The following is a guest post by Mick Davidson, a technical writer with 20 years of professional writing experience. Before I get started I’d like to thank Tom for giving me this opportunity to bang on about why I think wikis are the future for technical documentation. Like many writers, up to a few years ago I was plodding around using backwoods technology, stuck with … more »

The following is a guest post by Sarah Maddox, a technical writer at Atlassian. In a recent conversation, Tom mentioned that he’s been pondering this question: “Why, in a time when collaboration is more important than ever, do wikis still remain mostly unused as a help authoring tool in tech comm departments?” Tom asked me to join his ponderings and write a guest post on … more »

This past year I learned a few things. As I approach 2012, I’d like to note what 2011 taught me: Writing documentation in a wiki suits me for the same reasons I enjoy interacting on the web. The web is interactive, alive, dynamic, collaborative, fresh, and unlimited in potential. A wiki, being online, allows me to partake in the same game-like, community-rich environment that I … more »

Last week I was feeling a bit stretched out about not having enough time to accomplish everything I needed to do. Granted, I gave several webinars to a total of 2,000 people, which was somewhat stressful, but I was more stressed about the fact that the help material I’d created could have been much better if I had only more time to focus on it. … more »

The following is a guest post by Shay Shaked. I’ve been messing around with Google Plus for about two weeks now. It occurred to me, after reading Tom Johnson’s latest post about content strategy and listening to his podcast about the same topic, that Google Plus is, perhaps unintentionally, the best professional social network with the right usage of content strategy. I’m not going to … more »

Kristi Leach interviewed me for a quick Q&A about the occasional collaborative posts that I do on this site. You can read the interview on Kristi’s site, Why Tech Comm. Here’s an excerpt: When I was deciding on a format for my workshop, Grassroots Documentation Testing, I thought of Tom Johnson’s collaborative posts on his blog, IdRatherBeWriting.com. In collaborative posts, Tom poses a question to … more »

I was talking to a colleague today about wikis when he mentioned Google, and how Google has such a brilliantly simple solution that allows users to find content. With Google, there’s a search box. The users type keywords they want information about, and most of the time Google returns brilliantly relevant results. While some credit is certainly due to Google’s Pagerank algorithm, what enables findability … more »

In a previous post, I started to explain my approach to help authoring. I’m trying to flesh this out into a more developed and detailed — but not too long — statement about how I do help. This information would be useful both to project managers as well as other writers I work with. I would appreciate any feedback. Help Strategies Because users have different … more »

Sarah O’Keefe’s guest post — The Role of the Gatekeeper is Changing — on Peg Mulligan’s blog is interesting. Sarah writes, The Internet is removing the traditional gatekeepers for content. This may seem obvious, but its implications in my life have been profound. I majored in English and then earned an MFA in creative writing. After graduating, I gathered up my best essays and sent … more »

Today I spent a rather lonely day writing documentation. I had one team meeting, during which our team gathered for what seemed like a brief second. We then departed back to our respective portfolios, most of us working alone and in solitude toward some distant documentation goal.

Recently our technical writing team at work (Information Strategies and Design) started holding regular design reviews. The review sessions are patterned after meetings that our interaction designers hold regularly, in which they get together and critique each others designs and approaches toward user interfaces. In our design review sessions, a couple of members from our eight-person team share what they’re working on and ask questions … more »

Recently I’ve been working on a simple calendar project that uses a wiki for documentation. Although I’ve heard a lot about using wikis for documentation, and have even used them in the past, I ran into a few surprises this time.

Jakob Nielsen explains that with web 2.0 communities, 90% are lurkers who never contribute, 9% contribute a little, and 1% actively contribute. I wish I knew the secret formula for reversing those statistics. Nielsen mentions a few strategies for improving those stats at the end. One strategy is to take advantage of”read wear,” which refers to the natural marks of reading. Online, I believe it … more »

Identity and Authority. Why the Foundation of Documentation is Changing. | The LugIron Software Blog. In this post, LugIron says documentation departments now have competition from other sources, whereas previously they dominated this arena without challenges from other sources. He pulls together several posts by various bloggers and suggests a trend in the industry. He ends by arguing, “This shift [in the tech comm industry] … more »

Download MP3 Duration: 15 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] 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, … more »