Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Mark Hanigan, former international STC president, about ways to go beyond technical writing. I knew Mark at the STC-Suncoast chapter in Florida and often, during "post-meeting-meetings," listened to him talk about ways to transition from technical writing into tasks that companies perceive as having higher value, such as business analysis and project management. Mark strongly bel...
If you're interested in making money blogging, and you don't mind learning a bit about Google APIs and mapping, here's an opportunity worth pursuing. Studio B, a two-time Inc. 500 company and leading supplier of technical marketing content and services, is looking for developers with extensive coding and writing experience to write articles and blog posts on a variety of web services topics. Articles and blog posts will be hands-on accoun...
PodcastFAQ.com is a new site developed by Todd Cochrane of the Geek News Central podcast and several other prominent podcasters from RawVoice. PodcastFAQ is intended as a much-needed information resource for podcasters. I was exploring the site yesterday and discovered several things I was unaware of: Ioda Promonet -- a resource for podsafe music (music you can play on your podcast without violating copyright or paying royalties) Podcas...
Although it's outside my blog's focus, I'd feel remiss if I didn't express admiration for Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who just passed away tonight at age 97. Much unlike a prophet of doom and gloom, President Hinckley was an optimist who encouraged us to stand taller, to take longer strides and do better. One of my favorite talks he gave was entitled "Slow to Anger." Quite amazingly, h...
Clearplay is a DVD player that filters out profanity, extreme violence, and sexuality from movies, toning them down from R to PG-13, or from PG-13 to PG (if you want). Whereas other filtering methods involve physically altering the media, Clearplay works differently. You download filter files from Clearplay's site, load them onto a flash drive, plug the flash drive into the Clearplay DVD player, select to apply the filter to the movie, a...
Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, will be at a Wordpress meetup in Salt Lake City next Saturday, February 2. Details are as follows: Saturday, February 2, 2008 12:00 PM Taj India Restaurant 3540 South State St Salt Lake City, Utah 84115 See the original announcement or the event page. I'm looking forward to this opportunity, as I've never been to a WordPress meetup.
If you're a podcaster and you live in Utah, be sure to attend the upcoming podcamp in Salt Lake City. Details are as follows: Saturday, March 15, 2008 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM Neumont University 10701 S River Front Parkway, Suite 300 South Jordan, Utah 84095 Podcamp homepage: http://www.podcampslc.org/. Original announcement: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/319547/ I'm learning that several big podcasting names are in Utah, including Phil Wind...
Interviewing experts is one of the easiest and most practical ways to generate material for your podcast. Although many people think the difficult part of podcasting is the audio setup and production, actually pulling off a good interview requires more art and skill. I know I'm not the best interviewer, but I've learned at least 10 tips from the 60+ interviews I've conducted for my Tech Writer Voices podcast. 1. Do research beforehand. Re...
Lately I've been reading Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation. A passage about the methods for innovation jumped out at me. Berkun writes, Many innovations start in the same way as mentioned previously [from dedicated problem solvers], but an unexpected opportunity emerges and is pursued midway through the work (p. 41). In other words, while people are pursuing one direction, they encounter a surprise that leads them down another, more ...
Listen here: Madcap Flare is one of the most powerful online help authoring tools on the market today. In this podcast, Paul Pehrson, MVP in the Madcap Software forums, talks about Madcap Flare in depth. If you create online help, this is definitely a podcast you should listen to. Paul is a really sharp guy and if you've ever participated in the Madcap Software forums, you've probably been helped by "Doc-Guy" (Paul's ali...
In the pages section of my site (upper-left corner), I've added several new features: a Google Reader blogroll, podroll, and a shared Pandora feed. This blogroll is different from the usual blogroll. This blogroll is a javascript that inserts feeds from my Google Reader. Now you can know exactly what I'm reading, and I don't have to maintain a blogroll list separate from my feedreader list. It seems that we're sharing everything these day...
It turns out that you can get out of a slump or handle pressure situations comfortably by merely changing your facial expressions. I have been trying this over the past several days and have been completely stunned with what happens. Background This is not my own theory. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a mind reader, Silvan Tomkins, who can see and interpret the expressions on people's faces so well that he seems to read their mind...
Download MP3 Duration: 27 min. In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds. Bill explains th...
Quite a few people stumble across my blog searching for information on technical writing. One recent stumbler, Nick, writes with the following question: I'm studying tech writing and I happened upon this site (blog) and I'm asking myself what can I get from this thing called "blog" and what can I give to it. It seems that most of the people who respond are lecturers or advisers in the field and not , per-se, regular sloggers trying to ma...
I recently decided to look at the top 10 posts on various bloggers' sites and see what characteristics, if any, the top 10 had in common. Top 10 post lists are usually aggregated by plugins that measure hits, comments, and trackbacks, and then compile the most visited 10. Or they are derived from hit counters such as Google Analytics. The results of my analysis surprised me. It turns out there are three qualities that usually characterize...
