Techcrunch says the New York Times’ ethics policy of distance and objectivity contradicts their acceptance of David Pogue as an Apple fan boy. Journalists must maintain more distance and objectivity. This criticism reminds me of the case of Chez Pazienza, a CNN blogger fired for expressing views on his blog that contrasted with CNN’s more conservative outlook. This is perhaps a subtle danger of blogging: holding views on your personal blog that conflict with your company’s views. I wasn’t that familiar with Chez, but certainly Pogue is far too popular and engaging for the New York Times to ever consider getting rid of without a huge media backfire.

Every week our team has a team meeting. In our manager’s office, we sit around a table and talk about our projects, our concerns, and whatever else we want to talk about. Recently, during one of my colleague’s turns, he talked about his goals. Apparently he’d made some goals about video tutorials, and I can’t remember exactly what they were, just that he was reporting on them, his progress, what he needed to do to achieve some of the substeps of his goals.

Listening to him made smile, because here he was, evaluating the progress on his goals in a detailed manner, as if talking about a project he knew intimately and worked on every day, whereas I couldn’t remember any of my goals, not one. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m giving an STC webinar on blogging this Wednesday, July 29, from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. ET. Here’s the title and description:

Converting Readers from Casual Subscribers to Devoted Followers: Best Practices for Blogging

Although many people feel blogging is an activity with no best practices or rules—you publish what you want, when you want, and how you want—these same bloggers usually crave readership, comments, and visibility. They want to have successful blogs that connect with a wide audience in an influential way. Making your blog influential, however, with readers who are more than just casual subscribers but who are actual devoted followers, requires you to give consideration to some best practices for blogging. Beyond search engine optimization, readability, and format, these best practices include crafting posts with story, revealing appropriately, and connecting with users through an engaging voice.

You can register for the webinar here. Cost is $79.

Webinars differ from podcasts in interactivity. With podcasts, you listen for the length of the show and then submit any questions through e-mail or comments. But with webinars, you can ask questions at any time and receive immediate answers.

As part of the solution to STC’s financial situation, some members have talked about making Intercom an online magazine only, removing the printed version that is mailed out to thousands of members each month. Many people think the move from paper to online would be a tremendous blow to the STC, one that would significantly decrease member value towards one of STC’s most attractive assets.

Sometimes people talk about this potential move, from print to an online format, with a doom and gloom that would make you think they’re foreclosing on a house or planning a funeral for a close relative or giving up their children for adoption.

When I hear these discussions, it blows me away because I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. I admit, the look and feel of paper can provide a comfortable reading experience if you’re immersed in a 200 page novel lying on your bed on a rainy day. But the Intercom and other professional magazines or journals are not novels. With professional publications like these, the online format better matches the reading behavior of the audience. In fact, online formats provide more than a dozen advantages that print formats lack, including everything from interactivity to portability, feeds, metrics, multimedia, and more.

I’ve had some thoughts brewing all week about how people read online, not just online versus print. It’s somewhat of a collage of assertions I’m relaying here. The gist of it is that any organization or company would be crazy not to convert their paper-based magazine, journal, or newsletter into an interactive online format.

Reading Habits. When it comes to professional, job-related information, most people read on the job, during little breaks, when they’re tired of some task, or during the morning when they’re checking their e-mail and the news, or during lunch as they’re eating, or on the bus or train if they ride one. Some even read a bit in the evenings, but not as much, and rarely do they consume professional, job-related blogs on the weekends. With these reading habits, short online content that is easily accessible from a computer where most people are working better meets the reader’s needs. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a guest post on Unstoppability for my friends Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis at DMN Communications. Scott and Aaron are two technical communicators based in Toronto who have an engaging blog I regularly follow.

By the way, I rarely write guest posts. In my 3+ years of blogging, this is only the second guest post I have ever written. I hope you enjoy it.

Read my guest post on Unstoppability

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Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 14 min.

At the STC Summit, I ran into someone from Australia who follows my wife’s blog fairly regularly and had even brought gifts for her and the kids. It made me reflect on blog subscribers, and how you convert readers from being occasional readers to devoted fans.

In this podcast, Kirsty Taylor talks about what she finds appealing about Seagull Fountain (my wife’s blog) and other blogs she follows. Kirsty explains that, for her, blogs become powerful when they speak to her heart, make her reflect, and reveal authentically from the blogger’s life in an appropriate way. We also talk about transparency, authenticity, the use of pseudonyms, the portrayal of reality, and the importance of making personal connections.

Last week I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC-Suncoast chapter. I recorded the webinar using Camtasia Studio. If you have some time on your hands (for example, if you’re going on a plane ride to Atlanta and you have a few layovers), you can watch the webinar on your computer.

A few notes about the webinar. First, your computer’s resolution needs to be at least 1280px wide, because this is how I recorded it. Also, to watch it online, you need to have high bandwidth. I also made a version you can download for this very reason. Third, ideally I would break this presentation into smaller sections, tagging each section with labels in a table of contents. But that would require my whole evening, so I decided to pass on doing that.

The file is about 275 MB, which is quite large. If your bandwidth is restrictive, try downloading the zip version. After downloading and extracting the zip file, click the .html file in the folder.

Download WordPress Video in a Zip File

Watch MPEG4 WordPress Webinar Video (it has to load 10% before it starts to play)

I constantly receive questions about Google Adsense from people who just start blogging. They say things like, I want to start making some money from my blog and would like to know how to integrate Google Adsense.

For anyone with the same questions, I recommend that you read Penelope Trunk’s latest post, “Reality Check: You’re not going to make money from your blog.” She writes,

Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. It’s so unlikely that it’s a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. It’s not.

Given the time that blogging requires, and the near complete lack of monetary return, it’s amazing to me that so many people blog. I have never known anyone who earned substantial money from his or her blog. Read the rest of this entry »

The online transition to web 2.0, with its proliferation of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tweets, and other user-generated content, has posed a question for the state of help content. Should help material concern itself with web 2.0? Do users want to interact and contribute to help content in the same way they contribute and interact with web content? What is the technical writer’s role in relation to new media?

Although it may be early to tell, surely some keeping up with web trends is in order. As such, technical writers have somewhat of a new role to play (or at least to reconcile) in the realm of web 2.0. Of the various new media technologies writers could enter, perhaps none fits so well as the blog, since it consists mainly of writing.

A blog is merely journal-like content that readers can comment on and subscribe to through RSS. Whether marketed as a “blog” or not, the format of the blog is fairly pervasive. At least six types of blogs can be found online: Read the rest of this entry »

I was surprised to read Lars Trieloff’s announcement today that he is quitting his personal blog. He explains,

Personal blogging is dead. It has been succeeded by microblogging and lifestreaming on one end and corporate and professional blogging on the other end. …  The world has changed, personal blogging is dead and so is this blog.

He’s not quitting blogging altogether, just refocusing his efforts on a corporate blog and a twitter-like site. His decision to turn from the personal blog to the corporate blog surprises me because corporate blogs have a much tighter restriction and limitation against the free, transparent voice — which is the whole appeal of blogging in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »