This year Rahel Bailie and Scott Abel are putting on a new event called Content Strategy Workshops. It’s a two-day event, held October 9-10 in Portland, Oregon that follows the Lavacon Conference (held October 7-9, same hotel). I helped work on the website a bit, and I wanted to highlight this new event through an interview with Rahel.  Tell me about the new Content Strategy Workshop conference … more »

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 »

The following is a guest post by Neal Kaplan, a technical writer at Zuora, Inc. Another post about wikis? Why not! Wikis are great! Just to set the stage, I’ve been a technical writer for a while now, working for software companies in Silicon Valley. (In fact, I often forget that there are technical writers who don’t document software.) I’ve worked at large companies, where … more »

About four months ago, I posted a call for volunteer writers who might be interested in helping out with the LDSTech blog. Since that time, about 60 volunteers have joined the project. Some are more enthusiastic than others, and some have more writing talent than others. It’s not easy to determine talent and motivation based on signups alone. Some jump in eagerly right from the … more »

A couple of years ago, the STC started a Notebook blog. Recently I followed up with Kevin Cuddihy, editor of the STC Notebook blog, to see the impact has been for the STC. How long has it been since STC started their STC Notebook blog? It’s been just over two years—our second “birthday” was on 3 August. The assistant editor for STC at the time, … 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 »

I have a lot of flexibility and freedom in my job. That’s part of the appeal. The other day I was reflecting on the best route to take, the most fruitful path I should follow. There are quite a few directions I could go. I could become meticulously detailed about style, knowing the ins and outs of every handbook (and being able to compare them … more »

Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent recently wrote about Groupon as an example of a business employing a strong copywriting strategy. Valeria writes, Great copywriting is the secret sauce of successful email newsletters. Groupon is an interesting example of promotional writing that sells, when attached to the right deals. (See Conversation Agent: How Content Seals the Deal at Groupon.) If you’re unfamiliar with Groupon, it’s a daily … more »

A couple of months ago, I realized I would be playing a larger role in web publishing at my work, moving more towards a user awareness role. Realizing this direction, and knowing I had some budget, I decided I should attend Confab, the first conference on content strategy. It was sold out, but by a stroke of luck the organizer offered me one of thirteen … more »

Recently I listened to Moira Gunn interview Steve Rosenbaum about content curation in her podcast, Tech Nation. I heard Steve present on a similar topic at Confab. Interestingly, I found the podcast, which was a conversation between Moira and Steve, more interesting, fluid, and natural than Steve’s Confab presentation. Steve’s presentation at Confab was great. But all presentations, by nature, have a different rhythm and … more »

The following is a guest post by Noz Urbina, organizer of the upcoming Congility conference, held May 24-26 in Gatwick, UK. We live in a multi-in, multi-out world.  There are so many information pipelines running into, out and around the organisation these days that it’s overwhelming companies the world over.  The famous information overload is in stark contrast to an endless pressure to deliver excellent … more »

It’s been about 9 days since my last post, and yesterday my colleague leaned over and asked why I hadn’t been posting — was something wrong? He himself has been working on a novel, so he hasn’t posted anything for a month. No, nothing is wrong. I always chuckle when I see blog posts in which people apologize for not posting on their blog, or … more »

If you want to be able to sort information by various classification schemes, such as by most popular, or by role, or by problem, your content has to be chunked in a granular enough way to facilitate the various means of sorting. Consider a work that is one large book, with no chunks at all. In that case, it would be impossible to sort anything, … more »

In Everything is Miscellaneous, Dave Weinberger argues that classifications that we have imposed on most everything from the alphabet to the encyclopedia, planets, books, and knowledge ultimately represent our own beliefs and priorities. As time changes, we see how our own thinking at that time inclined us to organize the information that way. In reality, things in the world don’t have such clear-cut categories and … more »

During my annual performance review last week, my manager gave me a few tips to work on (as the format of the review requires). One of his suggestions was to get others to work for me. This advice (somewhat nontraditional), is something I’ve been mulling over for the entire week. I’m convinced that it is probably the best career advice I’ve ever been given. It’s … more »