My journey to and from wikis 1.0 → My Journey To and From Wikis: Why I Adopted Wikis, Why I Veered Away, and a New Model 1.1 The Need for Constant Updates (Wikis) 1.2 Some Wiki Basics (Wikis) 1.3 Community and Collaboration (Wikis) ...
I'm giving an STC webinar this Thursday titled "Creating Help in a Wiki Environment." Here's the description: Creating Help in a Wiki Environment Thursday, 7 June | 4:00–5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) One advantage to working in a wiki environment is to enable collaboration among a community of users. Without this collaboration, wikis offer little more than ease of publishing. But how do you build a community of users? How do you invite intelligent...
Last week one of my kids broke my ASUS laptop screen (she closed it while something was caught in the lid). At first I thought it would be the end of life for my laptop, but then I found that replacing a laptop screen was somewhat inexpensive (about $75 + shipping) and easy (according to this video). So I ordered a new screen from laptopscreen.com. After my order shipped, I also received this curious email from the company. The email said...
Content Strategy Workshops This year Rahel Bailie and Scott Abel are putting on a new event called Content Strategy Workshops. It's a two-day event, held October 9-10 in Portland, Oregon that follows the Lavacon Conference (held October 7-9, same hotel). I helped work on the website a bit, and I wanted to highlight this new event through an interview with Rahel. Tell me about the new Content Strategy Workshop conference you're putting on...
I am currently at the STC Summit in Chicago. One of the reasons I love the STC Summit so much is that it feels like home. I know so many people at this conference, and it's great to chat with them. People like Sarah Maddox, Ellis Pratt, Janet Swisher, Arnold Burian, Matt Pierce, Todd Deluca, Mark Lewis, Kirsty Taylor, Joe Gollner, Gina Wadley, Kai Weber, Kit Brown, Alyssa Fox, Tommy Barker, Larry Kunz, Rahel Bailie, Richard Hamilton, and ...
I recently attended Confab in Minneapolis. I was one of about 5 technical writers among the 650 attendees, which is why I found it surprising to hear Erin Kissane say, We can learn a lot from tech comm. Let me repeat that. We can learn a lot from tech comm. I felt pleased to hear this shout-out to my profession, and then tried to unpack exactly what she meant. Throughout the conference, a number of presenters emphasized the need for struc...
Tips for a successful conference experience The STC Summit takes place in a few days. If you monitor the #stc12 twitter stream, you can feel the excitement of the conference attendees. I've been to at least a dozen conferences over the last seven years or so, and I've accumulated a few tips that have helped make my conference experience better. Here are my top 15 tips for a successful conference experience. 1. If you want to sightsee, arr...
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, published in 2011, is a story about a pharmaceutical researcher's attempt to make sense of her lost colleague, presumably dead in the Amazon, while wrestling with a domineering academic professor who refuses to communicate updates about her research. The book begins at a slow pace but, as Janet Maslin notes in her New York Times review, the story catches fire when the narrat...
I received the following question from a reader: I'm a 20 year old college student and I just finished up my first year at a local community college and I was wondering what my major should be if I want to become a technical writer when I eventually graduate. Right now my counselors have me majoring in General Science (b/c my dream job would be to work as a writer at Scientific American) but I'm wondering if that's the right path I shoul...
It's interesting how new things sometimes sneak up on us. I'm 36 years old, which means I'm past my exploratory twenties. It fascinates me how I'll be perfectly content in one way of life and then suddenly find another. My wife, Shannon, seems to follow the same path as well at times. About six months ago, she discovered yoga. Shannon has never been so fully engaged in any activity like this (other than reading, which she'll do all night)...
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson, is a fantasy trilogy that takes you into a world where the characters can "burn" metals inside their bodies to give rise to certain powers, such as increased strength, the ability to push and pull other metals, an enhancement of the senses, or the most potent of all, the ability to see several seconds into the future (critical for fighting). Mistings possess one of the nine po...
I've been reading Sarah Maddox's new book, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate, and have been impressed. I enjoy the energy and speed in Sarah's writing. If you've read her blog before, her book has the same tone. This is not a book review, because I'm not yet finished with the book. But it doesn't take too many pages to come to some realizations worth noting. My primary realization: I wish I had a Confluence wiki rather than a Mediawiki wik...
This week, as I was riding my bike to work and listening to Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (a classic fantasy/adventure book), one of the characters -- was it Bayle Domon, the pirate? for the life of me, I can't remember, nor can I find it, but he says something like this to Rand, one of the protagonists: Sometimes asking questions is more important than finding answers. This sentence rang instantly true in my mi...
At work I have often grumbled about the fact that we have both a blog and a wiki, and that content shared between them sometimes seems redundant and unnecessary. However, I have since come to realize how well blogs and wikis fit together. I think it makes sense to have both -- at least in my authoring scenario. In short, wikis are suited for information that doesn't expire in a short time, while blogs are better for short-lived news. The ...
The 80/20 rule, or Pareto's Principle, states that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. Applied to help authoring, this could mean that from 100 help topics you write, about 20 of the topics will be viewed 80 percent of the time. Designers recognize the applicability of the 80/20 rule on design. Heat maps show that people only focus on about 20 percent of the page. This is where good designers will focus their ene...
