WritersUA: DITA pilot techniques
Mark Wallis of IBM ISS on how to run a successful DITA pilot. Some great information in this presentation on how to reduce risks.
Author: Sarah O'Keefe
When is XML the wrong answer?
Originally published in STC Intercom, November 2007
XML can benefit a publishing workflow in many ways: improving content reuse, consistency, and potentially automating much of the process. That all sounds wonderful, but XML is not the logical answer for everyone.
Implementing a structured authoring solution requires a significant change from the familiar desktop publishing routine to new tools, technologies, and processes. Switching to XML is going to cost time and money. Depending on your needs, it may not be the most efficient solution.
The Age of … Expertise?
Over on O’Reilly’s Radar blog, Andy Oram has a fascinating article about the demise (!) of the Information Age and what will be next:
[T]he Information Age was surprisingly short. In an age of Wikipedia, powerful search engines, and forums loaded with insights from volunteers, information is truly becoming free (economically), and thus worth even less than agriculture or manufacturing. So what has replaced information as the source of value?The answer is expertise. Because most activities offering a good return on investment require some rule-breaking–some challenge to assumptions, some paradigm shift–everyone looks for experts who can manipulate current practice nimbly and see beyond current practice. We are all seeking guides and mentors.
What comes after the information age? (be sure to read the comments, too)
It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think we’re getting away from the Information Age into the Expertise Age. After all, expertise is just a specialized (useful!) form of information.
In the comments, Tim O’Reilly points out that the real change is in how information is gathered and distributed with “the rise of new forms of computer mediated aggregators and new forms of collective curation and communication.”
I believe that we are still firmly in the Information Age because information has not yet become a commodity product. There is, however, clearly a shift happening in how information is created and delivered. I think it’s helpful to look at communication dimensions:
- Traditional technical writing is one-to-many. One person/team writes, many people consume it.
- Wikis are many-to-many. Many people write; many people use the information.
- Mailing lists are many-to-one. Many people respond to one persons’ question.
- Technical support is one-to-one. One person calls; one person responds.
Technical support is the most expensive option; it’s also often the most relevant. Technical writing is more efficient (because the answer to the question is provided just once), but also less personal and therefore less relevant.
Many technical writers are concerned about losing control over their content. For an example of the alarmist perspective, read Joanne Hackos’s recent article on wikis. Then, be sure to read Anne Gentle’s eponymous rebuttal on The Content Wrangler.
Keep in mind, though, that you can’t stop people from creating wikis, mailing lists, third-party books, forums, or anything else. You cannot control what people say about your products, and it’s possible that the “unauthorized” information will reach a bigger audience than the Official Documentation(tm). You can attempt to channel these energies into productive information, but our new information age is the Age of Uncontrolled Information.
Furthermore, the fact that people are turning to Google to find information says something deeply unflattering about product documentation, online help, and other user assistance. Why is a Google search more compelling than looking in the help?
TOC: Tim O’Reilly/Publishing 2.0
What do killer Internet applications have in common?
- Information businesses (publishers??)
- Software as a service
- Internet as platform
- Harnessing collective intelligence
Web 2.0: harness network effects to get better the more people use them.
- Google: every time someone makes a web link, they contribute
- eBay: critical mass of buyers and sellers hard for others to enter
- amazon: 10M user reviews
- craigslist: self-service classified ads, users do all the work
- YouTube: viral distribution, user creation, user curation
Each of these companies is building a database whose values grows in proportion to the number of participants — a network-effective-driven data lock-in. (gulp)
Law of conversation of attractive profits
- When attractive profits disappear at one stage the opportunity will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.
- PCs used to be expensive. Software became expensive. Free precursor to rediscovery of value in some other form.
And thus, if digital content is becoming cheap, what’s next? What’s adjacent?
For publishers, the question is: where is value migrating to?
Asymmetric competition
- craigslist has 18 employees, #7 site on the web (2005 numbers)
- All others in top 10 have thousands of employees.
Curating user-generated content
- The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. — Edwin Schlossberg
- The skill of programming is to create a context in which other people can share.
Collaborative authoring
- Collaboration works best for modular structure
- instructables.com
What job does a book do? What is a book’s competition?
- Harry Potter’s competitor is World of Warcraft
- Encyclopedia Britannica — Wikipedia — Google
- Books compete with information available online
- Teaching/reference/edutainment
Search is most important benefit of content being online
“Piracy is progressive taxation”
- Benefits the books at the bottom that would be lost
- How to balance/manage a progressive taxation system
- Gain more sales on the bottom end
DRM: “Like taking cat to a vet” (hold them very carefully and loosely!)
More options = happier users
TOC: Chris Anderson/Free: The economics of giving stuff away
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief, Wired Magazine
The cost of things tend to fall to zero over time.
You can build business around giving things away:
- Free samples
- Skype, YouTube, free unlimited storage on Yahoo
- Ad-supported media..product is free, make it back on ads
- Free ice cream samples
- Give away razor, sell blades
- Gift economy/wikipedia, craigslist: people donate expertise/time for nonmonetary — attention, reputation, expression…never before “dignified” as an economy. There is an economy, just money is not the currency.
If marginal cost of reaching the N+1 customer is approaching zero, then treat the product as free and figure out how to sell something else.
The price of a magazine like Wired is arbirary; it bears no relationship to the actual cost of the magazine. The subscription price is intended to qualify your interest. Setting the price too low “devalues the product.”
Most music is free. “Free as in speech” — DRM is going away. “Free as in beer” — bands are experimenting with giving away music to market the live performances.
Games and movies would be free if not protected. They are locked down to enforce prices. Artificial barriers tend to fall over time. Already seeing ad-supported videogames. (neopets)
The shining exception: Books! They are not asymptotically approaching free. Books make sense. They provide the optimal way to read. The physical product is better than digital product…excellent battery life, screen resolution, portable, and it even looks good on your shelf. Easy to flip through.
If “free” is “the business model of the 21st century,” how could a book be free?
(This was preceded with a disclaimer that many of these options would be “offensive” to people in the audience.)
For his next book, Anderson wants to do the following:
- Audiobook will be free with book (mp3) (free coupon in real book)
- Will participate in book search, include Google
- Considering an e-book locked to a specific reader for free
- Unlocked e-book with advertising inserted
- Book online with ads in the margins
- As many sample chapters as publisher will accept
How could a physical book be free?
- Sponsored book
- Consultants give away books
- Book with ads
- Free rebate
- Free to influentials/reviewers
- Libraries have always had free books
Why do it?
- Free book is marketing for the non-free thing
- Book is marketing vehicle for celebrity
- Can’t give away time
- If free version is inferior, you give it away to market the better product
- Use “free” to maximize reach to new influentials
Why aren’t more people doing free content?
- Most people are not represented by a speaker’s bureau and can’t monetize fame
- Online sample is not a compelling example of book (maybe for cookbook, probably not for novel)
- No natural advertiser
- Publisher opposition — publishers not in business of selling celebrity
- Annoys the retailers
- Fear and timidity/fear of cannibalization
The most critical point: The interests of the author and the publisher are critically misaligned. Publishers doesn’t benefit from speaking fees of consulting fees, only from book sales.
Sounds like an argument for self-publishing to me.
Tools of Change for Publishing/Norwegian Monks!
As part of a brief history of publishing in the opening keynote, I’ve already seen a few friends:
- The Norwegian Monks video — Technical support for books
- A reference to Vannevar Bush’s “As We Might Think” article from 1945
According to Tim O’Reilly, Microsoft Encarta “fatally wounded” the Encyclopedia Britannia because of “asymmetric competition.”
A series of short, related keynotes to kick off the conference. I like this approach; in a nontechnical, high-level keynote, it can be difficult to fill a 60- or 90-minute slot.
Brian Murray, HarperCollins, Retooling HarperCollins for the Future
Consumer publishing *was* straightforward. All promotion wasdesigned to drive traffic to a retailer.
In 2005, “the earth moved.” There were search wars, community sites, user-generated content, Web 2.0. Newspapers and magazines responded with premium, branded sites online based on advertising or subscription models.
Book publishers are confused. Search engines treat digitized book content like “free” content. Rights and permissions are unclear. Books are not online — except illegally! Book archives are not digitized.
Before 2004, “book search” took place in a book store.
What is the role of the publisher in a digital world?
What is the right digital strategy?
What are the right capabilities?
“Search” provides new opportunities for publishers.
Publishers must transition from paper to digital.
How can publishers create value and not destroy it?
Some statistics:
- 65M in the U.S. read more than 6 books a year.
- 10M read more than 50 books a year. [ed.: waves]
- Younger consumers read less; they spend more time online
Search is used more often than email.
HarperCollins decided to focus on connecting with customers, rather than e-commerce. Amazon and others already do e-commerce. They focused on the idea of a “digital warehouse” that is analogous to the existing physical warehouse. They want to:
- promote and market to the digital consumer.
- use digitized books to create a new publishing/distribution chain
- protect author’s copyright
- “replicate in digital world what we do in physical world”
- got publicity, strong public response
- no single vendor who could deliver turnkey
Improvements from digital production and workflow could fund some or all of the digital warehouse investment. Projects that were low priority “IT and production” projects become high priority. Savings were realized in typesetting/design costs, digital workflow, and digital asset management.
The digital warehouse now has 12,000 titles. (Looks as though they were scanned, which doesn’t meet *my* definition of “digital content.”)
At this point in the presentation, we began to hear a lot about “control.” Control of content, controlling distribution, and so on.
HarperCollins does not want others to replicate their 9-billion page archive in multiple locations. They want others to link into their digital warehouse. But if storage is cheap and getting cheaper, what’s in it for, say, Google?
Strategic issues for book publishers
- Should publishers digitize, organize, and own the exclusive digital copy of their book content?
- Should publisher control the consumer experience on the web?
- If the cost of 1 and 2 is zero, should every publisher do them both? would they?
- How to make money
The focus on controlling content was interesting and perhaps not unexpected. The business case based on savings in digital production was also interesting.
Why XML and structured authoring is a tough transition
Found on technicalwriter’s blog:
There are several applications that incorporate features for DITA use, such as XMetal and Altova Authentic, but how much value do they provide? (Looking over the online documentation for XMetal, you will see some pretty shaky formatting and copyfitting.)
There may well be formatting and copyfitting issues. Wouldn’t surprise me at all. But talk about missing the forest for the trees!
DITA/XML/structured authoring are important because they improve how information is stored. To question their value because somebody produced documentation using them that doesn’t look so great…let’s try an analogy:
Last week, I went to a restaurant and the food was terrible. I looked in the kitchen and saw Calphalon pots and pans. I conclude that you should not buy Calphalon because the food they produce is terrible.
The quality of your food is determined by things such as the quality of the ingredients and the skill of the chef. The pan you choose does contribute — it helps to use the right size and a high-quality pan, but to dismiss DITA because one example doesn’t look quite right is pretty much like dismissing Calphalon because somebody once cooked something that didn’t taste very good in it.
PS I like Calphalon. And I have produced my share of problematic entrees.
PPS DITA is not right for everybody.
Neil Perlin starts blogging
Hyper/Word Services now has a blog, which Neil Perlin (the principal) describes as “low-gibberish overviews of online help technologies and methodologies.” The world could use some of that.
But more importantly, will Neil use his blog as a venue for updates to his Guide to BBQ Restaurants?? The world is waiting.
chutzpah
Look in the dictionary, see a reference to MadCap Software. Their latest:
MadCap Blaze is the heir apparent to Adobe FrameMaker.
I haven’t seen Blaze, and as far as I know, it is not yet available in beta. Therefore, this claim seems just a tiny bit premature.
Also, Blaze is going to have tight integration with XML Paper Specification, otherwise known as “PDF-Killer.”
I blogged about XPS early on, when it was code-named “Metro.” I’m very skeptical about XPS; dislodging PDF will take a huge effort. I’m puzzled by MadCap’s focus on XPS.
Writing better XSL
Jeni Tennison has a new blog. Her latest post has tips on when to use template matching, named templates, and for-each statements.
In my experience, most people who are new to XSL overuse for-each loops, because they most closely resemble familiar programming constructs.
