Our 2012 event schedule is starting to come together. Our guest speaker lineup includes Char James-Tanny, Peter Lubbers, and Sarah Maddox, with more to be announced.
This year, we are changing our conference schedule somewhat. I am looking forward to participating in Intelligent Content for the first time, and Simon is going around the world for tcworld India.
Lately, our webcasts are getting great participation. The December event had 100 people in attendance (the registered number was even higher), and the numbers for the next few months are strong, as well. Previous webcasts had attendance of A Lot Less than 100. What changed? The webcasts are now free. (Missing an event? Check our archives.)
We’re going in a similar direction with white papers. We charge for some content, but we also offer a ton of free information.
The idea is that free (and high-quality) information raises our profile and therefore later brings in new projects. I’m not so sure, though, that we have any evidence that supports this theory yet.
So, I thought I’d ask my readers. Do you evaluate potential vendors based on offerings such as webcasts and white papers? Are there other, more important factors?
PS Upcoming events, including several DITA webcasts, are listed on our events page.
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.
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.)
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)
In the past few days, STC has been sending out acceptance notices for presentations at next May’s STC Summit. There’s been a small flurry of announcements, mostly on Twitter. (I live in North Carolina where two flakes are a flurry. 10 flakes are a school-closing, bread-and-milk-buying emergency.)
For instance, we have this on Friday, November 20:
Tweets related to STC acceptances
Side note: I’ll be presenting on managing in an XML environment.
In the pre-Twitter Era, acceptances were sent by mail, and then conference organizers could post the full program more or less at their convenience. But now, the leaks start almost immediately.
This may not be a bad thing. The happy tweets raise awareness of the event. For an organizer, however, it means that notifications need to be carefully synchronized or perhaps staggered on a formal schedule (SxSW does this quite well; they announce program decisions in batches).
It seems like another case where unofficial community content is eroding the ability of the content owner to control the messaging. Coincidentally (!), that’s the topic of a webcast I’m doing on December 8.
Strategies for coping with user-generated content
Tuesday, December 8, 11 a.m. Eastern time
We are offering this webcast for free; you just need to register.
This is a new presentation that I first delivered at LavaCon in New Orleans this year.
October 22nd, join Simon Bate for a session on delivering multiple versions of a help set without making multiple copies of the help:
We needed to generate a help set from DITA sources that applied to multiple products. However, serious space constraints prevent us from using standard DITA conditional processing to create multiple, product-specific versions of the help; there was only room for one copy of the help. Our solution was to create a single help set in which select content would be displayed when the help was opened.In this webcast, we’ll show you how we used the DITA Open Toolkit to create a help set with dynamic text display. The webcast introduces some minor DITA Open Toolkit modifications and several client-side JavaScript techniques that you can use to implement dynamic text display in HTML files. Minimal programming skills necessary.
Register for dynamic text display webcast
I will be visiting New Orleans for LavaCon. This event, organized by Jack Molisani, is always a highlight of the conference year. I will be offering sessions on XML and on user-generated content. You can see the complete program here. In addition to my sessions, I will be bringing along a limited number of copies of our newest publication, The Compass. Find me at the event to get your free copy while supplies last. (Otherwise, you can order online Real Soon Now for $15.95.)
Register for LavaCon (note, early registration has been extended until October 12)
And last but certainly not least, we have our much-anticipated session on translation workflows. Nick Rosenthal, Managing Director, Salford Translations Ltd., will deliver a webcast on cost-effective document design for a translation workflow on November 19 at 11 a.m . Eastern time:
In this webcast, Nick Rosenthal discusses the challenges companies face when translating their content and offers some best practices to managing your localization budget effectively, including XML-based workflows and ways to integrate localized screen shots into translated user guides or help systems.
Register for the translation workflow webcast
As always, webcasts are $20. LavaCon is just a bit more. Hope to see you at all of these events.
Scriptorium and JustSystems are announcing a three-webinar series on preparing to use DITA.
The first two webinars in the series describe the age-old problem of converting legacy content into DITA. Because a great deal of unstructured content is in either Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Word, we’re dedicating one webinar to converting Unstructured FrameMaker to DITA and the other to converting Microsoft Word to DITA.
The third webinar describes various re-use strategies you can apply to your DITA content.
The dates and times for the conversion webinars are:
The date and time for the third webinar (DITA reuse strategies) will be announced toward the end of August.
All of the webinars in the series are free, but you do have to register before attending. To sign up, follow this link to the JustSystems web site:
http://na.justsystems.com/webinars.php
Register now!
Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf is delivering Beyond Documentation this Thursday, July 9th, at 11 a.m. Eastern (US) time. Ellis gave a similar presentation in Vienna, which was the basis for Tom Johnson’s post, How to Avoid Extinction as a Technical Communicator, and led to a lively discussion in the comments. Join us to see if you agree with Ellis’s point of view.
In the category of “what’s old is new again,” we have Writing to STOP from Tony Self of HyperWrite in Australia.
STOP – Sequential Thematic Organisation of Publications – was developed at Hughes Corporation in the 1960s. The purpose of STOP was to improve the speed of document production, and to allow multiple authors to work simultaneously on the same document. […]
The STOP approach still resonates in the age of online documentation, as we still have the same needs to reduce document creation times and to work collaboratively. In this session, we will look at how the STOP approach worked, and how it might be re-applied even more effectively in the 21st century.
That presentation is July 15 at 5 p.m. Eastern time. (Note the time change. Our usual 11 a.m. time slot is 1 a.m. in Melbourne, Australia. That seemed impolite to our presenter.)
Finally, Jack Molisani of Prospring and Lavacon is delivering How to Build a Business Case on August 4 at 11 a.m. Eastern time.
If you’ve ever submitted a purchase request that was not approved, chances are it lacked one or more of the vital components management looks for when allocating resources.
In this segment, Jack Molisani will present a fun and practical session identifying the components of a successful business case, how to identify what is important to management, how to maximize your chances of approval, and more.
Jack usually rewards questions with chocolate, and I’m going to be impressed if he manages that in a webinar.
Don’t miss your chance to hear from these guys. You can register through our store; recordings of previous webcasts are now available as well.
PS Our presenters are based in England, California, and Australia. Registrants could be anywhere. The sessions are yours for $20. I love the Internet.
I have several webinar-related updates to share:
Next week, the State of Structure
You probably know that Scriptorium conducted an industry survey on structured authoring earlier this year. The report, The State of Structure in Technical Communication, is available in our online store for $200.
There is a cheaper option to get the highlights. On Tuesday, June 16, at 1 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be delivering a one-hour webinar that highlights the most important findings.
Coming in July and August
Expect to see additional webinars in cooperation with our TechComm Alliance partners, Cherryleaf and HyperWrite. We are also welcoming Jack Molisani of ProSpring, who will offer excellent and candid career development advice. Watch this space for details about these upcoming events. Scriptorium consultants will also be offering additional content.
Recorded events
Two of our recent webinars are now available for download:
Each webinar lasts about one hour and is $20, either live or recorded. You can register for the Tuesday webcast and download recordings in our online store.
(Warning: The recorded webcast files are quite large.)
