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 »

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 »

I recently read Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (2008), by Gene Smith. Smith dives into tagging as a method for adding metadata to resources, which in turn increases the organization and findability of the resources. Traditional help authoring tools categorize resources through folders (a carryover from Windows folders), whereas web platforms typically use tags. Tags are actually a quick and easy way to attach metadata … more »

After my Summit presentation about breaking out of topic-based hierarchies, a lady named Ursula came up to me and said she was tired of topic-based authoring. I asked her what the alternative was. She said she’s often more interested in seeing an end-to-end process rather than a specific task. This reminded me of a tutorial on Lynda.com in which Deke McClelland, the trainer, showed how … 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 »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 40 min. I recently spoke with Noz Urbina, consultant from Mekon Ltd, about his upcoming conference, Congility, and about content strategy. Based in Valencia, Spain, Noz is one of the industry’s thought leaders on XML, DITA, component content management, and content strategy. This year he and Mekon are running a conference called Congility (formerly X-Pubs), … more »

EServer TC Library (tc.eserver.org), an indexed library of technical communication articles, is the most popular technical communication website in the world, according to Alexa.com, a site that measures web traffic and Internet reach. The EServer TC Library doesn’t produce original articles itself, but rather has a team of indexing scholars adding links to worthwhile content across the web. The indexers sort the content into twelve categories and … more »