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The podcasts I record for I'd Rather Be Writing cover the latest trends in technical communication. I interview tech writing luminaries around the world as well as record STC presentations and other audio content. You can subscribe to podcast specific feeds using the subscription information below.
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Podcast: The Myth of Single Sourcing
December 21st, 2009 | Posted in Podcasts 6 Comments »
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Length: 38 min.
In his controversial post, The Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt explains:
Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.
In other words, single sourcing your content across the enterprise is an idea that simply doesn’t work. I responded to the post and had a lively exchange in the comments, so I decided to interview Michael for a podcast.
In this podcast I talk with Michael about single sourcing, collaborative authoring, mashups, help authoring trends, and other topics. You can follow Michael’s blog at Mashstream.com.
(Note: We had a brief Skype issue at the start. The audio gets noticeably better at around the 5 minute mark. It’s actually a great example of the clarity that the double-ender recording technique provides instead of just using Skype to record.)
Tags: help authoring, mashups, michael hiatt, myths, single sourcing
That was an incredible interview. Thanks to Tom for conducting it, and to Michael for sharing his insights.
It’s probably fair to say that Michael thinks a lot farther outside the box than I do. He and I both see the “cloud” full of information, and we both recognize the need (and the opportunity) for synthesizing that information.
Here’s where we differ: I see all of this happening within the old “single-sourcing” paradigm. He’s saying that the old paradigm has to yield to a new paradigm. The old wineskin can’t hold this new wine.
Now that I have a better grasp of what Michael is saying, I think that he’s probably right.
Larry, thanks for taking the time to give me feedback and respond to the podcast. I think the whole term “single-sourcing” tends to be slippery and mean a lot of different things to different people.
I am also musing on what single sourcing means and its role in the future. I am disenchanted with large-scale implementations, but still see a need for topic-based articles and reuse of objects at some level. I’m still looking for it’s rightful position in structuring my own content internally yet publish externally with highest quality. I’m still looking for some kind of object-oriented base-class-with-extended objects type of approach. This is still a big question for me.
What I do believe is this (at least for today):
–web services and info is where apps and doc will be single sourced. Semantic markup will identify content and ontologies will be built to connect and deliver.
–no proprietary platforms. This means MS Word and FM files, Vasont CMS database records, or Madcap/Robohelp files for documentation. As services go to the cloud, so goes content. Programmers are using web APIs to mash functionality; writers need to use XML and semantic markup to mesh information.
–In the near future, customers aren’t coming to your book, application, or website. You need to go to them and fit into their places of congregation and virtual interaction.
Michael provides a first-rate discourse on the failed promise of single sourcing in theory and practice. Some (STC, etc.) made a cult of it but the dynamics of the marketplace moved faster.
Single sourcing can work where the content repeats, but so much material and the larger world (the marketplace, software, applications…and people) has dictated that custom content seems to trump single sourcing most times, IMHO.
(And Tom…very focused questions. Good job.)
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I wonder if you could include a transcript with your podcasts? It would help people like me who aren’t inclined to listening to podcasts. I prefer reading because it’s faster (for me), plus I have the flexibility of skimming and of going back and forth between paragraphs.
I keep thinking it would be great if all podcasts and videos could have an “interactive transcript” feature like the TED talks website. For an example, see http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_veasey_exposing_the_invisible_1.html