I'd Rather Be Writing » Char James Tanny

Pay-per-Content Versus Free: Char James-Tanny and Bill Swallow at the STC Summit in Dallas, #stc10

Tom Johnson — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:02:53 +0000

In this video, I asked Char James-Tanny and Bill Swallow to comment on the controversy over free versus pay-per-content models online, especially as it applies to STC content with the Body of Knowledge, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and other information products.

Blog Sponsors

Tech Comm Toolbox: a Directory of Tools, Consultants, and Conferences

Tom Johnson — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:41:02 +0000

Tech Comm Toolbox is a brilliant website by Char James Tanny that provides a directory of tools, consultants, and conferences. The site offers several ways to find what you’re looking for: by category, by alphabetical name, or by search.

Char used WordPress to create the site, relying heavily upon categories to organize the information. Users can submit entries to be added, and they can comment on everything that’s listed. The next time you’re looking for a tool, definitely check out the Tech Comm Toolbox.

Tech Comm Toolbox: a directory of tools

Blog Sponsors

A blog worth adding to your feeds — and reasons why

Tom Johnson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:27:33 +0000

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is Beth Long’s Spork in the Road. Beth, who I knew from the Suncoast chapter, is interested in the intersection of the creative and the technical. As I remember, she was writing a novel when I left, and was very focused on it. She also had a very enviable job creating fictional text for an online game.

Here’s an excerpt from her latest post:

Optimism afflicts me in both my worlds, web development and fiction writing. The flip side of optimism is, of course, despair: when I realize it’s impossible to reach the dizzying heights to which I so casually aspired at the beginning of a project, my brain siphons away every happy chemical and erases my buzz, leaving me with a creative hangover and a depressive unwillingness to finish the project and thus prove my incompetence.

One reason I like Beth’s blog is because she seems to write for herself, for the enjoyment of writing, for keeping a journal of her thoughts and challenges she encounters. Her journal is a literary journal and you can see the expression of her creative mind through her posts. Whether she receives a lot comments or not seems irrelevant to her purposes.

Although I have many feeds in my feedreader, mostly chosen for their topics, hers is one I read regardless of the topic. I once wrote a post titled Counterargument to the Importance of Categories, in which I argued that for some writers, the category or topic is less important than the style. Beth’s blog is one of those blogs, and I hope to move mine in the same direction.

In a presentation Char James-Tanny gave to the Suncoast chapter a few months back (which I just published on Tech Writer Voices), Char was talking about blogs and mentioned that I tend to focus more on people than tools in my blog. This is partly because I periodically spotlight new bloggers to let others know of their existence. But also because blogging is often more about people than tools. It is often just as much about our style of expression than the content of what we say.