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 »

Content strategy is a topic more and more technical communicators are talking about. It’s one of the dominant conversations in the field right now. David Farbey recently presented on Content Strategy for Everyone at Tech Comm UK. Rahel Bailie talked about Creating a Content Strategy at the Lavacon conference. Scott Abel continually talks about content strategy — see this video series on content strategy he … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 50 min. In this podcast, Rahel Bailie, a content strategist from Vancouver, B.C., talks about content strategy in the context of technical communication. I briefly alluded to my conversation with Rahel in my post last week titled  Three Questions to Start Thinking Like a Content Strategist. In this podcast, Rahel goes into much more depth. … more »

Last week I spoke with Rahel Bailie, a content management/strategist in Vancouver B.C., about content strategy. I’ll post a podcast of the interview soon, but I thought I’d write a few notes and thoughts on content strategy first, much of which I gathered from my conversation with Rahel. Introduction to Content Strategy With almost any project, whether it’s a software application or website, most likely … more »

In a career development workshop at the TransAlpine Conference in Vienna, Ellis Pratt, one of the founders of Cherryleaf, argued that technical communicators may eventually become extinct if they keep using the same methods and formats to deliver information. Although there will always be a need for people to explain technical material non-technical people, Ellis said, others may be doing it instead, through the formats … more »

I’m excited about a panel that I’m going to be on with Scott Abel, Rahel Bailie, Chris Hester, and Ann Rockley tomorrow afternoon at the STC Conference in Philadelphia. The panel is titled “Evangelizing, Proselytizing, and Preaching: Strategies for Marketing Yourself and Your Expertise To Others.” That’s a mouthful. In simpler terms, we’ll be talking about how to market yourself in a web 2.0 world. … more »

Download MP3 Duration: 27 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Many content management projects fail because organizations are either too focused on tools before properly researching their needs and processes, or because they underestimate the difficulty of migrating and restructuring their content to fit the new content management system. In this podcast, Rahel Bailie explains these pitfalls and what companies can do to … more »