To find good content online, I find that I’m going less and less to Google Reader and more to sources like Paper.li, an automated content curation tool that filters out some of the content noise. The problem with Google Reader is lack of content curation. You get a ton of noise, regardless of how fine-tuned your list of feeds are. With tools such as paper.li, … more »

In the ongoing series on organizing content, we now shift attention to the phenomenon of emergence, and how intelligent, sophisticated systems emerge from relatively simple, unsophisticated parts. I listened to a Radiolab podcast the other day that explored this topic in depth. The hosts related how in the 1800s, Francis Galton visited a county fair where there was a contest to guess the weight of … more »

[amazon-product align="right"]0982219113[/amazon-product][Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 40 min. As a follow-up to my review of Anne Gentle’s book, [amazon-product type="text" text="Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation"]0982219113[/amazon-product], I also interviewed her for a podcast. Now you can listen to Anne talk about some of the concepts in her book in a more personal way through the headphones of your … more »

One of the perks about being a blogger is that authors occasionally send me their books to review. Recently Anne Gentle sent me her new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Anne’s book is particularly important because it addresses the situation of the technical writer today, with the web in the state it is — user generated, filled with blogs, wikis, Twitter, … more »

Jakob Nielsen explains that with web 2.0 communities, 90% are lurkers who never contribute, 9% contribute a little, and 1% actively contribute. I wish I knew the secret formula for reversing those statistics. Nielsen mentions a few strategies for improving those stats at the end. One strategy is to take advantage of”read wear,” which refers to the natural marks of reading. Online, I believe it … more »

Idea Management – Innovation Managment – Crowdsourcing – Suggestion Box. This is a neat online app that allows people to vote ideas up or down.

The DITA-to-WordPress importer tool allows you to import the XHTML output from the DITA Open Toolkit as pages into WordPress. This  importer (created by Mike Little, a brilliant developer who had a hand in creating WordPress itself) is available for download here, along with a sample XHTML output. The DITA-to-WordPress tool fills a major gap with the existing DITA outputs. Currently, the DITA Open Toolkit … more »

Web 2.0: The Tipping Point for XML (application/pdf)

Company blogging 101

A Collection of 40 Awesome Web 2.0 Navigations

Get Satisfaction – People-Powered Customer Service Very cool site for reviewing/complaining/praising, etc. companies.

THE CONTENT POOL: Move over DITA – Chaos is coming!

Stack Overflow — An Ingenious Alternative to the Forum Format

Stack Overflow Launches – Joel on Software