I'm giving a training course on WordPress this Wednesday. If you've been thinking about getting a blog or switching from Blogger to WordPress, this course will help you get up and running with WordPress in a quick, efficient way. The short details are below. Date: Wednesday, April 30 Time: 7:30 - 9:30 p.m. CST Location: Web Cost: $99 Course Size: Limited to 15 participants For the full course description, see WordPress for Beginners Cours...
Even though I'm an advocate of blogging and think it's critical to tech comm, I've always been assigned technical documentation projects for internally used, confidential, or classified software. Documenting products promoted on the web has never been an option for me. However, I'm convinced that even internal software, which never sees the light of WWW, still needs a blog as much or more than products sold online. Even so, numerous corpo...
The Read/Write web has a fascinating post about the amount of time people spend in Web 2.0 activities. Here's a graph from their post that sums it up. In short, content creators, such as those who publish blogs and podcasts, spend 5-10 hrs a week. To be a community directory, you can spend 10-20 hrs. I distinctly remember a question Thom Haller asked me after my presentation last year at Doc Train West. He threw up his hands and said, "...
Find a way to have fun with what you're writing. If you don't, not only will it be a miserable experience, the product will lack the energy, playfulness, and good feeling it needs to be successful. Change your point of view, experiment, try something different -- until the routine becomes an exploration, and the monotonous becomes your musing. If that doesn't work, try reading a few lolcats to lighten things up.
I'm trying to gather as many examples as possible about how companies are engaging in web 2.0 activities. Do you know any companies that are using blogs, wikis, social networks, forums, podcasts/videocasts, or interactive online help? If so, let me know by either adding a comment below or by contacting me. (It doesn't have to be restricted to tech comm examples.) In May I'm giving a virtual presentation to STC-Phoenix and I hope to use so...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Scott Abel about social networking, in particular The Content Wrangler community he started at TheContentWrangler.ning.com. Scott talks about this new social network specifically for technical communicators. But he also explains the value of social networks for your help deliverables. Social networks can help users connect with one another and also help technical communicators be...
The following is a guest post by Ben Minson, one of my technical writing colleagues. Ben's blog, which also focuses on technical communication, is called Gryphon Mountain Journals. Check it out. (You can subscribe to his RSS feed here.) My wife recently bought a book for me entitled Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers. Blogging has been around for about ten years now, but one blogger said in this book that he t...
Tonight I attended a WordCamp Utah planning meeting at Applebees with a group of blogging enthusiasts. Joseph Scott, one of the WordPress developers employed by Automattic, organized the event and is taking charge of the upcoming Wordcamp, which looks like it will be in September to avoid competition with other conferences (Blog World, Open Source, and New Media Expo). Wordcamp Dallas a Success By the way, Charles Stricklin of the WordPr...
Attention podcasters and podcaster wannabes, we're having a podcast meetup at Doc Train West. If you're heading to this conference in Vancouver, stay tuned to more details about this meetup. It'll probably be during one of the evenings of the conference (which takes place May 6-9). The podcaster meetup will involve an informal exchange, possibly at a restaurant or lounge somewhere, where podcasters introduce themselves to each other, shar...
Kalyani from Saudi Arabia writes, My name is Kalyani. I am 37 yrs old and live in Saudi Arabia. I have finished my Diploma in Electronics (4 year course). I was working at Hewlett Packard in India before moving to Saudi. In this country, women have very few opportunities to work i.e., only in the schools or hospitals. I chose to work in the school as an English and Computer Science teacher. Now I have moved into the administration. After ...
This post is part of Jane's Blog Carnival. The theme this week is the movie Some Kind of Wonderful, a classic 80s high-school movie that my wife quotes from daily. In one scene, the main character, Keith, intentionally sets off a fire alarm to land in detention, hoping to sit near his daydream love, Amanda Jones. It turns out Amanda -- unbeknownst to Keith -- sprung herself from detention through her flirtatiousness with a teacher, leavin...
One of my readers sent me a link to today's New York Times article on blogging titled "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Til They Drop." I find it touching that someone would think of me while reading the article. :) Actually, I read a sneak peak of the article in yesterday's Blog Herald. It made me think hard about how much I've been posting lately. Here are a few excerpts from the article: Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla...
"Technical Communicator" is a term that, as much as I dislike, can be extremely important for triggering Google Alerts set up by the Society for Technical Communication's Intercom editorial staff. How do I know this? Well, a couple of months ago I saw a summary of my blog post on video cameras and SMEs mentioned in the STC Intercom's Cut & Paste section (shown below). (Direct link to Intercom article above.) My original blog post was...
This is a funny video of Chris Pirillo talking about how difficult it is to teach people software. In software training sessions I've given recently, I've learned that demos can be incredibly boring unless you do them in a certain way. People don't learn much by simply watching you click through everything and explain tabs and buttons. People learn by doing, so you have to get them doing something. Here's my recipe, recommended by a fri...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Theresa Putkey, a usability consultant in Vancouver, about how she transitioned from technical writing into usability. This is part II of the previous conversation with Theresa. Learn more about Theresa by reading her blog. You can also read Theresa's articles on Boxes and Arrows. Topics in this Podcast In this podcast, we talk about the following: How to move into usability De...
