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Author: Sarah O'Keefe

Industry insights

I am not a Pod Person

Confession time: I don’t like podcasts.

And I think I know why.

I am a voracious reader. And by voracious, I mean that I often cook with a stirring spoon in one hand and a book in the other. I go through at least a dozen books a months (booksfree is my friend).

So why don’t I like podcasts?

  1. They’re inconvenient. I don’t have a lot of interrupted listening time, other than at the gym. And frankly, there’s a bizarre cognitive dissonance listening to Tom Johnson interview Bogo Vatovec while I’m lifting weights. I tried listening to a crafting podcast, but that was worse — my brain can’t handle auditory input describing crocheting techniques while simultaneously operating an elliptical machine. So I went back to Dr. Phil on the gym TV. It may rot my brain, but at least it doesn’t hurt.
  2. They’re inefficient. I can listen to a 30-minute podcast, or I can skim the equivalent text in 90 seconds.

I’ve been thinking about what would make a podcast more appealing to me, and realized that it’s not really the medium I object to, it’s my inability to control the delivery.

I’ll become a podcasting proponent when I perceive these properties:

  1. Better navigation. Podcasts, like other content, need to be divided into logical chunks. These chunks should be accessible via a table of contents and an index.
  2. Ability to skim. Podcasts need to provide the audio equivalent of flipping pages in a book or scrolling through a document while only reading the headings.

Depending on the software you use to consume podcasts, you may already have some of the features. For instance, a colleague told me that he listened to my recent DITA webinar at five times the normal speed:

I wanted to let you know about something in particular. I listened to it at 5x fast fwd in Windows Media Player while drinking a coke. My heart is still racing. You should try it. :o)

Do you enjoy podcasts? Do you have any special techniques for managing them efficiently?

Sarah O'Keefe
February 27, 2009
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Content management

WMF…that’ll shut ’em up

Which graphics formats should you use in your documentation? For print, the traditional advice is EPS for line drawings and TIFF for screen captures and photographs. That’s still good advice. These days, you might choose PDF and PNG for the same purposes. There are caveats for each of these formats, but in general, these are excellent choices.

Of course, everybody knows to stay away from WMF, the Windows Metafile Format. WMF doesn’t handle gradients, can’t have more than 256 colors, and refuses to play nice with anything other than Windows.

Think you’re too good to hang out with WMF? For your print and online documentation, perhaps. But it may be a great choice to give to your company’s PowerPoint users.

Are you familiar with this scenario? PowerPoint User saw some graphics in your documentation and thought they would work for some sales presentations. The screen captures are easy; you just give PowerPoint User PNGs or BMPs or whatever. It’s the line drawings that are the problem. PowerPoint User doesn’t have Illustrator and has never heard of EPS. PowerPoint User says, “Can you give me a copy of those pictures in a format that I can use in PowerPoint? Oh, and can make that box purple and change that font for me first? And move that line just a little bit? And make that line thicker? And remove that entire right side of the picture and split it into two pictures?”

You want PowerPoint User to reuse the graphics; you’re all about reuse. But you have dealt with PowerPoint User before, and you know you will never get your real job done if you get pulled into the sucking vortex of PowerPoint User’s endless requests.

The secret is to give PowerPoint User the graphics in a format that can be edited from within PowerPoint (or Word): WMF. Here’s the drill that will make you a hero:

  1. Save your graphics as WMF.
  2. Place each WMF on a separate page in a PowerPoint or Word file.
  3. Tell PowerPoint User to double-click on a graphic to make it editable.(If you think your PowerPoint User is really dumb, you can double-click the graphic and respond to the dialog box asking if you want to make the drawing editable yourself before saving the file, but nobody is that dumb.)

WMF. It will make PowerPoint User go away…happy!

Sarah O'Keefe
February 20, 2009
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DITA

Publishing DITA without the DITA Open Toolkit: A Trend or a Temporary Detour?

I estimate that about 80 percent of our consulting work is XML implementation. And about 80 percent of our XML implementation work is based on DITA. So we spend a lot of time with DITA and the DITA Open Toolkit.

I’m starting to wonder, though, whether the adoption rate of DITA and the DITA Open Toolkit is going to diverge.

For DITA, what we hear most often is that it’s “good enough.” DITA may not be a perfect fit for a customer’s content, but our customer doesn’t see a compelling reason to build the perfect structure. In other words, they are willing to compromise on document structure. DITA structure, even without specialization, offers a reasonable topic-based solution.

But for output, the requirements tend to be much more exacting. Customers want any output to match their established look and feel requirements precisely.

Widespread adoption of DITA leads to a a sort of herd effect with safety in numbers. Not so for the Open Toolkit — output requirements vary widely and people are reluctant to contribute back to the Open Toolkit, perhaps because look and feel is considered proprietary.

The pattern we’re seeing is that customers adopt the Open Toolkit when:

  • They intend to deploy onto multiple servers, and open source avoids licensing headaches.
  • The Open Toolkit provides a useful starting point for their output format.

Customers tend to adopt non-Open Toolkit solutions when:

  • They need attractive PDF. Getting this result from the Open Toolkit isn’t quite impossible, but it’s hard. There are other options that are faster, cheaper, and easier.
  • They need a format that the Open Toolkit doesn’t provide. The most common requirement here is web-based help. Getting from the XHTML output in the Open Toolkit over to a sophisticated tri-pane help system with table of contents, index, and search….well, let’s just say that it keeps me gainfully employed. AIR is another platform that we need to support.

The software vendors seem to be encouraging this trend. In part, I think they would like to find some way to get lock-in on DITA content. Consider the following:

  • Adobe FrameMaker can output lovely PDF from DITA content through FrameMaker (no Open Toolkit). You can also use the Open Toolkit to generate formats such as HTML.
  • ePublisher Pro uses the Open Toolkit under the covers, but provides a GUI that attempts to hide the complexities.
  • MadCap’s software will support DITA (initially) by importing DITA content and letting you publish through MadCap’s existing publishing engine.
  • Several other vendors provide support for publishing DITA, but do not use the Open Toolkit at all.

The strategy of supporting DITA structure through a proprietary publishing engine actually makes a lot of sense to me. From a customer point of view, you can:

  • Set up an XML-based authoring workflow
  • Manage XML content

It’s not until you’re ready to publish that you move into a proprietary environment.

To me, the interesting question is this: Will the use of proprietary publishing engines be a temporary phenomenon, or will the Open Toolkit eventually displace them in the same way that DITA is displacing custom XML structure?

Sarah O'Keefe
December 1, 2008
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DITA

The hidden costs of DITA

Originally published in STC Intercom, April 2008

DITA is a free, pre-made XML document structure. That statement can lead to a few erroneous assumptions: if it’s free, then it will cut down on costs, and if it’s pre-made, it will cut down on labor. There are several things to consider when choosing a DITA solution. Does your staff have the skills to author in a DITA environment? Will additional training be required? Does DITA even match your content model, and if it doesn’t, is it worth the effort to change?

Sarah’s conclusion? “DITA may be free, but it’s not cheap.”

Sarah O'Keefe
April 19, 2008
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DITA DITA XML—authors Structured content

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.

Sarah O'Keefe
November 19, 2007
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Change management Structured content

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?

Sarah O'Keefe
September 5, 2007
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Industry insights

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

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

Sarah O'Keefe
June 19, 2007
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Industry insights

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.

Sarah O'Keefe
June 19, 2007
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