The following is a guest post by Shay Shaked. I’ve been messing around with Google Plus for about two weeks now. It occurred to me, after reading Tom Johnson’s latest post about content strategy and listening to his podcast about the same topic, that Google Plus is, perhaps unintentionally, the best professional social network with the right usage of content strategy. I’m not going to … more »

Two powerful trends in tech comm seem to be moving in different directions: social media and structured authoring. I have used a wiki as my primary format for documentation for the past year and a half. I tried to corral a group of volunteer technical writers to edit and update the wiki, because I embraced the idea that collective intelligence beats the individual thinker in … more »

On my smartphone, I used to have Google Reader as one of my four quicklinks on the bottom toolbar. I recently replaced it with Twitter Topic, an app that shows all tweets that meet a specific hashtag. For example, if I’m interested in reading about other experiences at Confab, I’ll search for the #confab topic. If I’m interested in seeing what’s new about findability, I’ll … more »

Kristi Leach interviewed me for a quick Q&A about the occasional collaborative posts that I do on this site. You can read the interview on Kristi’s site, Why Tech Comm. Here’s an excerpt: When I was deciding on a format for my workshop, Grassroots Documentation Testing, I thought of Tom Johnson’s collaborative posts on his blog, IdRatherBeWriting.com. In collaborative posts, Tom poses a question to … more »

I was talking to a colleague today about wikis when he mentioned Google, and how Google has such a brilliantly simple solution that allows users to find content. With Google, there’s a search box. The users type keywords they want information about, and most of the time Google returns brilliantly relevant results. While some credit is certainly due to Google’s Pagerank algorithm, what enables findability … more »

In The Big Shift from Search to Social, Anne Gentle notes the growing problem with Google’s search and trends towards alternative search sources, such as social networks like Facebook. She links to an stirring NY Times article called The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, which I recommend reading. The NYTimes article exposes how search engines are gamed, and how search engines can also game consumers. … more »

Internet users have grown accustomed to free content. But this is not without its problems. Jeff Chandler used to produce a Weekly WordPress podcast. His last podcast, “I tried,” is dated back in December. It’s a long, tired explanation about the difficulties of pouring so much energy into an endeavor that has no substantial financial return. As he moves toward marriage and maintains a full-time … more »

A podcast summary by David Armano from Edelman caught my attention yesterday. Armano writes: My theory is that social technologies and the online behaviors they enable leads to more participation from what use to be static audiences and “consumers”. But as a result of this, a demand is generated for participation to be reciprocated from business and brands. If this is true (and I think … more »

Some of my projects include community-involved documentation. When you work for a church, it’s not hard to find dedicated members willing and committed to sacrificing a few hours for a higher cause. To harness community efforts, I gathered up a large pool of volunteer names and formed a listserv. I communicated project needs with the listserv members and asked for help. Despite some contributions, the … more »

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 unfolding saga of inline links within posts and the decline in readability that these links bring about, Adriel Hampton’s post helped me persuade me more to this idea. Hamptom quotes from Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr writes, (In a 2001 study) one group read (a short story) in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read … more »

Lavacon is a yearly conference Jack Molisani puts together on professional development for technical communicators. This year’s conference focuses on social media. You can’t run a conference on social media without having a cool-looking social media driven website, right? So Jack contacted me to help make the Lavacon conference site more of a web 2.0 / social-media-driven experience. Working on the Lavacon conference website has … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 80 min. In this podcast, Michael Hiatt at mashstream.com presents to the STC Intermountain chapter on documentation in the cloud. By documentation in the cloud, he’s referring to our move to the web of everything we do on the computer — the running of applications, the saving of our data, the way we access and … more »

Last week Will Sansbury mentioned to me that one of his ideas with the Atlanta chapter site was to provide an example or template of how WordPress could be used for chapter sites. I got to thinking, why isn’t there a standard WordPress template for chapters and SIGs to use? Further, in WordPress 3.0, WordPress MU and regular WordPress will be merged. This is huge, … more »

Recently Will Sansbury and I gave a webinar to STC community leaders on chapter and SIG websites. Rather than giving a static, one-way presentation about theoretical concepts with web design, or boring people with technical details they probably didn’t care about, we held the webinar more like a design review workshop, not too different from a writing group workshop. Although I spent three years in … more »