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2008 Predictions: They'll keep me humble in 2009
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 — posted by Sarah
Each year, I write up an internal annual report, which discusses company performance in the previous year, looks at trends, and lays out a strategic plan for the following year. Generally, this report looks great in November and December and is completely obsolete by March (at the latest). Nonetheless, I thought I'd share some of the highlights from this year's analysis. I hope you will share your agreement or disagreement in the comments.No clear leader for DITA
DITA authoring tools are everywhere. Long-time contenders (FrameMaker, Arbortext, and XMetaL [anyone remember SoftMetal or HotMetal??]) are adding DITA feature support. Many help authoring environments are adding DITA import or export. Several companies are developing web-based DITA authoring tools, and In.Vision Research has a DITA authoring plug-in for Microsoft Word.
The tools proliferation is disconcerting. In the olden days (the early 90s!), serious technical publishing was a fairly easy choice among FrameMaker, Interleaf, and maybe Ventura Publisher. Now, some tools are on the desktop, some are in the browser, some reside inside other tools, and life is much more complex.
Will things look different in five years? Certainly. I doubt, however, that we'll be back to half a dozen (or fewer) contenders. Instead, I think DITA output will become a check-off in the same way that HTML output is now.
Reuse analyzers
Both MadCap Software and Author-It have developed reuse analysis software -- Analyzer and XTend, respectively. Most of us are familiar with translation memory tools, which try to match new content to be translated against existing content in the TM database. The reuse analyzers do similar work, but in the source language. As you write, the software compares new content to existing content and recommends matches.
This is such an elegant, obvious idea that I can't believe it's new. But I haven't seen this type of tool in desktop-level software before.
Web 2.0 integration
User-generated content, such as blogs, wikis, and forums (not to mention YouTube), is on a collision course with "professional" content, such as user assistance and documentation created by technical writers. The complaints about the amateurs butting in where they don't belong must be painfully familiar to those who remember the rise of desktop publishing software and the destruction of the vast majority of the professional typesetting business.
Note: I laid out my first magazine in PageMaker. Version 1. What little manual paste-up I did was not very attractive.
Note to young people: The expression "cut and paste" is used because in the olden days, your parents used to use scissors ("cut") and glue ("paste") to move things around on a page layout. And "strippers" didn't always use poles. But I digress...
People who are paid to create technical content need to understand what user-generated content will and will not do. (Shameless plug: I'm doing a session on this topic at WritersUA in Portland, OR, this year.)
Global business
We have our fair share of customers in North America, but an increasing number of our clients are outside North America or have significant operations in multiple locations around the world. The implications for technical communicators are global audiences, global customers (internal and external), and a requirement to work well with people from all over the world.
This is an area where I believe that U.S. communicators face some significant challenges.
Flash
I expect Flash to become the next Next Big Thing. Flash technology enables the creation of interactive applications that run in a browser (or offline with AIR, which is also fascinating). Flash is widely used for games, but for our purposes, its role in e-learning applications is more important.
Traditional classroom training is effective (when you have a good trainer), but it's also expensive and it doesn't scale well -- the more people need training, the more costs rise. And furthermore, if the students are scattered literally all over the world, the costs of assembling them all in one location are astounding. I firmly believe that e-learning is less effective than a great classroom experience (of course, I'm biased since I am an instructor myself), but e-learning has some significant advantages -- like eliminating travel requirements and reducing overall cost.
Flash has almost nothing in common with the current Next Big Thing -- XML. XML is markup, text, human-readable, and geeky. Basic Flash is like Illustrator with an extra dimension (time). Advanced Flash is an application development environment.
So there you have my list of important developments for 2008. Do you agree? Disagree? Have additions?
Labels: analysis, dita, web 2.0
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