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Documentation as conversation webinar

Friday, May 22, 2009 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

We have added Documentation as Conversation, presented by Anne Gentle, to our upcoming webinars. Anne is scheduled to present on June 9 at 11 a.m. Eastern time:

Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates. This talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, with the help of social media technology. I'll discuss the topics in my new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. I'll describe the use of in-person Book Sprints that combine wikis and community events to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals

Anne is an expert, perhaps the expert, on using wikis and other social media to extend traditional documentation efforts. She's also an excellent speaker, so I hope you'll join us for this session.

Register for Documentation as Conversation ($20)

See all upcoming webinars

PS We are working on additional topics and looking for more speakers. Do you have topics you would like us to cover? Please let us know. We are working on a couple of sessions on document conversion.

Labels: presentations, web 2.0, wiki

8:38 AM Permalink | |

 

Wacky wiki

Monday, September 08, 2008 — posted by Sarah

We recently made our FrameMaker 7 workbook content available in a public wiki. We simply don't have the time to make the needed updates to get the content to version 8, so we thought that we'd let you, the general public, have editable access to it.

The results have been enlightening and, at least to me, unexpected:

1. Nobody is making updates. We have a significant number of people who have registered as users on the wiki, but they aren't making changes to the content.
2. Sales of the fully formatted, not-free PDF versions of the workbooks have increased significantly.

According to Chris Anderson, this second effect is actually what we should have expected for a Web 2.0 platform. He describes the "freemium" model "where 90% of the users get the basic product for free and 10% chose to pay for a premium version."

One of my coworkers thinks that people are using the wiki to window-shop. They verify that the content looks useful and then go ahead and pay for the official version. So the wiki provides reassurance about the paid product's quality.

Your thoughts?

Labels: FrameMaker, web 2.0, wiki

2:13 PM Permalink | |

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