The economics of information
The slides from my tekom/tcworld session on the economics of information are below.
The slides from my tekom/tcworld session on the economics of information are below.
In my junk mail, the capital letters were screaming in bright red: WE’RE NOT ARTISANS.
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?”
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.
Content strategy is usually thought of in the context of web development. But today’s software is increasingly information-rich. Software is a content vector, and we need to manage the life cycle of that content. This webcast from guest speaker Ray Gallon adapts content life cycle management principles, taken from web-oriented content strategy, to software development cycles. Some examples from real experiences illustrate this adaptation.
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.
This morning, I was among the many who received an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. He was responding to criticisms that Netflix “lacked respect and humility in the way [the company] announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes.”
Out of the box, the DITA Open Toolkit (OT) looks like it’s localization-ready. It handles the XML attribute xml:lang. It contains strings for more than 50 localizations. So it would seem that all you have to do is specify the language in your DITA files and maps and you’re good to go…or are you? In this webcast, I’ll discuss some of the issues Scriptorium has encountered while generating localized output from the DITA Open Toolkit—and how we solved them.
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.
In addition to mixed column and copyfitting, the shift from desktop publishing to structured authoring may result in the demise of the traditional index.