Listen here: In this week's Tech Writer Voices podcast, Heidi and I talk about some innovative research from Microsoft, Word 2007, convincing upper management you're not a cost, focusing on information users actually want, tool versus industry experience, the curse of knowledge, the slow movement, and a tip for handling your e-mail inbox. Links mentioned in the Show Tom's blog Heidi's blog Innovative Microsoft Research ...
Grammar Girl is the latest subject of the DMN Communications podcast. The Grammar Girl podcast covers ... you guessed it, grammar. What's surprising is the popularity of this podcast. The popularity prompts a thought-provoking question: in a world of degenerating language, where sentences are massacred in text messages, poorly written blog posts, reader comments, user forums, and other social media, why does anyone care so much about gram...
If you don't enjoy listening to voicemail on your cell phone, check out Spinvox. This service converts your voicemail messages to text and then emails you the message. Right now you can sign up for a year's service for free by e-mailing [email protected] with the request. Two U.S. competitors to Spinvox are Simulscribe and Callwave. But with Spinvox, not only can you have the transcribed voicemail sent to your email or cell phone (althoug...
I never thought blogging could be very profitable, but after listening to a podcast with Guy Kawasaki, who says he could make 25-30K a year blogging, and after reading John Chow's blog, which shows him earning 3K a month, I decided to start integrating Google Adsense into my posts. Google Adsense allows you to integrate Google's ads into your website or blog. The ads displayed match the categories you've set up and the keywords of your po...
Callwave.com is a pretty cool service. When people leave voicemail messages on your cell phone, rather than having to listen to the messages on your phone, Callwave sends the voice message to your email inbox. The following image shows a sample delivery of the message. You click Open and the message plays. Setting up Callwave (which is free) took me all of 2 minutes. You just enter a string of digits in your phone, and voila. To sign up,...
The Suncoast Member mashup map is finished. Several people commented how cool it is. You can create a mashup map in 5 minutes from http://www.batchgeocode.com/, and there are Google plugins for WordPress that also facilitate the map. But I used the Google Map API because I wanted a list of scrollable names on the side. The method was much more arduous (right-click the map file to view the source and see the code for the individual marker...
Brian Oberkirch has interviewed some really cool people over in Silicon Valley. In this podcast from Oberkirch, Guy Kawasaki reveals some thought-provoking dilemmas about his blog habits. Guy is a big name in tech — former evangelist for Apple, now a venture capitalist. During the first 20 minutes they talk about startups, why some succeed and others fail (basically no one knows), they cover Guy's previous books (The Art of the Start, Rul...
I listened to an awesome podcast today. Brian Oberkirch from Edgework talks with Matt Mullenweg about WordPress. Of course I love WordPress so it was great to hear from Matt, the WordPress lead. Matt said a few things about Akismet and accelerated development cycles that were interesting. Akismet, the spam-blocking software packaged with WordPress and produced by Automattic (the company behind the open-source WordPress application), is re...
This podcast from Podcast Academy talks about integrating podcasting into your company's mix of marketing deliverables. Schwartzman talks about how, for an opera site, his company added podcasts that consisted of opera singer interviews. He says the main purpose of a podcast should be to drive listeners to your website—the website should be the center of your activity, not the podcast. A little shocking was the cost. Schwartzman says hi...
One of the responses in our recent chapter survey showed that members want more information about other members (see #3). I think this means members want to interact more, to get to know their peers better. But going out to the meetings each month isn't always possible given the remote locations of some members. And others have family commitments or other obstacles that prevent them from interacting. To get around this, I've added a chat ...
Jakob Nielsen offers 10 principles for weblog usability. But it's #9 that really jumps out: Whenever you post anything to the Internet -- whether on a weblog, in a discussion group, or even in an email -- think about how it will look to a hiring manager in ten years. Once stuff's out, it's archived, cached, and indexed in many services that you might never be aware of. Years from now, someone might consider hiring you for a plum job and t...
In a recent survey we did with our chapter, 75% of the members said the blog was sufficient, and that we don't need to bring back the chapter newsletter. We archived our newsletter about 2 years ago because each newsletter editor kept getting burned out. When we converted our site to a blog, members contributed to it but the posts were not really articles as much as announcements., job listings, or requests for advice. I asked the newsle...
As a technical writer, I use styles for almost everything. That's why I almost died when I learned about this WordPress Easter egg in the visual editor. Go to where you would write a new post and look at your visual editor. Press alt+shift+v. You'll suddenly see an additional toolbar appear that wasn't there before. Uhm, isn't restricting heading tags and other formatting options one of dumbest omissions in a WYSIWYG editor? If it's poss...
Boagworld shares some worthwhile advice on podcasting. If you skip ahead to minute 37, you'll get to the part about podcasting. Here's what Paul and Marcus said that I found interesting: Your listeners are listening to your podcast while doing something else, such as driving, exercising, or working. So you only have part of their attention. The implication is that your content has to be somewhat light, not requiring 100% attention to abs...
You probably saw the brief descriptions of the two keynote speakers at the STC Conference in March, but did you know one is a podcaster. Or a videocaster, or a new media artist. The show with zefrank is an interesting new video art form. He does some creative, theatrical commentary while looking at your straight in the eye. Click the image above to see Ze Frank talk about Google and Valentine's day and "Googe." The show is a satire on Go...
