Spring conference season is just winding down. Here's the rundown on our recent adventures.
Philadelphia Freedom
Matt Arnold, Sarah O'Keefe, and Alan Pringle were in Philadelphia June 1–4 for the STC Technical Summit. We all enjoyed speaking with the many visitors who came by our booth. We appreciate the positive feedback you offered on our books and white papers. Also, thanks for eating the chocolate we brought: if you hadn't eaten the truffles, we would have devoured them all ourselves.
Check out our blog, Palimpsest, to see the slides for Sarah's presentation, Paradigm Shifts are Never Pretty.
California Dreaming
At Gilbane San Francisco 2008 last week, Simon Bate was part of the panel discussion on Enterprise Publishing with XML (DITA). Simon presented Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit, in which he discussed some of the decisions we made when modifying the toolkit to meet a customer's needs.
During the rest of the show, Simon followed the Collaboration and Social Computing track. Some of his notes and observations are recorded in our blog. Collaboration and social computing is going to have an impact on Help and documentation. The more we can learn about trends and user expectations, the better we'll be able to meet the challenge.
The exhibition floor was an interesting mix of web and enterprise content management systems and other peripheral functions (localization and search, in particular). The web systems varied from pure web-based content management to out-of-the-box web sites that managed content as part of their function. A number of these also provided the tools to add collaborative or social aspects to a web site.
London Calling
Well, the first stop wasn't London, but it was close. From June 21–22, Sarah was in Birmingham, UK, for STC UK. She spent those very busy 48 hours presenting, hosting a day-long XSL workshop, and providing some chocolate for the presidents' champagne and chocolate reception.
After STC UK, the call to London was finally answered at X-Pubs. X-Pubs is a content and communication technologies conference in London that was held from June 22–24. Sarah's presentation, Friend or Foe? The Role of Web 2.0 in Technical Communication, explored how web 2.0 technologies are affecting technical documentation. Forums, wikis, blogs, and the like are quickly dissolving the barrier between subject matter experts and end users. Should we worry that anyone can present information to the world? Once everybody is an author, what happens to technical writers and the content masters of yore?
You can see the slides from Sarah's web 2.0 presentation and read her observations in our blog. |
