No, nothing is wrong. I always chuckle when I see blog posts in which people apologize for not posting on their blog, or when they provide reasons for their lack of blogging activity. I chuckle because it’s like, hey, I didn’t miss you. I have 1000+ unread posts in Google Reader and content overflowing on Twitter, books from Amazon, and other sources. There’s no dearth of content on the web, so your short absence of content isn’t something I’ve been agonizing over. I suspect the same is true for my readers.

If you really want to know, though, I’ve been exhausting my creating energy writing a debut article for work. I’m still waiting on the outcome, but it involved doing some historical research, and that kind of stuff you just can’t crank out with clever typing.

Now, on to the broken clock. After my last post about rocks and cairns and chunking, some people thought it was funny that I went to Arches National Park and all I took were pictures of dinky rock cairns. So for those waiting for something more camera-worthy, check out Park Avenue.

Park Avenue in the Arches

And if you prefer people in your pictures, here I am skydiving off a rock in Sand Dune Arch.

Skydiving off Sand Dune Arch. The sand below is really soft. Otherwise I wouldn't do this.

I will spare you the 60 to 70 pictures of the baby crawling through the sand, as well as the other hundred pictures of my other kids doing all kinds of funny poses with rusty-orange arches in the background.

But digital pictures are not entirely irrelevant here. In David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, he says the digital camera has encouraged people to take many more photos than they normally would. After a while you end up with thousands of photos on your hard drive, with almost no way to order or arrange them. Do I tag the above photo Arches? Utah? 2011? Jumping? Age 35? Soft sand? Rusty orange rocks? Sandstone? Falling? About the only thing you can do, without a specific metadata strategy, is tag the photo haphazardly. (I actually don’t tag my photos at all, really. They just sit in various folders.)

But the scenario, if I were to tag my photos, is relevant to the ongoing discussion about chunking. The trend in previous comments I received was that your metadata strategy informs the size of each topic. If your metadata requires you to identify certain characteristics, then naturally your topic will need to be a certain size in order to accommodate that metadata. This makes sense to me.

But the most thought-provoking comment was by Mark Baker, who pointed me to a post on his site comparing granular topics to a broken clock. Mark says that as you start dismantling an alarm clock into its pieces, the pieces soon become meaningless in isolation. The broken clock is similar to a topic: the more granular it becomes, the less meaningful the topic becomes to readers. You also have less potential for attaching metadata to the topic. Mark explains:

Now start taking it [the alarm clock] apart. First you will disconnect various assemblies: the case, the clock mechanism, the ringer. Some of these, at least, could still have interesting metadata attached to them. But you continue, taking each of these assemblies apart until what you are left with is a collection of screws, gears, and several pieces of bent metal about which you can say nothing meaningful other than that they used to be part of an alarm clock. (Why Fine Chunking and Rich Metadata Don’t Mix)

I couldn’t find a picture of a disassembled alarm clock, but here’s a flayed alarm clock below. You can see all the components here — capacitors, transistors, wires, tubes, square things, bands, and other parts. Would it really be wise to isolate each one as a separate topic?

Look at all the pieces in an alarm clock. Would it make sense to separate them out and sort/arrange/call by various pieces? Probably not -- unless you're an alarm clock maker.

Keep in mind that the broken alarm clock is a metaphor, and all metaphors break down at some point. But it’s quite a good metaphor since many of us do not understand the insides of alarm clocks. In fact, if you were to disassemble any technology in my house — the refrigerator, a DVD player, a digital camera, an automatic pencil sharpener, etc, I probably couldn’t make much sense of the individual components. They are meaningless in isolation.

A while ago I was reading DITA 101, by Ann Rockley, Charles Cooper, and Steve Manning. In the introduction, the authors assert that a well-written topic can stand alone in nearly any medium. A well-written topic is versatile in its placement, and is a logical unit in and of itself. It doesn’t require much context to make sense.

To accomplish this self-contained unit of information, I think a topic has to be a fairly decent size. It probably wouldn’t be a short standalone paragraph, nor would it likely be a short list of three steps. In my mind, it would be a somewhat sizable topic — probably a conceptual description followed by a list of task steps. One needs a certain amount of substance to prevent the type of content that seems fragmented and incomplete to the user when viewed alone.

That’s it for now. By the way, if you’re going to the STC Summit, I’m giving a presentation titled Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-Based Hierarchies on Tuesday at 4:00 pm. In it I hope to present the ideas I’ve been exploring in my Organizing Content series. Unfortunately my presentation is at the same time as Karen McGrane’s We Are All Content Strategists Now and, judging from what I saw on Vimeo, she looks like a really good speaker. So my Summit audience may be a passing janitor and an assigned room monitor, but that’s okay. Expect to see more posts in this series on my blog.

Also, I can see that the topics are moving toward metadata and taxonomy. If you have any good recommendations for books on metadata (in the context of technical communication), please let me know. I am finding that, despite the abundance of well-written blogs, books are sometimes more enjoyable to read in the long run.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Content Talks is a new podcast from Brain Traffic

Hey podcast listeners, check out Content Talks, a new podcast by Brain Traffic on content strategy. The first episode features Kristina Halverson interviewing Ann Rockley about content strategy issues. It’s a great interview, and Ann sounds lively and engaged.

Kristina steers Ann towards detailed stories and experiences as they make their way through a host of content issues. Kristina says they will be producing a weekly podcast show. The audio quality in this show is superb, by the way.

While you’re listening to podcasts, check out several others as well. The Spoolcast from Jared Spool is full of relevant discussions for designers, communicators, information architects, illustrators, web managers, and more. In particular, check out one of his recent shows, Stephen Anderson, the Quest for Emotional Engagement.

I also enjoy Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn. Moira is a skilled interviewer, and her topics are engaging with a general technical interest. In particular, I especially enjoyed The Internet Age of Journalism episode.

If you also enjoy webinars, both Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler and Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium produce regular webinars. You can listen to Scott’s interview with Richard Hamilton on Managing Technical Writing Teams. And check out Scriptorium’s DITA Best Practices webinar on Scriptorium with Tony Self.

I’m also planning to produce more regular podcasts. My most recent podcast was an interview with Donna Spencer on Information Architecture.

Do you listen to other podcasts you enjoy? Let me know in the comments below.

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Blog Sponsors

• 3Rabbitz book
• Webworks ePublisher
• Scriptorium
• Help Generator help authoring software
• Southern Polytechnic: Information Design and Communication
• Simplified English
• MindTouch
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

Ann Rockley

A few years ago, I wanted to better understand content management, so I picked up Managing Enterprise Content, by Ann Rockley, and read it through. It opened my eyes to a lot of new concepts.

Ann is one of our field’s leading experts in content management. She’s now expanding in to something she calls “intelligent content.”

Intelligent content is a concept that builds on other concepts you may already be familiar with. I think we’re going to hear a lot more about intelligent content. In fact, she and Scott Abel are preparing an entire conference exploring intelligent content. I caught up with Ann over email and asked her to expand on the concept. Below is our interview.

What is intelligent content?

We define it this way: Intelligent content is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.

Let me explain more what that means.

Structurally rich

“Structurally rich” means the content is structured content, and more importantly it is semantically structured content. For example, we can look at the structure and know what type of content it contains (steps contain chronological action-oriented information). DITA-based content is an example of structurally rich content, as is DocBook, XBRL, and RSS, though the content could have a custom structure as well).

If we have a structure in our content, we can manipulate it. For example, we can automatically determine how to publish it to multiple channels (print, web, help, mobile), or we can filter out some content (e.g., tables may not work as well in the mobile environment).

Also, if it is structurally rich we can perform searches and narrow our search to the particular type of information we are interested in (e.g., look for all occurrences of the word metadata in conceptual information).

Semantically aware

The word semantic refers to “meaning.” Semantically aware content is content that has been tagged with metadata to identify the kind of content within it. For example, you might tag your content with industry, role or audience, and product. If the content is tagged with semantic metadata, it is possible to automatically build customized information sets based on audience or industry, for example.

As more organizations start to create personalized content (content which is dynamically assembled upon user request that specifically matches a users need or user profile), this type of metadata becomes extremely important.

In addition, as content is pushed to wikis, integrated through “mashups” or “pipes,” it becomes even more important to ensure our content is semantically tagged. Without semantic metadata, it’s difficult to automatically, let alone manually, find the content we need.

Discoverable

If the content has semantic tags and is structurally rich, it’s a whole lot easier to find exactly what we are looking for.

Reusable

Reusability refers to content we frequently use. If content is structured for reuse, and I know what type of content it is, I can either easily retrieve it for manual reuse or automatically retrieve it for systematic reuse (automatic reuse).

Reconfigurable

Knowing the structure of the content, we can output it to multiple channels, reconfiguring it to best meet the needs of the channel, or we can automatically mix and match content to provide us with the information the customers needs. We can even transform content (reconfigure it) from one structure to another, but only if we know what the structure is in the first place.

Adaptable

We frequently create our content for a particular need or audience, but content can be adapted (used in a different way), often without our knowledge, to meet a new need.

Is “intelligent content” a new term for our industry? If so, who coined it?

As far as technical communication goes, “intelligent content” is a new term. In some ways, it’s a new term in the broader content industry as well.

I coined the term, just like I did for much of the terminology used today for reuse because there wasn’t a term to describe something that existed, or there were too many terms, and talking about something or trying to explain something was difficult.

Technical communicators are very focused on producing high quality content that meets the customers’ needs, often in a very short period time and often with tools that won’t stretch to meet their needs. Many have begun to move to DITA and some are adopting content management, but when you have the conversation with management about why they should move to DITA and adopt content management, it is very difficult to get across the concepts and the return on investment. DITA is a standard, content management is a tool, but how does it help the organization to do what they need to do better?

I’ve heard some managers respond to a well-presented business case with, “So, why should I care, how does this really help us?” Let’s turn it around, let’s talk about the goal and what it gives the organization and the customer. Intelligent content allows us to do the following:

• Automatically publish to multiple channels because the content is structured. Content structure can be recognized and automatically transformed to any format we like. This is not possible with traditional content.
• Customize our content for customers because we can identify what content is appropriate for what customer.
• Reduce the costs of translation because content is modular and designed for reuse, etc.

Why is it intelligent? Because it is structured, etc.

How do we support intelligent content? With DITA, component content management, etc.

Now let’s take the concept of Intelligent Content outside of Technical Communication. There are huge amounts of information in organizations being provided on websites. For a long time, metadata has been the way that most companies optimized content for retrieval, but now XML is beginning to make inroads into broader organizational content, and that brings all the benefits I’ve already discussed.

If you try and talk about XML, though, you’ll lose most managers because it is perceived as being too technical. However, you can turn it around and say we can create intelligent content that enables us to:

• More easily find it
• Deliver it
• Customize it
• Personalize it
• Automatically deliver it to multiple channels
• Simultaneously release content in multiple languages

And

• Reduce costs
• Speed up delivery time
• Optimize resources
• Do more with the same resources
• Increase customer satisfaction

We’re creating intelligent content that can be automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable, etc. — we’re not just creating XML-based content.

What’s the role of the content creator in creating intelligent content?

The role of the content creator is crucial in intelligent content. It is not enough to just put our content in topics and push it out, although that’s a good start. We need to think about all the ways in which we can make our content adaptable. This means doing content analysis, customer needs analysis, and identifying an appropriate information architecture that sits above our content. Content creators are getting a good handle on DITA and structure, but very few use or understand metadata.

What kind of tools do you need to create intelligent content?

We can use the existing DITA tool sets and Component Content Management systems, but if we are interested in helping the organization beyond Tech Pubs, we should consider using XML content servers, and dynamic delivery engines.

What skills are needed for a writer to create smart content?

I’m always looking at where writers are today and where they can go to increase their skills and marketability, so this list reflects a growth curve. To start, writers should look at DITA, but in looking to the future they should gain an understanding of the following:

• Content modeling
• Metadata
• Reuse strategies
• Multichannel delivery strategies
• Mashups, pipes
• XPath and XQuery (not necessarily so they can code these, but so they know what they can do and specify requirements for them)
• Structuring content for marketing campaigns (the intricacies of campaigns are incredible and they are completely dependent upon intelligent content)

What organizations are employing tactics to make content intelligent?

We are seeing the beginnings of intelligent content with organizations that have moved to DITA, but organizations that are global or that have a broad product lines are really developing intelligent content. They are tagging content for region, product, audience, and more as well as automatically producing content that meets the needs of their customers. We have one client that creates 500 different pieces of content to reflect different products from the same content source, all automatically and all based on metadata tagging and DITA!

Next we are seeing intelligent content in organizations where their product is content (e.g., newspapers, magazines, publishers).

We are also seeing intelligent content in pharma, medical devices, intelligence, and financial industry organizations.

Ann Rockley is part of The Rockley Group, a content management company focused on intelligent content.

For more information about Ann Rockley, see The Rockley Group. You can also follow The Rockley blog.

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 say about this topic. After all, it has the M word in there (“marketing”), and the last thing I consider myself is any kind of marketer (disgusting) doing any kind of marketing (repulsive). But when I changed the terms a bit to “influencer” (while talking to Chris tonight), it made everything come into focus. And I suddenly realized that I’m the perfect person for this panel.

Since only a small selection of my readers can actually attend the panel (and because recording STC sessions is prohibited), I’ve posted my panel notes below.

1) How can an employee at a company that wants to move to XML structured authoring become the domain expert in the company? What marketing tactics might they use to position themselves as the expert in the field?

First, as I indicated earlier, I dislike the term marketing. I don’t think of myself as a “marketer” or as someone who is engaged in marketing. I prefer to think of myself as an influencer.

But how can you transform yourself from the lowly technical writer who sits in a cube all day to a domain expert? Or into key influencer on the project team?

First, you need to get a foot in the door. Let your project team know that, for the user documentation, you need to be kept in the loop of anything related to application functionality or the user interface. Make sure you insert yourself into the right meetings and get on the right email loops — under the guise of staying updated.

But instead of just absorbing information in these meetings or email threads, speak up and demonstrate your domain expertise by offering suggestions, analysis, and other insights into the problems the team is trying to solve. If you’re really a domain expert, it will show.

If you have access to a corporate blog (for example, a SharePoint blog or other space), use that and promote it as much as you can in your company. Share your domain knowledge through this publishing space. The more information you share, the more others will see you as the go-to person for information on this topic.

But even if you don’t have aspirations to become a domain expert, you can still transform from tech writer to key project influencer by becoming a user expert. Your largest leverage point is your knowledge of users. The more you know about your users — their complaints, the features they want, the feedback they’re giving, their profiles and habits — the more influence you have on product design. User knowledge transforms you into a key influencer on the product team.

Without this knowledge of your users, you’re only an absorber of information. But if you’re dripping with user knowledge, it can make you one of the most valuable players on the team. Many of the priorities that developers work on for the products I document are priorities based on the user feedback I’ve given them (much of which I gathered while giving training and interacting with users). The project team often turns to me and asks what the users want or what they’re saying about such and such feature. I love that focus.

2) What can an employee of a company do outside of their company firewall to promote themselves as an expert — and why would this matter to others with whom they work?

Outside of a company, you have access to a TON of web 2.0 tools — blogs, twitter, video, Flickr, Second Life, and more. But before you jump into these tools, you have to think about your purposes and the audience you’re trying to win over.

Your web 2.0 endeavors won’t do much good if they don’t reach your audience. Is your audience other technical writers? Great. Is it companies looking to hire contract technical writers? Fine. If you’re trying to market yourself, your content needs to attract that audience.

Once you establish the audience and the content that appeals to them, you need to pump out valuable information in a prolific way. For example, you don’t increase your visibility by blogging once a week or even twice a week. If you’re planning to really crank up your visibility and promote yourself as an expert, blog as much as you can (e.g., daily) about the topic you want to promote yourself as an expert in.

Blogging prolifically comes naturally if you’re 100% engaged in what you’re passionate about. If you’re trying to promote yourself as an expert in XML, immerse yourself in journal articles, books, other blogs, podcasts, email lists, and any other content on XML. Write about what you’re reading. Reflect, analyze, and apply your knowledge.

You’ll have plenty to blog about, and the more you blog about the topic, the more you’ll teach Google to find you in search results. Those searching for information on that topic will naturally be drawn to you, recognizing you as an expert and potentially hiring you. You will saturate Google.

One key technique to increasing your visibility is to search-engine-optimize your posts. People find you through keyword searches in Google. I didn’t really believe this until I started watching my readers via Woopra. 65% of my visitors find me through Google. Those posts I’ve purposely optimized rise to the top. Stack your keywords at the beginning of your title and at the beginning of the first paragraph. Think like a searcher and the keywords will naturally come to you.

3) What things can a technical communicator do who wants to prepare themselves to leave their employer and become a consultant or self-employed?

If you want to leave your employer and become self-employed, I think you have to do more than simply blog. You have to do something that catches the attention of your audience in a major way. One web design company does this extremely well: Headscape. Paul Boag and his colleague Marcus Lillington have a popular podcast called Boagworld.com that has thousands of listeners. It’s a marketing vehicle that promotes their company (Headscape) by branding them as experts and attracting new clients.

Even my little podcast, Tech Writer Voices, has made a sizable impact on the technical writing community for me. It has allowed me to make connections with hundreds of people. Each week about a 700 people download podcasts I’ve recorded. In May I had 4,000 downloads. That’s a lot of reach, and it’s a reach that’s more personal and powerful than merely writing a blog. Wherever I go at this conference — each hall, room, or back alley — I run into someone I know through either my blog, podcast, or Twitter.

Still, despite the effectiveness of my podcast, if I wanted to increase my reach, I could make it a lot more informative. I could make it entertaining, like This American Life. Ira Glass interweaves interviews with an in-depth exploration of a theme.

I could prepare all the content myself and relay it like Jason Van Orden does with the Podcasting Underground. His podcast on podcasting helped him promote himself as the go-to guy for podcasting. He wrote a book, created a course, and provided other peripherals.

Or I could focus the podcast on a topic that there’s not too much info about (e.g., DITA, or breaking into technical writing). I could provide insights, tips, and tricks on this topic on a weekly basis, and then promote peripherals through the podcast — a book, course, CDS, and consulting services.

Another approach to increase your reach is to do a roundtable similar to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, which presents and discusses the latest tech news. This roundtable format works exceptionally well. About four guys go on Skype and discuss the latest tech news. If you have some disagreement, it makes for a really engaging, entertaining show. If you were to create the same show on a topic you’re trying to promote yourself as an expert in, it would brand you as an expert.

Conclusion

Any time you provide a lot of valuable information, you’re going to attract an audience. And you can sell that audience something. The cool thing about blogs, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 marketing vehicles is that it isn’t conscious marketing. You’re unconsciously marketing yourself, building networks, and increasing your potential client reach — all without really thinking you’re doing any of it.

Download MP3
Duration: 27 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds.

Bill explains that the web is more than just a venue for publication — it’s a medium that allows people to interconnect and work/collaborate with information. This is the direction we’re moving towards, and technical communicators are starting to integrate social media, such as user forums, directly into their help.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

• Keycontent.org
• KeyContent blog
• Naymz
• Bill on Naymz
• Facebook
• Linked in
• Content Wrangler LinkedIn
• Last.fm
• Myspace
• Amazon
• Tikiwiki
• Flickr
• Secondlife
• Flare’s online help file with Feedback server
• My instructions for installing mediawiki
• Yahoo pipes
• Joann hackos’ blog
• Ann rockley’s blog
• Neil perlin’s blog
• Alan houser’s blog
• Bill’s slideshares on social media
• Slideshare

Podcast Sponsors

MadCap Flare is the most versatile XML-based Help authoring tool on the market, with thousands of customers using MadCap products including Microsoft, Google, HP, GE, yahoo and the list goes on. Check out Flare version 3.1 and a host of other new tools at at madcapsoftware.com.

Lunar Pages offers basic web hosting starting at $6.95. When you sign up for a basic hosting account, you get 350 GB of storage, 3500 GB of bandwidth per month, free tech support, Fantastico, and and dozens of other tools. If you’ve been thinking about starting your own self-hosted blog, contact Lunarpages.com to set it up.

Adobe – The Technical Communication Suite software offers a complete solution for authoring, managing, and publishing interactive instructional information from technical documents and books to online help systems, knowledge bases, interactive training, and eLearning content in multiple formats and languages. Learn more here.

At the last STC Summit, I ran into the legendary Ann Rockley and interviewed her briefly about the goings-on at the Rockley Group. One of the new projects she mentioned was the upcoming launch of their stylishly-designed blog. I asked her if blogs were becoming an expected norm, and she said that yes,

People expect to see a blog, they expect to see information provided in this way.

Ann and others at the Rockley Group are interested in content re-use, which leads them into XML and DITA territory. In their latest post, they talk about a recent DITA conference they attended in Raleigh.

This brings me to the topic of DITA, which I haven’t gotten into too much in this blog. I feel like a latecomer to DITA, but two main obstacles about DITA have held me back from otherwise diving in.

In the spirit of interactive blogging, maybe Ann or Steve can write a post that answers the two following objections? Here they are:

1. DITA does not have a Webhelp format, but rather just an .chm file, which won’t display over networks. This limits DITA’s web output (apart from the network-banned .chm file) to basic HTML pages. How can DITA be so popular when its online help offering is so crippled?

2. Creating DITA content requires a detailed knowledge about the nesting of different tags (what tags are allowed in what topics, and how the tags are nested). Manually coding these tags seems very tedious. Are DITA tools still too primitive to automate the code, putting it behind the scenes? And if you have to dive into code, doesn’t it create problems for large tech pubs groups that may have many members resistant to getting so technical?

A few months ago I started reading Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Typing Information Architecture, but these two obstacles held me up. I was searching for a tool to replace RoboHelp, trying to decide if our content re-use was heavy enough to merit an entirely new system like DITA. Thanks Ann and Steve (and anyone else) for any thoughts you may have.