Jan 22, 2012 update: For results of the survey, see this post: Graduate Research Findings on Technical Communication and Blogging. A graduate student is collecting information about technical writers and blogging. For more information, see her explanation below and then take the survey (it’s short): My name is Michelle, and I am a first-year Master’s student studying Technical Communication. Currently, I am working on a … more »

I was talking to a colleague today about blogs. He said he’s starting a blog and wants to use it as a professional journal, to write about what he’s learning. Our discussion made me reflect on my blog. I’ve used this blog for a lot of different purposes, it seems. Somewhere in this shuffle, I seemed to have forgotten its original purpose: “web log,” or … more »

The following is a guest post by Larry Kunz, a consultant with Systems Documentation, Inc. (SDI) Global Solutions. Writing a professional blog—whether you do it under your own name as Tom does, or under a company’s banner as I do—is about building a brand. By brand I mean the personality that you want to project. Just as companies have brands in the marketplace, individuals have … more »

Corporate blogs suffer from an almost insurmountable paradox: you can write something interesting to readers, but it will make your company uncomfortable. You can write something that will make your company comfortable, but it won’t be interesting to readers. The corporate blogger has a difficult decision to face. Do you want to gain an audience, build relationships with readers, and strike a cord of authenticity … more »

I was talking with a colleague the other day about how to increase the number of hits per article on our organization’s technology website. We get about 800 hits per article, which isn’t much given the potential audience. To increase hits, I said we need to send these articles to all users via a newsletter. Email is the only way to reach a lot of … more »

I’m not sure entirely why, but corporate blogging can be quite difficult. On my professional blog, I can post several times a week in the spare moments of my days, sitting down for 30 minutes here or an hour there and have some substantial content to show for it. But at work, I can spin my wheels on full throttle for hours and only have … more »

Recently I’ve been playing more of a blogger role at my job, doing more user awareness than user education. This will only increase during the coming months, and if I do a good job, I might finally show the importance of this neglected role. Part of the reason we’re doing more user awareness is because we’ve suddenly published dozens of new websites, tools, and other … more »

Scott Abel has a good post on content curation strategies. He writes, In order to develop an active and engaged audience, you have to publish as much interesting and informative content as possible — as often as possible! He notes how tweets and blog posts are short-lived, so you have to keep publishing all the time: … Add to the mix the sheer volume of … more »

Over the past several years, I’ve trained a lot of people on WordPress, through individual one-on-one training, seminars, workshops, and conference events. Most of the people who want to learn WordPress have plans for blogging. They think blogging requires you to understand the technology before they can jump in. But the technology is easy — learning how to navigate and publish content with WordPress is … more »

Today I have a guest post on the Firehead blog, run by CJ Walker. It’s called Finding a Content Strategy for your Blog. Here’s an excerpt: To have a successful blog, you have to push out content on a regular basis – several posts a week, if not more. Not only do you need frequency of content, but also consistency in the topic. Basically, you … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 70 min. In the barrage of information created by all the social media channels, how can you find relevant content? How can you move past forms of noise to actually produce content that engages users? What forms of social media do students respond to the most? These are some of the questions we explored in … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 27 min. In this monologue podcast, I answer a student’s questions about the field of technical writing, including how I fell into it, what kinds of projects I work on, and other details. Her questions are as follows: What did you study in college and where did you attend? What degrees/certificates do you have? Did … more »

Paul Pehrson and I sat down after Leadership Day at the STC Summit to talk about some of the strategies the board is taking to address the issue of trust. This is the first in a series of videocasts that I’ll be posting at the Summit.

A recent Blogher study finds that blogging is still the dominant place where conversations of substance are taking place (despite rumors about blogging being dead or ideas that microblogging on Twitter and Facebook would replace the more time-consuming blog). I always knew this to be the case. For more info, check out “Blogs are Still Where Substantive Conversations are Happening.”

Last week I listened to David Peralty give feedback to Jeff Chandler about his WordPress Weekly and WPTavern.com projects (see episode 75). David praised the community and visibility that Jeff had created through his weekly podcast and forum, in addition to his WPTavern.com site, but noted that he was aware Jeff hadn’t reached the monetization goals he hoped to achieve. In other words, Jeff has … more »