To find good content online, I find that I'm going less and less to Google Reader and more to sources like Paper.li, an automated content curation tool that filters out some of the content noise. The problem with Google Reader is lack of content curation. You get a ton of noise, regardless of how fine-tuned your list of feeds are. With tools such as paper.li, which rank the most shared links on Twitter (based on a user's followers, a hash...
Listen here: In the barrage of information created by all the social media channels, how can you find relevant content? How can you move past forms of noise to actually produce content that engages users? What forms of social media do students respond to the most? These are some of the questions we explored in a presentation I gave to Brigham Young University Provo students earlier this week. This podcast is a recordin...
Listen here: Download the PowerPoint (PPTX) PowerPoint in Zip file (in case you have trouble with the above) A while ago, our chapter held a half-day eLearning event, and I presented a version of my Developing a Personal Voice in Audio presentation (similar to what I presented at the STC Summit in Dallas). The recording has been sitting on my hard drive for a while, and I thought I'd finally release it. I've also inclu...
I stumbled across an essay called The Rhetoric of Text Design in Technical Communication, by Charles Kostelnick, a professor at Iowa State University, that discusses the meaning encoded in the visual arrangement of information. Kostelnick writes, We see documents before we read them: this initial encouter evokes an aesthetic response but one with immediate practical consequences. Since seeing precedes reading, the reader's first glance in...
Content strategy is a topic more and more technical communicators are talking about. It's one of the dominant conversations in the field right now. David Farbey recently presented on Content Strategy for Everyone at Tech Comm UK. Rahel Bailie talked about Creating a Content Strategy at the Lavacon conference. Scott Abel continually talks about content strategy -- see this video series on content strategy he did with MindTouch. When I was ...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
For the past couple of years in October, I've gone up to Brigham Young University Idaho to talk to students at their professional writing conference. I'm going up there again this year. In preparation, I asked my colleague who teaches there whether students still think of technical writing as a sellout/fallback career, or whether they're more seriously preparing for an actual career in technical writing. My colleague responded: They've ch...
At the last STC Summit in Dallas, one of the most attended sessions was Don Moyer's Building Visual Explanations: Practical Advice for Writers. I was recently listening to the recording of the session. I've been feeling more and more lately that I need to develop my visual imagination. Illustrating concepts isn't difficult, Moyer said. The hard part is coming up with the idea of the illustration, the napkin sketch. The rest is just "fancy...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
Substandard wages for senior technical writers This week's question comes from Mary in New York: I am a loyal reader of your blog and have gained more from it than all the seminars and continuing ed courses I've taken--which cost me a good chunk of my salary. Recently, I've noticed a disturbing trend which I hope you might consider blogging about. I'm an experienced technical writer currently looking for work, and I've been contacted by s...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
This screencast addresses the concept of inheritance in CSS.
This screencast addresses how to change your post title color in WordPress using CSS.
A reader asks, Is my resume so awful that no one will hire me? I mean, I'd been laid-off so long it's pitiful really. His resume is here. I opened up this question up to my friends on Twitter and to those who follow my blog. About 40 professional technical writers responded with all kinds of resume advice. The overall trend in the responses is for the writer to add more detail to his resume, to expand on his education, tools, online pr...
The Summit @ a Click offering for STC Summit attendees allows you to download the audio and slide recordings of the majority of the sessions. However, most people don't know how to download just the audio. In this screencast, I show you how to download the MP3 file from each session.
