I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

I’m giving a virtual presentation to the STC-Phoenix chapter tomorrow at 6:15 pm Arizona Time (which right now is the same as PST). The topic of my virtual presentation is “Combining Social Media with Help Authoring.” See more details here. It costs $10 and should last about an hour. Even though it’s coordinated by STC Phoenix, anyone interested can sign up.

Download MP3 (right-click, select Save As)
Duration: 43 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Alan Porter, vice president of Operations at WebWorks, about the Web 2.0 technologies they’re using to reach out to their customer base. In addition to using blogs, wikis, and social networks to connect with customers, WebWorks also uses wikis to facilitate communication and collaboration within their company.

Alan says they consider themselves a “wiki-driven company” because the wiki drives the way they do business. WebWorks has an internal wiki (which replaced their old intranet), a projects wiki (used to communicate with their customers on project work), an external wiki for their help center (where customers can interact directly with developers and support), and a wiki for organizing their upcoming user conference.

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I wrote a WordPress Quick Start Guide in wiki format and posted it on the WordPress Codex. Check it out here: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Quick_Start_Guide.

This guide gives you a quick introduction to the most important tasks and concepts in WordPress. It divides these tasks and concepts into five sections, outlined below: Read the rest of this entry »

I updated the date and time for the WordPress course. Instead of this Saturday, I’ve moved it to next Wednesday evening. Here are the updated details:

Date: Wednesday, April 30
Time: 7:30 p.m. CST
Location: Web
Cost: $99
Course Size: Limited to 15 participants

I hope this can better accommodate all of you who emailed me to say that you have previous engagements this Saturday. If not, I’m sure I’ll do some more training in the future.

For more details about what the training will cover and how to sign up, see WordPress for Beginners Course.

I’m giving a training course on WordPress this Wednesday. If you’ve been thinking about getting a blog or switching from Blogger to WordPress, this course will help you get up and running with WordPress in a quick, efficient way. The short details are below.

Date: Wednesday, April 30
Time: 7:30 - 9:30 p.m. CST
Location: Web
Cost: $99
Course Size: Limited to 15 participants

For the full course description, see WordPress for Beginners Course.

Even though I’m an advocate of blogging and think it’s critical to tech comm, I’ve always been assigned technical documentation projects for internally used, confidential, or classified software. Documenting products promoted on the web has never been an option for me.

However, I’m convinced that even internal software, which never sees the light of WWW, still needs a blog as much or more than products sold online. Even so, numerous corporate restrictions, standards, and culture will present seemingly insurmountable barriers to blogs.

I can think of six major ways product blogs can benefit users and project teams. Product blogs can

• Provide a venue for product announcements
• Allow users to submit product bugs
• Allow users to submit feature requests
• Provide a roadmap preview for the product
• Enable a point of connection between users and project teams
• Provide a way to teach advanced tips to users

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The Read/Write web has a fascinating post about the amount of time people spend in Web 2.0 activities. Here’s a graph from their post that sums it up.

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I’m trying to gather as many examples as possible about how companies are engaging in web 2.0 activities. Do you know any companies that are using blogs, wikis, social networks, forums, podcasts/videocasts, or interactive online help? If so, let me know by either adding a comment below or by contacting me. (It doesn’t have to be restricted to tech comm examples.)

In May I’m giving a virtual presentation to STC-Phoenix and I hope to use some of this info to liven the presentation up. In case you’re interested, my presentation summary is below.

Combining Social Media with Help Authoring

The web landscape has changed considerably in the last several years. Users are no longer passive consumers of information (web 1.0), but instead are active contributors of content (web 2.0). They expect to interact and share information, not only with other users, but with project teams and companies.

Although interactive technologies have flourished on the web, much of the help authoring community remains in the one-way communication model. We treat our users as if they have little or nothing to contribute back.

In this virtual meeting, I’ll discuss six of the most compelling technologies that enable users to become contributors: blogs, wikis, social networks, forums, podcasts/videocasts, and interactive online help. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of each medium, and how technical writers can use these technologies to better connect with users.

Download MP3 (right-click, select Save Target As)
Duration: 20 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Scott Abel about social networking, in particular The Content Wrangler community he started at TheContentWrangler.ning.com. Scott talks about this new social network specifically for technical communicators. But he also explains the value of social networks for your help deliverables. Social networks can help users connect with one another and also help technical communicators better understand their users.

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The following is a guest post by Ben Minson, one of my technical writing colleagues. Ben’s blog, which also focuses on technical communication, is called Gryphon Mountain Journals. Check it out. (You can subscribe to his RSS feed here.)

My wife recently bought a book for me entitled Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers. Blogging has been around for about ten years now, but one blogger said in this book that he thinks blogging is still in its infancy and has a lot of potential. If you’re thinking about blogging, that’s good news.

One of the questions that the interviewer, Michael Banks, typically asked each blogger is what advice he or she had for other bloggers or for people thinking about starting. With the range of advice you’d think could come from 30 people, so far there are three main themes or pieces of advice that characterize the answers.

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Tonight I attended a WordCamp Utah planning meeting at Applebees with a group of blogging enthusiasts.

Joseph Scott, one of the WordPress developers employed by Automattic, organized the event and is taking charge of the upcoming Wordcamp, which looks like it will be in September to avoid competition with other conferences (Blog World, Open Source, and New Media Expo).

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One of my readers sent me a link to today’s New York Times article on blogging titled “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Til They Drop.”

I find it touching that someone would think of me while reading the article. Actually, I read a sneak peak of the article in yesterday’s Blog Herald. It made me think hard about how much I’ve been posting lately.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:
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“Technical Communicator” is a term that, as much as I dislike, can be extremely important for triggering Google Alerts set up by the Society for Technical Communication’s Intercom editorial staff.

How do I know this? Well, a couple of months ago I saw a summary of my blog post on video cameras and SMEs mentioned in the STC Intercom’s Cut & Paste section (shown below).

(Direct link to Intercom article above.)

My original blog post wasn’t really that interesting and, after discovering Jing, I would in no way use a video camera in place of Jing.

But that’s no my point here. My point is, how did the Intercom editors at the Society for Technical Communication come across my blog? Are they regular readers? (Of course, everyone should be.) I shrugged my shoulders and didn’t think more of it.

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Jane is hosting a blog carnival with the theme “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This is a quote from a Dickens novel that I should have read sometime in my life but haven’t. The way the carnival works, everyone writes a post related to this announced theme, publishes it on their blog, and then adds a link to it on her original post.

Given that Jane, who also doubles as my wife in a fictional blog world in which my name is Dick, is somewhat of an outspoken, call-it-what-it-is, take-no-prisoners wife, my topic to apply the Dickens best/worst lens is Cat Stevens’ “Hard Headed Woman.” For those unfamiliar with the song, be sure to play it below.

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I just ran across the most comprehensive list of Twitter resources and other Twitter advice here: Twitter Tools, Tweaks, and Theories, by John Unger. So far I’m only using Twhirl and the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin, as well as TwitterBerry for my BlackBerry. But Unger exposes me to about two dozen more Twitter tools.

Unger also lists some of his favorite uses for Twitter:

Note to Self: Twitter has become the quickest and easiest way to keep track of stray thoughts I want to hold on to.

Breaking news: I’m finding it more difficult to stay on top of my RSS feeds these days. But a lot of the people I follow in Twitter drop links to the most interesting stories of the day. Also, some of the blogs that generate way to much content to allow into my RSS can be found on Twitter, allowing me to easily scan the headlines and choose whether to follow links (@BoingBoing for example).

Communication: I’ve never liked IM or SMS and I don’t think I ever will. But the @reply and DM (direct message) features in Twitter work really well for me. Because I’ve got a Twitter client open all day, I can send quick messages to most of my contacts without feeling as interrupted or getting dragged into a long back and forth over IM. A direct message on Twitter is WAY more likely to get my immediate attention than email or phone right now… especially because by nature, it’s required to be short and to the point.

Advice, Support, Polling, Questions: More and more, I see people using Twitter as a way to fire off a quick question and get answers back from people in their network. This is way more useful than I would have expected at first. Everything from tech support, research questions, vetting new ideas, where to eat in a new town and so on. When I want a quick answer, sending out a twitter question is a great way to get one.

You can follow me on Twitter here. Basically, Twitter is like a global, mobile IM client with all your friends added. You don’t have to use it to describe the mundane activities you’re doing all day. You can use it like IM.

As I was upgrading to WordPress 2.5 today, I discovered a really creepy widget that I just had to add to my blog.

The Live Traffic Feed Widget from Feedjit allows you to see details about who’s visiting your blog in real-time. If you look in the right sidebar of my blog (lower-right), you’ll see everyone who is reading my blog at the current moment — both what they’re reading and where they’re from.

This kind of information creeps me out a bit, knowing that a handful of strangers are silently looking in my mental windows. For example, as I’m writing this, people in Johor and Ankara (are those places on earth?) are reading posts I wrote months ago. And some guy from Jersey is reading a post on printable to-do lists that’s more than a year old.

Who are these people? Is the content I wrote weeks/months/years ago still valid? Does it have a bunch of typos and outdated perspectives?

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Just a few days after someone begins blogging seriously, he or she starts hungering after subscribers and comments. We want readership, we want lots of people visiting our site, reading our posts, subscribing to our feed, and regularly leaving comments. This, my friend Clyde says, is the “payoff” of blogging.

Although I try to write for a higher purpose outside of trying to get more readers and comments, I must admit that the interactivity of blogging is what makes it fun. To this end, I offer ten tips for increasing your readership:
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April 20, 2008 Update: If you’re interested in the WordPress training, see the course announcement about the 2-hour session I’m giving on April 26.

I’m planning to offer some WordPress training, and I’d like to know if you’re interested. By WordPress I mean the self-hosted WordPress blogs that you create with WordPress software from Wordpress.org, not the freely hosted blogs at WordPress.com.

WordPress is software that can be so easy a first-grader can publish posts (see Avery’s blog here). At the opposite end, you can be a PHP enthusiast, such as Alex King, creating plugins that extend WordPress’s functionality. Or a theme designer creating cool-looking themes. Or you can sidestep the blogging features altogether and just use WordPress as a mini content management system or website, such as what Scott Deloach did with Clickstart. (By the way, did you also know that the New York Times and Business Week were both created by WordPress?)

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Ning (”peace” in Chinese) is a social network application that allows groups to communicate and connect with each other in seamless, convenient ways.

Scott Abel just recently started a new social network community called The Content Wrangler Community. Within a couple of weeks, it already attracted 824 868 members. This community on Ning is quickly becoming the social network community for technical writers and others in our field.

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The 2008 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) festival, currently underway in Austin, Texas, until March 16, is one of the most popular, high-energy tech conferences of the year.

This Interactive conference “celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies.” Basically, everyone who is doing anything cool on the Internet ends up speaking there. 37 Signals, Facebook, Wired — they’re all there.

Many of the presentations are interactive panel discussions. Everyone twitters and blogs and texts during the presentations, etc. It’s like a gathering of the Internet geeks and hackers and designers and content creators.

Important: Because almost every session is recorded and distributed practically the same day, you can start attending sessions yourselves. Here’s a list of all the feeds available.

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