Today I became convinced of something I'd always known: shorter is better. While driving to our Florida Tech. Comm. Competition showcase event, I listened to a South by Southwest podcast on "How to Add Video to Your Blog." (I actually had my videocamera with me to take footage at the event.) The vloggers explained that 3 minutes is the max length you want. At that point, the reader gets the point. I was also looking at Copyblogger's posts...
I was digging in the Oberkirch podcast archives and found a thought-provoking podcast on corporate blogging (dated July 2006). In this podcast, Brian Oberkirch talks with Shel Israel about Dell's foray into the corporate blogging world. In Dell's initial blogging phase, their blog took a downturn when they failed to address user concerns. Dell simply wasn't building relationships with users. Israel says Jeff Jarvis was one of many frustra...
I received the following email from a reader: Super-sized kudos to you on your tech writer voices website and podcasts! Great job tackling topics that matter to tech writers. For me personally, it has really helped me stay current as I re-enter the field after taking some years off to raise young kids. So thanks, and tell me what vitamins you take to keep up with work/family balance. Do you ever sleep? (Good future topic, eh?) Also, I'm w...
WritersUA published their 2007 salary survey, finding that 73K the average. The survey breaks down the highest to lowest paying states. Click the links at the top of the WritersUA page to see how the survey is broken down. If you live in Northern California, Massachusetts, or South Carolina, you're in the top three states. Pennsylvania, Florida, and Missouri are at the bottom of the chart. Thanks to Gordon Meyer for alerting me to the pub...
Kathy Sierra is on the leading-edge for user help. In her posts and speeches for Creating Passionate Users, she often talks about the qualities of help that works, especially in this excellent South by Southwest presentation. In this presentation, she asks why so many participants actually attended South by Southwest, because the conference was in fact being recorded, blogged, and even twittered. Ironically, the same people developing in...
We're doing a special STC election podcast next Wednesday at 9 p.m. EST, talking with the different candidates running for STC offices. If you're running for election, and you want to talk about yourself and your vision/plans for the STC, contact me at [email protected]. All you need is a landline phone. I mentioned this elections topic at the close of my last podcast. Nicky Bleiel has already contacted me. I'm curious to see how many ca...
In this podcast by Dan Rather at this year's South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Rather says today's journalism "needs a spine transplant. It has lost its guts" (see minute 42:30). I didn't realize how authentic Rather was as a journalist. He really is a dyed-in-the-wool, tried-and-true, 100%-committed journalist. He says information is central to making correct choices in a democracy. Journalists bring us information that all...
Listen here: In this week's podcast, Heidi and I consider a probing question: Is technical writing boring? We discuss a post that spawned a lot of comments and exchanges. We also talk about an article on information architecture in the Tech Comm journal. We talk about the following topics in this podcast: "Is technical writing boring?"post Information Architecture article in Tech Comm Journal Grammar Girl podcast Web 2...
TECHWR-L, one of the most popular listservs for technical writers, recently switched their site to Drupal. I was excited to see it. I haven't worked with Drupal before, but I've heard good things about it. Drupal offers more content management features than WordPress. I was also delighted to see that my blog feed had been aggregated to their Community "News Feeds from the Web" section. I explored the TECHWR-L Drupal site for a while. It'...
I finally found a perfect answer to the question "what's in it for me" when it comes to blogging, podcasting, and the other social media. In this IT Conversations panelist podcast from SofTECH, Robert Rebholz explains he engages in Web 2.0 media (blogs, social tagging, and other social collaborative sites) because the ROI for information is the equivalent of having 100 personal researchers and analysts working for you. I liked his explan...
Several people have asked me about how to embed an audio player into their websites. I use the PodPress plugin for WordPress, but this plugin itself is based on an audio player by 1 Pixel Out. If you have a regular HTML website and want to start embedding an audio player (for example, to play recordings of your chapter presentations or other audio broadcasts), check out this player from 1 Pixel Out. Well-written instructions for non-WordP...
Joshua Porter's 9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers gives some of the best advice about blogging I've ever read. Porter says people hesitate to blog because they're afraid of putting themselves on public display, or of not having anything interesting to say. He encourages you to lose your fear of criticism, and to recognize you do have valuable ideas to contribute. He also says your blog should have a "schtick." It helps you focus on finding ...
I keep waiting for the semantic web to materialize, but it seems like microformats aren't being adopted as quickly as I hoped. I listened to a podcast on microformats that got me thinking about this topic again. I first heard about the semantic web at the 2006 Tri-XML conference in a keynote address by Salim Ismail, who asserted that the semantic web could free the data trapped in sites like ebay, personals sites, classifieds, amazon, and...
Second Life provides a virtual world you can explore as a video game character walking around and interacting with other game characters. You use your keyboard's arrow keys to move, and you can even fly. You feel as if you're in a video game, because you select an avatar (3-d character), and everyone else is represented by avatars as well, mostly provocatively dressed. Thousands of others are also participating, and it's an experience lik...
Wikinomics explores the economic side of wikis. In this Harvard Business Review (HBR) ideacast, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, tells a story about a CEO of a gold mining company who embraced wiki principles to boost his company's revenue from 90 million to 10 billion. Frustrated by his geologists' inability to locate the gold in his land, the CEO nearly closed the company, but in a final eff...
