Twitter Part II –- One Step Deeper
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Earlier this week I asked how others are using Twitter in their documentation and branding strategies. Alan Porter at WebWorks wrote me with details, saying:
As you know we have a branded Twitter account (webworks_com) that we use for product announcements, information on speaking engagements, webinars and just general company updates. We also have a hashtag set up for information related to our annual RoundUp users conference.
We are also encouraging our partner companies, and consultants that we work with, to set up Twitter accounts, and several of them have set up accounts and are using them.
We actively follow all the top Tech Doc twitter accounts like yourself, Sarah O' Keefe, Scott Abel, Anne Gentle, Paul Mueller, Alan Houser, etc., as well as any STC region that is on Twitter. We also follow any customers that we know have Twitter accounts.
Several of the WebWorks staff have personal Twitter accounts. The two most active are:
- Me -- I tend to post on my STC related activities, and my freelance writing projects.
- Jennifer Whitley -- Jen posts a lot about social media; she is also a pilot and posts a lot about flying.
There are several other people at WebWorks on Twitter, including the CEO and Support Staff, but as yet they aren't as active.
OK, so how do we use Twitter as part of our documentation strategy?
- Currently we use an RSS feed from Twitter search to be notified of anyone asking questions about the product. When that happens, we respond by Twitter giving them a link to either our documentation wiki or our Help Center wiki as needed.
- We tweet about updates and new topics added to the wikis on Twitter.
- We tweet about technical blog posts. By the way, we just launched a new blog site at http://blogs.webworks.com.
We are considering doing some prototype work on the following:
- Integrating the Twitter feed directly into the documentation wiki based on hashtags and RSS.
- Having recent changes to the wikis automatically generate a Tweet.
- Have the WebWorks Twitter account feed directly into the product online help for instances where the install is connected to the internet.
As I said these three are just conceptual ideas at the moment, and we are doing some experimental work around them. I'm also talking to a couple of other companies that are looking at integrating Twitter (or social media in general) with their corporate publishing strategy.
I'm impressed at the extent that WebWorks incorporates Twitter into their work, especially their use of hashtags to identify different areas of their documentation.
I was about to post Alan's response when I saw a tweet from Dan Maurer, a technical writer in a rhetoric and professional writing program, saying he might write a masters thesis on Twitter and technical communication. I asked Dan what he thought of WebWorks' use of Twitter.
Dan thinks Webworks' use of Twitter focuses on the user, which is a good thing. And services that send Twitter direct messages when a wiki entry is updated are useful, especially for people who prefer this type of communication.
However, Dan fears that this is "just another method of getting word out to the user. A new way, and one that's useful, but not really different from an e-mail list, blog, or RSS feed."
So exactly what is the value of Twitter, in contrast to other means of communication? What unique quality does Twitter bring to the table? Dan lists three unique characteristics of Twitter communication:
- Low attention threshold. (140 characters)
- Mobile capability.
- Networking. Our @ conversations are public ... that's how I find new people to follow.
But if given the option to subscribe to Twitter, RSS, or email to stay updated about a product, Dan says he would choose RSS, because it keeps his inbox free. "I use Twitter for conversations with interesting people, not to learn about the newest gadgets. Again, that's what RSS is for," he says.
I agree with much of Dan's analysis. If one technology already fulfills a need, there's little value in duplicating it with another technology. However, given the increasing amount of information we must sort through daily, the limitation of 140 characters per message is appealing.
About Tom Johnson
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I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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I know it's an old post, but I've only been introduced to the shit-show that is Confluence in the last year. How about: no WYSIWYG, crippled text search, no resizing table columns on the fly, and saving your work is now a part-time job. I feel like I've regressed to 1989.
Oh, and when you get edits from your reviewers...30-40 comments each helpfully designated by page number. Try explaining to your reviewers help that you actually have no idea what "page" anything is in your source file.
My company has used confluence for a "knowledgebase" (notes and internal documentation) for 10 years or so. We still have a (many years out of date) installation on one of our servers, and a couple of cloud instances for some newer stuff.
They used to give you access to the source markup. Our old installed version still lets you switch between source markup, rich edit, and preview tabs. They've been working on the rich text editor since we first started using, and have yet to get it right. In our old installed version, you inevitably have to go into the source to fix things when they get screwed up, or just to do thing in the first place as something are just easier that way.
However switching back and forth, it inevitable screws something up. The only safe way is to never edit with their rich text editor once you've started on editing the source.
So I assume they "fixed" their inablility to get that right, by just taking away the ability to switch back and forth. But it boggles my mind that they would do this when they clearly can't get the rich editor right either.
I always end up with pages that have weird formatting going on that is completely unfixable or inspectable in the editor. A bit of text will be indented yet no buttons get enabled when I click on it, including the outdent button, so there is no way to fix the indenting. Lines have different space between them than other again for no reason the editor will let me see or change. Some bits of text that look perfectly plain and again provoke no toolbar reaction, get rendered into icons while other identical bits of text do not. It fills me with rage.
Tom, it would seem that you can get excerpts to be searchable within articles...it requires another plug in though.https://ffeathers.wordpress.com/201...
Hopefully this solution works with multiexcerpt content too.
Thanks for the tip.
I have to agree with Tom - I don't like Confluence as a documentation tool much at all. I've had to work with Confluence on Demand lately, which admittedly is a really stripped down version...but so much stripped down that it is barely usable. There are so many annoying formatting issues that you can't put right because there is no access to the source code (the plug in doesn't work for On Demand) and there's no access to a css style sheet either. I have used the full product, which was better, but I'd read about the problems with content re-use, and even the use of multiple 'excerpts' requires a paid-for plug in. The amount of plug-ins needed makes it more costly than it first looks.
Given the choice, I would use Flare or Robohelp over it every time.
Looks like you have read my mind! I am working with Confluence lately. I so agree that the usage has a lot of limitation. However, I do understand the other side of the coin too. When I see the developers penning down their part of documentation, there's no other tool better than Confluence. All they need is a common platter to access, and Wiki is a way to go.
However, as a technical writer, it's tough to maintain single sourcing, conditional build tagging, exporting to PDF/Word, and to an extent the look-n-feel too.
I like wikis more than you do, but I wouldn't recommend mediawiki because of its fundamental antagonism to permission controls. This is a killer deficiency for most enterprise knowledge base implementations.
Confluence changed direction a couple of years ago, hiding the wiki syntax behind the WYSIWYG editor. They clearly decided to focus on the "typical business" user at the expense of their techcomm audience.
Yeah, Mediawiki's open permissions are problematic for a lot of situations. Mediawiki is good if your access and collaboration needs parallels that of Wikipedia, basically. Also, I'm not sure that Mediawiki's transclusion has any better results with search than Confluence. What I do like is the ability to work directly with wiki syntax or HTML. Mediawiki is also pretty robust in terms of its feature set.
Have you ever worked with a wiki that wasn't full of a bunch of outdated, authorship-unknown content?
Tom
Sorry, but I don't agree at all.
The argument about content re-use and comparing Confluence with DITA is like comparing apples and oranges. If you assume to use Confluence both as authoring and publishing platform, please tell me how to do that with DITA? Let your readers read XML files? How would you make sure they read only the content for the relevant audience? It is actually possible to export from Confluence and use a publishing tool chain to produce online help, PDFs, or even books (just one example that has been authored in Confluence: http://www.thelanguageofcon...)
With regards to the rich text editor in Confluence. Agreed, that it has its glitches - as many other WYSIWYG editors do too. But other than highly specialized (XML) authoring tools, Confluence lets tech writers escape their silo, and get to collaborate with the whole organization:
- developers can provide input in same system the tech writers are working in;
- service people can ask questions and provide feedback in the same system;
- tech writers can include co-workers with twitter-like @-mentions and shares to ask for feedback
- ... I could go on here, but I think the most important benefit of using a multi-purpose collaboration platform like Confluence for tech writers, is that there work becomes visible and more fun.
No doubt it's a good tool for collaboration: that's what it was designed for. But as a doc creation tool it is simply terrible.
Stefan, thanks for your comment.
DITA does separate authoring from publishing. In some ways this is problematic because it lengthens the publishing cycle. When you want to update a page in your help, you have to regenerate all the help and re-upload it to your server. With wikis, you just edit the page, make the change, and when you save the page, the browser publishes it.
Additionally, DITA's paradigm is to publish different variants of the content as separate deliverables. However, having output 1, 2, and 3 may not make sense for audiences who are not that divided and who want to see content for outputs 1, 2, and 3. Dynamic content filtering, which would allow users to select attributes and have the content dynamically shape around that attribute on the same platform, is something only possible with advanced DITA publishing platforms.
I'm not really sure what you're asking when you say, "If you assume to use Confluence both as authoring and publishing platform, please tell me how to do that with DITA." I'm not suggesting that you do that with DITA. XML doesn't automatically render into HTML in the browser. (There is a guy who created that functionality to some extent, but it's a work in progress.) I'm arguing that this paradigm in Confluence is what gives rise to the complications I described.
Re "It is actually possible to export from Confluence and use a publishing tool chain to produce online help, PDFs, or even books," yes, I am aware of this. The PDF looks pretty good, I have to say. However, PDFs aren't a deliverable I need. The HTML is pretty weak -- it's a single file with jump links. I think Microsoft Word can also publish out to HTML, but that doesn't mean I'd use it to publish a website.
Re books, such as with the Language of Content Strategy, that's an area I don't know much about. It would be neat to learn more about the back-end publishing workflow of how you're mapping Confluence pages to an HTML site page. Even so, it seems kind of like an inflexible model. What if I change around pages and IDs -- I assume that I would have to adjust all the mappings. If you want to write a guest post that describes how The Language of Content Strategy site model works from a technical level, I would welcome it.
As far as the collaborative benefits to wikis as an advantage that outweighs the lack of wiki markup, I admit that in some environments, collaboration on wikis can make tech authoring more fun. But wikis are problematic overall. They lead to redundant, outdated content (ROT). I explained why here.
Thanks for the feedback and thanks for the offer to write a guest post on the making of "The Language of Content Strategy". I'll get back to you about it.
Just on additional note on redundant, outdated content: IMO this is not a problem of a particular technology, it is an organizational problem: If there is no ownership defined for content, and the content is left to who ever wants to edit it, then you will get outdated content. - It doesn't make a difference, if it is a wiki page or a DITA XML file.
Only, it will easier for co-workers to provide feedback and fixes, if the content is a wiki page instead of a DITA XML file.
>But you can’t automate the variant based on login permissions.
Yes and No. If you use Bob Swift's plugins , you can do some fancy variable content based on the individual user.
Good tip, Ellis. Which plugin from Bob Swift are you referring to? I see he has about a dozen of them.