I recently attended Confab in Minneapolis. I was one of about 5 technical writers among the 650 attendees, which is why I found it surprising to hear Kristina Halverson say, We can learn a lot from tech comm. Let me repeat that. We can learn a lot from tech comm. I felt pleased to hear this shout-out to my profession, and then tried to unpack exactly … more »

At work I have often grumbled about the fact that we have both a blog and a wiki, and that content shared between them sometimes seems redundant and unnecessary. However, I have since come to realize how well blogs and wikis fit together. I think it makes sense to have both — at least in my authoring scenario. In short, wikis are suited for information … 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 »

One of the sites I’m working with lately at my job combines a forum (vBulletin), blog (Joomla), and wiki (Mediawiki) into one experience. Each of these tools does a great job at what it was designed to do. They’re three separate platforms skinned and linked together. I used to think the site was a hodgepodge of software platforms, but now I see that these three resources … more »

How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing. I saw this on Gordon Meyer’s blog. It talks about how blogs and web publishing have provided venues for texts that, due to incorrect page length, wouldn’t have otherwise been published. Traditionally, texts had to be either 5 pages for magazines or 200 pages for books. Blogs now allow paragraph-length thoughts or 20 pages essays. Length … more »

Blogger, commenter or plain old reader – which are you.

Examples of blogs as online help and release notes | just write click.

Customizing a SharePoint site is not necessary — you can use the default theme or related themes straight from the box. And this is really how SharePoint was intended to be used by the mainstream. But if you don’t want your SharePoint site to look like the hundred other SharePoint sites at your company, you can customize the look and feel. This is something I’ve … more »

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Palimpsest: How do you manage your RSS feeds?

RJ Jacquez and Mike Hamilton: Blogs by Lead Adobe and Madcap Evangelists

A week ago I read a flattering comment in one of Heidi’s posts. She says Intercom articles would be more enjoyable distributed as blog posts, and then adds that good blog posts are just as good as Intercom articles. Heidi writes: The thing about Intercom is that I think that these articles could all be blog posts. It would be a lot handier to read … more »

Many of us want to integrate innovative Web 2.0 practices into our online help. But if we create blogs, wikis, or other interactive features outside the help file, users may never use them. I’ve been using SharePoint 2007 as a file repository for my online help mainly because of the publishing control it gives me. And since I was already using SharePoint as my file … more »

Charles Jeter recorded an excellent podcast with Mike Hamilton, V.P. of product management at Madcap Software, and posted it on his blog yesterday. Jeter is a technical writer in the California area who has been carefully analyzing the online help tool market. The following are some of my takeaways from the podcast: