Listen here: IT project teams often need to increase collaboration and communication, but they're hampered by the cubicle walls and other physical silos they set up in the workplace. These physical obstacles force teams to have frequent meetings -- which can be long and inefficient -- just to keep each other updated. In this podcast, Emma Hamer talks about both physical and virtual workspaces that project teams need to ...
Listen here: Many content management projects fail because organizations are either too focused on tools before properly researching their needs and processes, or because they underestimate the difficulty of migrating and restructuring their content to fit the new content management system. In this podcast, Rahel Bailie explains these pitfalls and what companies can do to avoid them, as well as how companies can climb ...
Listen here: XML, a way of tagging and structuring your content, can help solve a number of problems, including storing, mining, reusing, and sharing content. XML helps enable the interoperability of information between systems, allowing you to export and import your content from one application to another. XML is behind much of the collaboration and information sharing Web 2.0 technologies, such as RSS (really simple ...
I received an email the other day from a podcast listener in Germany. K. writes, Today, I've been listening to some of your podcasts which I had saved up, and I wanted to say thank you: You won't believe how invaluable they are to me - and I hope to many others as well. As the lone tech writer at my company in Frankfurt, Germany, I'm missing out on community effects, for better or worse. And since I write documentation for software only ...
John Hewitt at Poewar is giving away $250 to the guest post that brings in the most traffic to his site. He plans to vacation in June and wants the guest posts to keep his site going while he's away. I'll admit, the money is alluring. I've already written my guest post and am planning to submit it tomorrow. The due date is May 28, 2008. John says the posts should be between 400 to 800 words and can be about any of the following: Fiction...
At Doc Train, Stewart Mader was such a popular guy that both Scott Nesbitt and I interviewed him separately. I just listened to Scott's interview while shooting hoops tonight, and I thoroughly enjoyed their exchange. Scott touched on many angles I didn't cover and went more in depth. Here are several things that struck me: Stewart's Wikipatterns site shows wiki practices and techniques that work well in organizations. It's a wiki that a...
"Mark in Canada" has a podcast called Musings of a Tech Writer. In one of his recent episodes (episode 19), he reflects on the STC and makes some interesting comments. He wonders whether the Content Wrangler community and Doc Train conferences can replace the STC. He says the STC spends too much time trying to help tech writers justify themselves to their companies, too much time focusing on the latest tools, too much effort trying to get...
Listen here: In this podcast, Sarah O'Keefe talks about XSL, Flash, and live blogging. XSL (extensible stylesheet language) is a programming language that transforms XML content into a specific format, such as HTML. She explains what you can do with XSL, why it's unique, and how the output is created. Sarah also presented on Flash. Flash comes easier for people who are visual thinkers, she says. She recommends people ...
Listen here: Duration: 15 min. Listen here: In this podcast, Dr. Robert Glushko, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, explains the concept of Document Engineering -- the process of developing document models to make information sharing, reuse, or syndication more efficient. Glushko gives several examples of document engineering, such as creating a calendar event model that allows an ev...
Lately I've been converting my documentation over to a SharePoint wiki and have had days where I felt totally liberated and others where I wanted to go into my Control Panel and remove every Microsoft product I have installed on my computer. Liberating Here's what I find liberating. Most wikis can easily degenerate into a chaotic disaster, with links nested on pages pointing to other links on other pages, with no clear sense of where you ...
I'm giving a virtual presentation to the STC-Phoenix chapter tomorrow at 6:15 pm Arizona Time (which right now is the same as PST). The topic of my virtual presentation is "Combining Social Media with Help Authoring." See more details here. It costs $10 and should last about an hour. Even though it's coordinated by STC Phoenix, anyone interested can sign up. May 15, 2008 Update: View the PowerPoint for this presentation (.ppt). ...
Doc Train has ended, and I'm sitting at the Vancouver airport waiting for my airplane. Lots of thoughts are coming to my head, in no particular order. I interviewed about 12 people this year. I seem to have a knack for this -- tracking people down, asking if I can interview them, getting them talking, etc. Actually, it has taken me three conferences to get this right. Last year, at Doc Train West 2007, I didn't have the right setup. I tri...
Listen here: In this podcast, Noz Urbina talks about how Web 2.0 is changing the role of the technical communicator into one who drives product R&D and interaction design. My discussion with Noz was a light-bulb moment for me at the Doc Train West conference. Podcast topics include the following: How the role of the technical communicator has evolved into a diversity of roles How awareness of user needs and requi...
Listen here: Stewart Mader was one of the coolest people I met at Doc Train West 2008. He is a person driven by his enthusiasm for wikis. In this podcast, Stewart talks about the following: Advantages of using a wiki for your technical documentation Why lack of advanced styles in wikis isn't a major problem The relentless focus on simplicity with wikis Choosing the right wiki among dozens of wiki engines Pitfalls wit...
Presenter: Joe Sokohl (http://sokohl.com) Conference: Doc Train West 2008 In this presentation, Joe Sokohl talks about gathering user research prior to designing and implementing your help deliverables. Breaking the Rules First you have to get to know the user by talking directly to real users doing real work in actual contexts. Interview real people doing real activities. "Don't speculate, don't argue. Observe" (Don Norman). Everything s...
