DocTrain East, day two by Communications from DMN.

Last week I caught up with Scott Abel, a well-known content management guru, for an interview. As you probably know, Scott has been actively organizing conferences all over the United States for the past couple of years — and he’s had tremendous success doing it. I wanted to know the story behind Scott’s move into conference organization and why he’s been so successful with it. … more »

Download MP3 Duration: 15 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] XML, a way of tagging and structuring your content, can help solve a number of problems, including storing, mining, reusing, and sharing content. XML helps enable the interoperability of information between systems, allowing you to export and import your content from one application to another. XML is behind much of the collaboration and … more »

Download MP3 Duration: 15 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] In this podcast, Dr. Robert Glushko, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, explains the concept of Document Engineering — the process of developing document models to make information sharing, reuse, or syndication more efficient. Glushko gives several examples of document engineering, such as creating a calendar event model that allows an … more »

Tonight I attended a WordCamp Utah planning meeting at Applebees with a group of blogging enthusiasts. Joseph Scott, one of the WordPress developers employed by Automattic, organized the event and is taking charge of the upcoming Wordcamp, which looks like it will be in September to avoid competition with other conferences (Blog World, Open Source, and New Media Expo).

Just a few days after someone begins blogging seriously, he or she starts hungering after subscribers and comments. We want readership, we want lots of people visiting our site, reading our posts, subscribing to our feed, and regularly leaving comments. This, my friend Clyde says, is the “payoff” of blogging. Although I try to write for a higher purpose outside of trying to get more … more »

The 2008 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) festival, currently underway in Austin, Texas, until March 16, is one of the most popular, high-energy tech conferences of the year. This Interactive conference “celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies.” Basically, everyone who is doing anything cool on the Internet ends up speaking there. 37 Signals, Facebook, Wired — they’re all there. Many … more »

Conference season is approaching and presenters are busy preparing their notes and PowerPoint slides. Now is the perfect time to review some good ways to bomb a presentation (especially since I did a great job bombing a presentation I gave today). 1. Prepare your presentation without any awareness of your audience. About the worst thing you can do is grossly misunderstand your audience. Assume they’re … more »

Technical writing careers are often a mystery to those on the outside. What do technical writing jobs involve? What is the industry like? What is the career path of a technical writer, and what challenges do technical writers face? Carmen, a student in a technical management program, found me by searching for “technical writers” on Yahoo.com. Fulfilling an assignment in a Career Development course to … more »

In May I’ll be participating on a Documentation and Training West panel in a session called Meet the Bloggers. As a presenter, Scott Abel has given me a free guest ticket to the conference to give to one of my friends. I’ve decided to give the ticket away to one of my readers by way of a little contest. (In case you’re wondering, Scott gave … more »