Twemes.com is a service that aggregates tweets that have the same tag. A handful of twitterers at the STC Conference are tagging their tweets with #stc2008. If you go to http://twemes.com/stc2008, you can see a stream of all of these tweets. Right now the number of people on Twitter at this conference is abysmally low (less than 1%), but through one co-twitterer we were able to lower the AC in a room. It's a start. If you're tweets have a...
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. At first I didn't think I had much to s...
Listen here: In this podcast, rich media specialist Todd O'Neill explains how to add video to your training and documentation deliverables. Many technical writers are intimidated by the learning curve, equipment costs, and software they think they need to create video, but actually you can create engaging videos with minimal equipment (e.g., $150 for a Flip video camera) and using software you probably already have (e....
Listen here: With all the buzz about web 2.0 deliverables, it's easy to get caught up in the frenzy and think we need to quickly create blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasts, videos, and other new media for our users. Actually, we have to step back and analyze our users and their needs before creating any help deliverables at all. In this podcast, Nicky Bleiel says we should talk to as many users as we can — conducti...
If you're going to the STC Summit in Philadelphia, check out my presentation on podcasting. The Art of the Podcast Room: 111AB Format: Demonstration Skill Level: All Time: Tuesday, 4:30 -5:30 pm Learn how to capture audio from presentations, in-person interviews, phone conversations, and tutorials and deliver them as professional productions that can build relationships with listeners and strengthen their knowledge. I have a PowerPoint fo...
User-centered documentation 1.0 → Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 New series: User-centered documentation 1...
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 documentation into web 2.0 territory and enable user interaction and feedback, bu...
I was digging into some SharePoint books on Safari online tonight, and I noticed something incredibly cool. While I'm reading a page of a book, there's a section at the bottom called "Additional Reading." Based on keyword/topic matches, it pulls similar content from other chapters of other books in the Safari library. It's not just showing me related books for my topic, but is showing me related chapters from other books. I ended up not j...
Listen here: You can either listen to this post as a mini-podcast or just read it. They're mostly the same, but not entirely. I listened to a couple of podcasts back to back tonight that, taken alone, might not have had as strong an impact on me as they did together. The first was Mark in Canada's "Musings of a Tech Writer -- Episode 21," in which he lists the top 10 most annoying things podcasters do. Then I listened t...
Listen here: IT project teams often need to increase collaboration and communication, but they're hampered by the cubicle walls and other physical silos they set up in the workplace. These physical obstacles force teams to have frequent meetings -- which can be long and inefficient -- just to keep each other updated. In this podcast, Emma Hamer talks about both physical and virtual workspaces that project teams need to ...
Listen here: Many content management projects fail because organizations are either too focused on tools before properly researching their needs and processes, or because they underestimate the difficulty of migrating and restructuring their content to fit the new content management system. In this podcast, Rahel Bailie explains these pitfalls and what companies can do to avoid them, as well as how companies can climb ...
Listen here: XML, a way of tagging and structuring your content, can help solve a number of problems, including storing, mining, reusing, and sharing content. XML helps enable the interoperability of information between systems, allowing you to export and import your content from one application to another. XML is behind much of the collaboration and information sharing Web 2.0 technologies, such as RSS (really simple ...
I received an email the other day from a podcast listener in Germany. K. writes, Today, I've been listening to some of your podcasts which I had saved up, and I wanted to say thank you: You won't believe how invaluable they are to me - and I hope to many others as well. As the lone tech writer at my company in Frankfurt, Germany, I'm missing out on community effects, for better or worse. And since I write documentation for software only ...
John Hewitt at Poewar is giving away $250 to the guest post that brings in the most traffic to his site. He plans to vacation in June and wants the guest posts to keep his site going while he's away. I'll admit, the money is alluring. I've already written my guest post and am planning to submit it tomorrow. The due date is May 28, 2008. John says the posts should be between 400 to 800 words and can be about any of the following: Fiction...
At Doc Train, Stewart Mader was such a popular guy that both Scott Nesbitt and I interviewed him separately. I just listened to Scott's interview while shooting hoops tonight, and I thoroughly enjoyed their exchange. Scott touched on many angles I didn't cover and went more in depth. Here are several things that struck me: Stewart's Wikipatterns site shows wiki practices and techniques that work well in organizations. It's a wiki that a...
