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 »

In my last post on wikis, Mark Baker added an astute comment: I’m not a wiki fan myself — I’m a structured text guy bred in the bone — but I am fascinated by the trend, and by the variety reactions to it. Wikis started more as a cultural statement than a technology. They were a tool for the democratization of content, the intent being … more »

I gave a MindTouch webinar on Friday, June 10, called Organizing Help Content: The Problem of Findability. The webinar was a joint-discussion with Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler.  Here’s the webinar description: Help systems often have hundreds of topics. Arranging this information into a logical order so that users can find the exact topic they’re looking for poses major challenges for technical writers. We often … more »

Hey podcast listeners, check out Content Talks, a new podcast by Brain Traffic on content strategy. The first episode features Kristina Halverson interviewing Ann Rockley about content strategy issues. It’s a great interview, and Ann sounds lively and engaged. Kristina steers Ann towards detailed stories and experiences as they make their way through a host of content issues. Kristina says they will be producing a … more »

Scott Abel has given me a free ticket for the 2011 Intelligent Content conference to give away on my blog. The Intelligent Content conference is held February 16-18 in Palm Springs, California. To win the ticket, leave a comment on this post explaining what intelligent content is in your own words. Tomorrow morning I’ll randomly select one of the comments to win, so be sure … more »

Scott Abel has a good post on content curation strategies. He writes, In order to develop an active and engaged audience, you have to publish as much interesting and informative content as possible — as often as possible! He notes how tweets and blog posts are short-lived, so you have to keep publishing all the time: … Add to the mix the sheer volume of … 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 »

A few years ago, I wanted to better understand content management, so I picked up Managing Enterprise Content, by Ann Rockley, and read it through. It opened my eyes to a lot of new concepts. Ann is one of our field’s leading experts in content management. She’s now expanding in to something she calls “intelligent content.” Intelligent content is a concept that builds on other … more »

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 »

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 »

I sometimes feel that my life online varies drastically from my life at work. Online, I blog and publish podcasts and write about wikis and Web 2.0. But at work, I used Flare, InDesign, Word, and other tools to create standard help deliverables, such as the User Guide, the Quick Reference Guide, and the Video Tutorial. For a long time, I’ve wanted to take my … more »

Download MP3 (right-click, select Save Target As) Duration: 20 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] In this podcast, I talk with Scott Abel about social networking, in particular The Content Wrangler community he started at TheContentWrangler.ning.com. Scott talks about this new social network specifically for technical communicators. But he also explains the value of social networks for your help deliverables. Social networks can … more »

Ning (“peace” in Chinese) is a social network application that allows groups to communicate and connect with each other in seamless, convenient ways. Scott Abel just recently started a new social network community called The Content Wrangler Community. Within a couple of weeks, it already attracted 824 868 members. This community on Ning is quickly becoming the social network community for technical writers and others … 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 »

In the pages section of my site (upper-left corner), I’ve added several new features: a Google Reader blogroll, podroll, and a shared Pandora feed. This blogroll is different from the usual blogroll. This blogroll is a javascript that inserts feeds from my Google Reader. Now you can know exactly what I’m reading, and I don’t have to maintain a blogroll list separate from my feedreader … more »