually you can create engaging videos with minimal equipment (e.g., $150 for a Flip video camera) and using software you probably already have (e....
Listen here: With all the buzz about web 2.0 deliverables, it's easy to get caught up in the frenzy and think we need to quickly create blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasts, videos, and other new media for our users. Actually, we have to step back and analyze our users and their needs before creating any help deliverables at all. In this podcast, Nicky Bleiel says we should talk to as many users as we can — conducti...
If you're going to the STC Summit in Philadelphia, check out my presentation on podcasting. The Art of the Podcast Room: 111AB Format: Demonstration Skill Level: All Time: Tuesday, 4:30 -5:30 pm Learn how to capture audio from presentations, in-person interviews, phone conversations, and tutorials and deliver them as professional productions that can build relationships with listeners and strengthen their knowledge. I have a PowerPoint fo...
User-centered documentation 1.0 → Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 New series: User-centered documentation 1...
I sometimes feel that my life online varies drastically from my life at work. Online, I blog and publish podcasts and write about wikis and Web 2.0. But at work, I used Flare, InDesign, Word, and other tools to create standard help deliverables, such as the User Guide, the Quick Reference Guide, and the Video Tutorial. For a long time, I've wanted to take my documentation into web 2.0 territory and enable user interaction and feedback, bu...
I was digging into some SharePoint books on Safari online tonight, and I noticed something incredibly cool. While I'm reading a page of a book, there's a section at the bottom called "Additional Reading." Based on keyword/topic matches, it pulls similar content from other chapters of other books in the Safari library. It's not just showing me related books for my topic, but is showing me related chapters from other books. I ended up not j...
Listen here: You can either listen to this post as a mini-podcast or just read it. They're mostly the same, but not entirely. I listened to a couple of podcasts back to back tonight that, taken alone, might not have had as strong an impact on me as they did together. The first was Mark in Canada's "Musings of a Tech Writer -- Episode 21," in which he lists the top 10 most annoying things podcasters do. Then I listened t...
