The convergence of information science and tech comm
Until I started working at Scriptorium, my educational and work background was in information and library science.
Tag: web 2.0
Joining Sally Field’s “like me” revolution
In 1985, a few eyebrows were raised (and many eyes rolled) when Sally Field gave her “You like me!” Academy Award acceptance speech.
The PDF roadblock
Getting attractive PDF output out of XML is a serious technical challenge. But in some organizations, the PDF requirement is being used to prevent to unwanted workflow changes.
Social media: marketing in every message
Social media has transformed the work of technical communicators, but we’re far from alone in feeling its impact:
Balancing user advocacy and corporate responsibilities
Anne Gentle, in the post Writing Engaging Technical Documentation, says this:
I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.”
Conferences versus social media
The information you can get from a conference presentation is usually available online—in blogs, webcasts, forums, and/or white papers. So why should you invest the time and the money to attend an event in person? In the end, there’s something very powerful about eating and drinking with a group of people. (And no, alcohol is not required, although it doesn’t hurt. Until the next day, when it hurts a lot.)
The value of conferences, which is not (yet) replicated online is in the “hallway track”—the discussions that happen between the formal sessions:
“[B]eing able to establish a one-to-one personal connection with other professionals in your field is critical to being a success.” (Dave Taylor in The Critical Business Value of Attending Conferences)
“I’ve found that time and again, I’ll hear speakers or audience members or participate in conversations and lie awake that night jam-packed with new ideas (some that don’t even correspond remotely to the concepts discussed that day). Conferences are a brainstorming paradise and a terrific opportunity for new ideas to come bubbling to the surface.” (Rand Fishkin, The Secret Value of Attending Conferences)
Scriptorium has quite a few social media “features”:
- This blog, started in 2005
- Webcasts, 2006 (recordings available for recent events)
- Forums, this week (currently in the “awkward silence” phase. Help us out by posting, please!)
But there’s something missing. I’ve attended and presented quite a few webcasts, and I can tell you that it’s actually far more difficult to deliver a compelling webcast than a compelling conference presentation. As the presenter, you lose the ability to gauge your audience’s body language. As an attendee, you have the temptation of your email and other distractions. The audio coming through your computer or phone is somehow not real—it’s easy to forget that there’s an actual person on the other end giving the presentation online. (There’s also the problem that many webcasts are sales pitches rather than useful presentations, but let’s leave that for another time.)
In my experience, it’s much easier to sustain online friendships with people that I have met in real life. Even a brief meeting at a conference means that I will remember a person as “that red-haired woman with the funky scarf” rather than as an email ID or Twitter handle. So, I think it’s important to go to conferences, meet lots of people, and then sustain those new professional relationships via social media.
In other words, conferences and social media complement each other. Over time, I think we’ll see them merge until a new interaction model. For example, we are already seeing Twitter as a real-time feedback engine at conference events. (Here’s an excellent discussion of how presenters should handle this.) Joe Welinske’s WritersUA is experimenting with a community site tied to the conference.
What are your thoughts? How important are conferences to your career?
Talk amongst yourselves…introducing forums.scriptorium.com
Our web site now has forums for discussions of technical communication issues. We want to give you, our readers, a venue where you can set your own agenda instead of just responding to our blog posts.
Given Scriptorium’s particular interests, I expect to see a lot of emphasis on publishing automation and XML. But frankly, we don’t know exactly what might happen. Communities often develop in unexpected ways. It will be up to you—and us—to figure out what direction these forums go.
(We have an internal pool on how long before Godwin’s law is applied.)
The forums are available in our main site navigation. There are also RSS feeds so you can subscribe to a topic or category of interest. Or, if you prefer, you can get email notifications for new forum posts.
And how do we feel about this launch? We’re…perfectly calm.
Please join the conversation.
Are you ready for mobile content?
A report from Morgan Stanley states that mobile Internet use will be twice that of desktop Internet and that the iPhone/smartphone “may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen.” That “disruption” is already affecting the methods for distributing technical content.
With users having Internet access at their fingertips anywhere they go, Internet searches will continue to drive how people find product information. Desktop Internet use has greatly reshaped how technical communicators distribute information, and having twice as many people using mobile Internet will only push us toward more online delivery—and in formats (some yet to be developed, I’d guess) that are compatible with smaller smartphone screens.
The growing number of people with mobile Internet access underscores the importance of high Internet search rankings and a social media strategy for your information. If you haven’t already investigated optimizing your content for search engines and integrating social media as part of your development and distribution efforts, it’s probably wise to do that sooner rather than later. Also, have you looked at how your web site is displayed on a smartphone?
If you don’t consider the impact of the mobile Internet, your documentation may be relegated to the Island of Misfit Manuals, where change pages and manuals in three-ring binders spend their days yellowing away.
Angst and authority
Clay Shirky has a fascinating post on the concept of algorithmic authority; the idea that large systems, such as Google PageRank or Wikipedia have authority (that is, credibility) because of the way that the system works. In other words, a page that is returned first in a Google search is assumed by the searcher to be more credible because it is ranked first.
That made me think about authority in technical content.
As an in-house technical writer, your words have authority and your content carries the corporate logo. But although this should theoretically increase your credibility, it seems that the reverse is true. Consider, for instance, the following hypothetical book titles:
- XYZ User’s Guide—This document, produced by the makers of XYZ, is shipped in the product box (or downloaded as a PDF with the software)
- XYZ Classroom in a Book—This document is available in bookstores and is produced by XYZ Press
- XYZ: The Complete Reference*—This document is available in bookstores and is produced by a third-party publisher
Which of these books would you turn to for help? What are your expectations of each document?
I believe that credibility and thus authority increases with distance from the product’s maker. In other words, the third-party book has more authority than either of the other two. Credibility is compromised by close association with the organization that makes the product.
When we apply this concept to information on the web, the implications are troubling for professional content creators who work inside corporations. If corporate authorship decreases authority, we get this result:
online help < user forums on corporate site < user forums on third-party site
Will people looking for user assistance gravitate toward independent third-party sites? What does that mean for in-house authors? How can you increase your credibility as a corporate technical communicator?
* Feel free to substitute your favorite book series title: XYZ for Dummies, XYZ: The Missing Manual, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to XYZ, XYZ Annoyances, …. I should probably also mention that I have written both a Dummies book and a Complete Reference.
Coping with webcast participation
Many thanks to all of the people who attended yesterday’s webcast on coping with user-generated content.
We recorded the webcast, and it is now available:
In a nod to the topic itself—and in an effort to make the event more interesting, I solicited quite a bit of audience participation. As a result, I owe the webcast participants a significant number of links and other resources.
Question: What blogs do you read?
Answer: Lots.
Better answer: Here is a link to my Google Reader subscriptions in the Publishing category. Many thanks to the attendee who recommended sharing them this way. (If you’d like full credit by name, send me email or put a note in the comments; I don’t want to do that without permission.) I’ve also listed the blogs at the bottom of this post.
In addition to the publishing blogs, I specifically mentioned Punk Rock HR, Dooce, and Mark Logic CEO blog. (Don’t read the first two if you are offended by a word that starts with F.)
Question: Are there any guides to legal issues in social media, such as libel?
Answer: I found a few interesting resources, but not a definitive guide.
Libel and Social Media (blog post)
IBM Social Computing Guidelines (these have been in the news as a template for a well-crafted policy)
