I gave a MindTouch webinar on Friday, June 10, called Organizing Help Content: The Problem of Findability. The webinar was a joint-discussion with Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler. Here's the webinar description: Help systems often have hundreds of topics. Arranging this information into a logical order so that users can find the exact topic they're looking for poses major challenges for technical writers. We often default to the print...
Two powerful trends in tech comm seem to be moving in different directions: social media and structured authoring. I have used a wiki as my primary format for documentation for the past year and a half. I tried to corral a group of volunteer technical writers to edit and update the wiki, because I embraced the idea that collective intelligence beats the individual thinker in the long run. But even the most advanced wikis don't have a stru...
One can hardly dismiss the power of visuals. One of the oldest truisms in communication is that a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Instead of lengthy text, we praise infographics, diagrams, workflows, and other visual illustrations that communicate ideas. (See this collection of New York Times infographics.) In Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, Robert Horn's main premise is that the combination of text with visual...
Each month I allow my blog's sponsors to include a brief message. This month I asked them to write about the biggest problem their company's product solves. Scriptorium Publishing We help companies with large amounts of technical content streamline their publishing processes, which results in cost reduction and quality improvements. If you are responsible for technical content, you face a bewildering array of possibilities—XML-based autho...
If you're looking for an opportunity to get some writing experience, consider joining the LDSTech Blog project. LDSTech is a site focusing on IT projects from the LDS Church for volunteer community members. For example, some projects have the goal of building an iPhone app, or making sites more accessible, or coming up with infographics. I'm heading up a project within this community called LDSTech Blog. On this project, volunteer members...
Callie and Lucy love it when I tell them stories, both stories I'm reading and stories I make up. I have more fun making them up. I look at things around me and can usually just see a story in what's lying around. Sometimes these stories work well and other times they're just corny and dumb. Anyway, I wouldn't keep telling them if it weren't for Callie and Lucy's interest. Here are two that I made up tonight. I thought maybe I'll start writing...
I gathered the family for scripture study and tried to relate some of what Paul talks about in Hebrews -- how Christ brings about a new covenant, and fulfills the Law of Moses. Callie and Lucy were totally uninterested, and as much as I tried to explain it, no one was interested. I was getting upset but realized that my teaching method didn't work for children. Frustrated, I ditched my lesson and picked up a kids version of the Book of Mormon ...
After my Summit presentation about breaking out of topic-based hierarchies, a lady named Ursula came up to me and said she was tired of topic-based authoring. I asked her what the alternative was. She said she's often more interested in seeing an end-to-end process rather than a specific task. This reminded me of a tutorial on Lynda.com in which Deke McClelland, the trainer, showed how to make a black cat, with the eyes, curly whiskers, g...
Last week while attending the STC Summit, I learned that MindTouch named my blog, I'd Rather Be Writing, the most innovative blog in technical communication. In their post, 2011 Technical Communication Innovation Award Winners, they write, This honor is bestowed upon long-time technical documentation professional Tom Johnson for creating some of the best — and most innovative — original content about the field of technical communication (a...
On my smartphone, I used to have Google Reader as one of my four quicklinks on the bottom toolbar. I recently replaced it with Twitter Topic, an app that shows all tweets that meet a specific hashtag. For example, if I'm interested in reading about other experiences at Confab, I'll search for the #confab topic. If I'm interested in seeing what's new about findability, I'll search for the #findability topic. If I'm curious to know what pe...
Listen here: The recording is available in a variety of formats: Audio with Slides PowerPoint Show File PowerPoint Original File iPod format I recently gave a presentation at the STC Summit in Sacramento titled "Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-based Hierarchies." I would have recorded my presentation, but recording is not allowed. I did, however, record a practice run-through in my hotel room the mornin...
Mark Baker The following is a guest post by Mark Baker. The a-ha moment came for me reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, a book Tom and I both admire. Weinberger's central thesis is that miscellany has become more powerful than order. No one ordering of information is ideal for every reader. The web allows readers to find information for themselves, and to organize it for themselves and for others. The power to organiz...
Tomorrow I'm giving a four hour workshop on blogging and WordPress at the STC Summit in Sacramento. I thought I'd post my outline in case anyone is interested in how I approach these workshops. In preparing this outline, I realized that my focus on WordPress and blogging has shifted more towards producing content rather than manipulating the technology. Several years ago, you had to be more techie to make adjustments to your theme and get...
In my Organizing Content series, I've been exploring the idea of adding metadata to help topics so you can sort them into different arrangements for different audiences. For example, you could add metadata tags such as "popular" or a specific role or a business goal and then provide entry points that arrange topics based on that metadata. Since I'm presenting on this topic at the Summit, it would be nice to have a few examples of help sys...
Michael Hobren This is a guest post by Michael Hobren. Michael is a technical and "marcom" contract writer, as well as a fictional novelist. He resides with his family in the Tampa, Florida area. As a technical writer, I don't think my late father ever quite understood what I do for a living. I would try to explain to him what I did, but to no avail. Despite my best efforts, my explanations were typically met with dad saying, "You know, ...
