I'd Rather Be Writing » web 2.0

Paper.li as an Alternative to Google Reader [Screencast]

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:40:20 +0000

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, which rank the most shared links on Twitter (based on a user’s followers, a hashtag, or a list), you can filter out the first layer of noise and more quickly find relevant content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwXeWqaFP9A

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Emergence [Organizing Content #19]

Tom Johnson — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:34:40 +0000

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 an ox. About 800 people submitted various guesses about the weight. None of them were right. Later, Galton took the average of the 800 guesses and found it to be just one pound off from the actual weight of the ox. James Surowiecki wrote about this event in his well-known book, The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few, and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Businesses, Economies, Societies and Nations.

The wisdom of the crowds is a term often used in discussions of social media. But emergence takes this concept a bit further. Emergence describes the phenomenon of an intelligent system forming from dumb parts. In the ox example above, none of the individuals were intelligent enough to guess the real weight of the ox. But collectively, the average of their answers was extremely intelligent. Emergence looks at how complex, intelligent systems arise despite the apparent absence of intelligence in each individual part.

The Radiolab hosts look at the ants as a prime example of emergence. Individually, ants are dumb. They can spend hours pushing and pulling a twig, without any higher sense of purpose or direction. They are practically brainless, acting without thought. They move here and there, randomly wandering around for food.

Despite their lack of intelligence at the individual level, collectively ants build sophisticated colonies, organize wars with generals and armies; build water barriers to protect themselves from storms; have queens and clearly defined society roles. They can start at two distant ends and meet each other exactly in the middle. Somehow, collectively the ant colony is brilliant. But alone, each ant is mostly dumb and thoughtless. How is it that the complex, ordered system emerges from a sum of thoughtless parts? That’s the idea of emergence.

As another example, take the thoughts in your head. Where do they come from? The neurons? Okay, take one neuron out and analyze it. Is that where the thought is? Take another, and another. The thought doesn’t exist in or stem from any particular neuron, yet collectively when brought together they form a complex system of intelligence.

Google is another example. In the early days of the Internet, everyone complained about the difficulty of finding anything online. Google came up with a new search algorithm. In Google’s search algorithm, every link that someone makes to a site counts as a vote for that site. Further, those sites with a lot of votes have more voting weight.

Individually, no one controls what appears at the top of the results when you search for a term in Google. We don’t usually add links to our posts with the idea of influencing the results in Google, and individually few of us have the voting power to influence that high ranking. But the end result of all these links, and the votes and weighting inherent in the algorithm, is findability. Now when you search for information on Google, you usually get a very intelligent set of results — a set of links that exactly answer your question. Again, a complex, intelligent result stems from individual parts that aren’t complex at all.

How exactly does emergence apply to technical communication and help authoring? I will cover that in the next post in this series. Mainly, emergence can only happen when you harness the collective intelligence of the crowd. If you can do that, you can take your help from a useless, frustrating group of topics to an intelligent, highly responsive and accurate body of knowledge.

Collectively we are intelligent; alone we are simple-minded.

——–
photo by James Cridland

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Podcast with Anne Gentle about her Conversation and Community book

Tom Johnson — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:39:41 +0000

[amazon-product align="right"]0982219113[/amazon-product]

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 iPod. In this 40 minute podcast, we cover questions such as the following:

What’s the first step in connecting with your users?
Why are wikis used more internally than externally?
How can you build trust with users?
What’s the 90-9-1 percent rule and how can you change the 1 percent part?
What three steps can you follow for any strategy with social media?
What is “read wear” and how can you make that content more visible?
What happens when you break the listen-participate-share-then-lead model?
How can you use Twitter into your documentation strategy?
What mindset is antithetical to building conversations and communities with your users?

Additional Resources

Companion site to Conversation and Community on XML Press
Anne Gentle’s blog
XML Press
Tweets converted into T-shirt themes
Posts about Participation Inequality (the 90-9-1 rule)
Sarrah Maddox blog
Stewart Mader
Review by Jefro
Review from Sarah Maddox. (Sarah’s post also lists other reviews.)

To contact Anne, see the contact button on her blog, Just Write Click.

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Review of Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation

Tom Johnson — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:14:58 +0000

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, Facebook, social networks, and speckled with communities and conversations about the products we document.

Anne makes connections to a variety of concepts in a conversational style with her sources. It’s a complex situation, and it’s not about the tools or the technologies. It’s about the people, and how you approach and interact with them. Focusing on people, Anne talks about participation levels, and she squarely addresses Nielsen’s 90-9-1 percent rule — that 90 percent will be silent, 9 percent will contribute occasionally, and 1 percent will contribute actively. She then explains strategies for increasing the 1% participation — for example, relying on “read wear” with your content to make it naturally float in more visible spaces; recognizing the contributions your users make; helping users feel good when they contribute. She encourages writers to give their users freedom and to engage them with dialogue.

Beyond just reading about tips and strategies for the social web, Anne’s book prompted me to reflect. It made me think carefully about how I’m listening and participating in conversations that my users are having. A lot of my documentation is behind the firewall. It never sees the light of the world wide web. As a result, I’ve often thought that social documentation doesn’t really apply to my situation. Reading Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation made me challenge that idea. Anne says wikis are more popular internally than externally. Conversations can actually be even more open and engaging behind the firewall, through the blogs and wikis of countless SharePoint installations, because users already have trust — a necessary ingredient for conversations.

The book also made me reflect on my light involvement in the community projects at my work, and how I should perhaps interact with that community. A growing number of developers, quality assurance engineers, designers, and technical writers are starting to contribute to those projects. What could I do to encourage more contributions? Am I listening? Am I enabling these communities to come together and have conversations? I hadn’t really thought about these topics as much as I did after reading Anne’s book.

I admit the approach to engendering conversation and community doesn’t always seem to have a clear path. No one really knows whether some technologies are here to stay (for example, Twitter), or whether certain technologies (for example, wikis) are the best approach, or how you find time (for example, to blog about your products), or what you even write about. In short, the road through documentation on the social web is not a simple matter. But Anne provides several starting principles to ground any strategy you might have. First find out where the conversations are, she says. Then listen, participate, share, and finally lead.

A lot of companies take a reactive approach to social media, feeling the need to catch up so they aren’t out of date. So they start blogs, or they join Twitter, or they launch a forum, but do they know how to navigate this space in a way that builds trust with users? Do they know how to open up lines of communication and channels of conversation in liberating ways? Do they know what net effect this engagement in the social web will have on their company? And how to measure it all? Conversation and Community covers all of these topics in depth.

We talk a lot about social media, and constantly look at ways to integrate best practices that will help us connect with customers in helpful ways. Anne’s book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, will get you thinking in productive ways about the best approaches for entering this space. As technical writers needing capture the best information and tips from users about the products we document, the social web is not a space we can ignore and still be successful. Anne’s book provides a map to this space that is more detailed and helpful than any other reference for technical writers. You will come away with more than a dozen ideas you can implement to increase conversations and communities with your users.

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Converting Lurkers into Contributors in Online Communities — Nielsen’s 90-9-1 Rule

Tom Johnson — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:22:13 +0000

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 means to give more weight or to make more visible content that has more hits. (Thanks to Anne Gentle for the link.)

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Idea Management – Innovation Managment – Crowdsourcing – Suggestion Box

Tom Johnson — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:11:06 +0000

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

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WordPress Tip: Merging Worlds: DITA and WordPress

Tom Johnson — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:15:19 +0000

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 doesn’t have a webhelp output. The XHTML output provides an index of files in a left pane with the topics in the right, but it is so plain and unattractive that I can’t imagine anyone actually using it.

With the DITA-to-WordPress importer, you can use WordPress as your online help format. This approach provides unique advantages over other help tools on the market. Basically, WordPress taps into all the juicy features of Web 2.0 and gives you them for free.

For example, in your WordPress help, you can include the following:

Comments
Gravatars
Tag Clouds
Categories
Related Posts
Embedded flash (for screencasts or videocasts)
Blog integration
Calendar integration
Video players
Hundreds of attractive themes
Easy theme customization with CSS
RSS feeds and integration of RSS feeds
Better user tracking, such as Woopra
Better search engine optimization
AJAX
Tags
Image galleries

And hundreds of other features. For a list of the 4,000+ plugins WordPress provides, see the Plugin Directory. To browse hundreds of themes, see the Theme Directory.

Additionally, WordPress provides an attractive website format that can change the way users feel about help. The standard help file, such as a .chm or tripane webhelp, has lost much of its appeal with users. WordPress can rejuvenate your users’ attitude about using help by providing a new, contemporary look.

I created a 5 minute demo of the DITA-to-WordPress importer. You can view the embedded version below or view the demo in a larger, clearer format here.

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

Tom Johnson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:14:04 +0000

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

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Company blogging 101

Tom Johnson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:11:40 +0000

Company blogging 101

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A Collection of 40 Awesome Web 2.0 Navigations

Tom Johnson — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:57:01 +0000

A Collection of 40 Awesome Web 2.0 Navigations