Tekom thoughts
You know you’ve had a bad travel week when you cannot wait to compose the complaint letter to the airline. But sandwiched between flight problems, I had a great time in Wiesbaden at tekom/tcworld 2011.
Author: Sarah O'Keefe
The economics of information
The slides from my tekom/tcworld session on the economics of information are below.
You don’t have to bet the farm…
A wise man once told me that the goal of marketing is to frame the question so that what you are selling is the best possible answer. In the world of tech comm publishing, the default question has been: “What tool should I use?”
Curation analytics take a step forward
My 2011 predictions post included a brief mention of curation analytics. This week, we have news from MindTouch that supports my thought that accountability in technical communication will increase.
The (work)force is strong…
Technical communication is in the midst of a huge transition from a craft/artisan model to an engineering model. Our consultants are the vanguard of this transition, and as a result, we are experiencing significant challenges in finding new employees.
DITA, The Sequel: Refining your DITA workflow
The initial wave of DITA implementations is still building, but we are already seeing the early adopters move on to what I am calling DITA, The Sequel.
The perversion of indexes
In addition to mixed column and copyfitting, the shift from desktop publishing to structured authoring may result in the demise of the traditional index.
The economics of information
Originally published in tcworld e-magazine, July 2011
In Europe before the 1450s, books were precious, rare objects and were usually copied by hand over a period of months or years. Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press changed the economics of information distribution.
Content monoculture
I’m having some trouble with the idea of “extending DITA” outside the world of technical communication. DITA is obviously important in the right environment, but should we be advocating the use of DITA for more and more content?
A simple use case for DITA conkeyrefs
I have struggled to understand the keyref and conkeyref features added in DITA 1.2.
It wasn’t until we started applying them to our proposal workflow that I finally understood them. I hope this use case also helps others.
