I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Although the podcasts I listen to are usually tech podcasts, such as the highly entertaining TWIT (by Leo Laporte), I also enjoy a good alien podcast now and then. Mysterious Universe, produced by Benjamin Grundy, is one of the most fun-to-listen-to podcasts I’ve come across.

I’m not someone who believes in aliens, but dude, you should hear some of the content Grundy plays on the show. For the sake of pure imaginative entertainment (similar to perhaps WWF wrestling), the podcast keeps me coming back.
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Heidi Miller has some excellent tips on interviewing. In a presentation she gave at the Portable Media Media Expo, she explained several techniques that have encouraged me to change my interviewing style. Here are four key points from her presentation:

Don’t send the interviewee the questions before the interview.

I guess I’m a latecomer to this style, but I’m now totally convinced that it’s best not to send questions beforehand. Sure you want the interviewee to be prepared, but he or she is most likely an expert on the topic anyway. Having a list of expected questions detracts from the flow of the interview. It makes the exchange less natural, and leaves less room for surprises and unexpected turns. Instead of a list of questions, Heidi recommends sending the interviewee 4-5 topics you plan to cover.  Read the rest of this entry »

I watched a couple of interviews this week that spiraled downhill. The first is a Luke Burbank interview with the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. The second is a Sarah Lacy SXSW interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

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In this SXSW podcast — Body Optimization: Why Stop at Health and Fitness? –panelists describe techniques for health and fitness in the language of tech geeks and designers. They share “hacks” you can do to “optimize” your body profile. (Listen directly to the MP3 here, or right click and select Save Target As.)

Although the advice they give isn’t revolutionary, it is inspiring. One panelist explains what it feels like to have more energy. When you finish eating, you don’t lay down on the couch and say ugghhh as you digest for 2 hours. Instead, you say, great, what’s next? You maintain an active level of energy despite having just eaten.

Another panelist recommends carrying healthy snack food with you wherever you go so that when you’re hungry, you’re not grabbing the most immediate thing in site (e.g., hamburger and french fries).

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Download MP3
Duration: 35 min.

Madcap Flare is one of the most powerful online help authoring tools on the market today. In this podcast, Paul Pehrson, MVP in the Madcap Software forums, talks about Madcap Flare in depth. If you create online help, this is definitely a podcast you should listen to. Paul is a really sharp guy and if you’ve ever participated in the Madcap Software forums, you’ve probably been helped by “Doc-Guy” (Paul’s alias).

(We recorded this interview in-person, since we actually work less than a mile from each other.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Duration: 27 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds.

Bill explains that the web is more than just a venue for publication — it’s a medium that allows people to interconnect and work/collaborate with information. This is the direction we’re moving towards, and technical communicators are starting to integrate social media, such as user forums, directly into their help.

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In a recent episode on The Engaging Brand podcast, business coach Anna Farmery interviews Mark Sanborn, author of You don’t need a title to be a leader, on the topic of self-confidence. Farmery says many people have aspirations to write a book, but lack the self-confidence to do it. Sanborn says you can use a blog as a tool to build confidence and write a book. Sanborn explains,

Book writing is more about initiative and effort than confidence and creativity. …

Confidence is acquired in tiny doses… You ski a few feet on the kiddy hill after you get some good instruction …

The great new tool for writing a book today is a blog. I blog on a regular basis. …. Part of the reason I blog is to discipline myself to continually be thinking and writing. When I can do a 50 or 100 or 200 or 500 word blog and bang it out and realize that I can always go back and polish, improve, and change it later, no harm done, that’s a good example of skiing 3 feet without falling down on the kiddy hill….

Writing a good book that you’re proud of, that finds you standing on top of the mountain with the ability to make it all the way down, comes from doing all those little things, those tiny doses. Because if you don’t start small, I guarantee you 99 out of 100 people will never start. (17 min. mark, “The Art of self-confidence, show #130″)

In other words, writing a book may be too challenging of a goal in itself, but writing a blog post is easy. If you write scores of blog posts during the course of a year, you’ll build up the confidence to actually write a book.
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Charles Jeter recorded an excellent podcast with Mike Hamilton, V.P. of product management at Madcap Software, and posted it on his blog yesterday. Jeter is a technical writer in the California area who has been carefully analyzing the online help tool market.

The following are some of my takeaways from the podcast:
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After reading Scott Berkun’s essay on the how to be a genius, I listened to some of his podcasts too. One myth is that geniuses get their ideas almost out of the sky — Newton is watching an apple fall from the tree when he suddenly discovers gravity. Archimedes is taking a bath when he realizes the physics of buoyancy. Here’s an excerpt of this Archimedes myth from Wikipedia:

According to Vitruvius, a new crown in the shape of a laurel wreath had been made for King Hiero II, and Archimedes was asked to determine whether it was of solid gold, or whether silver had been added by a dishonest goldsmith.^[11] Archimedes had to solve the problem without damaging the crown, so he could not melt it down in order to measure its density as a cube, which would have been the simplest solution.

While taking a bath, he noticed that the level of the water rose as he got in. He realized that this effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown, and therefore its density after weighing it. The density of the crown would be lower if cheaper and less dense metals had been added. He then took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying “Eureka!” “I have found it!” (Greek: “εύρηκα!”)^[12]

The story about the golden crown does not appear in the known works of Archimedes, but in his treatise On Floating Bodies he gives the principle known in hydrostatics as Archimedes’ Principle. This states that a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.^[13]

Berkun says we tend to mythologize geniuses because we need the story, and he references Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero. Most of these stories turn out to be factually false. Geniuses don’t just pull ideas out of the sky with mere luck. They spend their lifetimes reflecting and thinking and pondering about these topics. Whether they do it in a bath tub or while eating in an apple orchard, the brilliance doesn’t come from chance. It is the result of a life immersed in thought and experiment.

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I listened to a podcast nearly two weeks ago that I’m still thinking about it. Oliver Sacks, a popular neurologist storyteller, just published a book called Musicophilia that explores the brain’s love/obsession/affinity with music. In this Science Friday podcast, he shares extensive details about the book.

Sacks explains that unlike other areas of the brain that are localized in specific regions — for example, memory is in one area, speech is in another, motor skills in another, and so on — music is “recruited” by almost every region of the brain. When people suffer trauma to the brain, they may lose speech if the trauma affected the area responsible for speech. But music is almost always unaffected because it is so thoroughly distributed throughout the brain.

Sacks explains:

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species.

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I listened to Alistair Christie’s IT Author podcast the other day online and then later driving home from work. Alistair is based in Scotland and has one of the most enjoyable podcasts on technical communication around. If you listen to podcasts, add his podcast to your feed.  His latest episodes are as follows:

• In Flare: the good stuff, he explains the features of Flare that he really enjoys, such as being able to integrate his own javascript and PHP scripts directly into the code.
• In Why do we use Flare?, he and a colleague talk about Flare in depth — for about an hour, actually, discussing the little things that annoy them about Flare, such as the visual editor.
• In What does it take to be a technical writer (a carcast), he mentions some key qualities technical writers need, such as a curiosity for learning and understanding how things work.
• In his May 19th Dogcast, he actually gives the podcast while walking his dog. The podcast covers the evolution of help, the need for technical communication, and user psychology.

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I listened to several excellent podcasts this week that I want to recommend to others.

Networking for Freelancers, Work-at-Homers, and Other Professionals

In this podcast on networking by the STC Washington D.C. chapter, Carolyn Kelley Klinger interviews two experts on the value of networking. Although I’ve never been aggressive in my networking, this podcast made me realize that my blog and podcast are infinitely valuable networking tools. What better way to connect and build relationships with others than through the mediums of Web 2.0.  Read the rest of this entry »

In this iinnovate podcast, Marissa Mayer — Google VP of Search Products and User Experience — talks about the innovation and methodology behind some of Google’s products.

What’s most interesting is the story behind Gmail, specifically how Marissa almost killed its ad integration. Apparently one of the coders — despite the request from Marissa to stop trying to integrate ads — stayed up all night (literally until 7 a.m.) finishing the ad integration. Read the rest of this entry »

I listened to STC Atlanta’s recording of Allison Reynold’s talk on job skills for the workplace and what universities should be teaching tech writers. Three ideas struck me during the presentation. They may not have been her main points (there was a lot of audience discussion), but they were what I walked away with.

1. Employers looking to hire candidates for the long-term primarly look for assets such as business skills and leadership qualities rather than tool knowledge.

2. In tech writing programs, students should learn tools on their own.

3. The question of whether academics are out of touch with the real world is unfounded.

Allison made her slides available here. Below are my reflections on these three ideas.

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My article, “Top 5 Podcasts for Technical Communicators,” appeared in STC’s Intercom today. It’s in the Cut & Paste section here (stc login required). I didn’t have a lot of space to expand, so I thought I’d take the liberty here.

First, settling on just 5 podcasts was agonizing and I thought about it for weeks, constantly drawing up lists and ranking them. I actually submitted 10 podcast recommendations, hoping they would say okay we’ll publish 10, but they whacked it down to just 5.

My Top 5 Recommendations

My top five recommendations are iinnovate, IT Conversations, Edgework, STC Atlanta, and WordPress. There aren’t many podcasts out there specifically about technical communication. But there are a lot of podcasts that might appeal to technical writers, even if the topics don’t address technical communication. I tried to choose the podcasts that I regularly listen to and enjoy, rather than just 5 podcasts that might fit categorically into tech comm.

Podcasts I Also Wanted to Recommend

Here are 10 more podcasts I wished I could have included in my recommendations. Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoy podcasts, check out Act One of the “Devil in Me” episode of This American Life. The episode explores how Iraqi war veteran Sam Slaven returns from Iraq with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a fear of Iraqis.

Just being in the same room with an Iraqi makes him start trembling and thinking of ways to remove him (for example, by “choking him out”).

Sam recognizes the irrationality of his fear. After he enrolls in college, he decides to join a Muslim Student Association (MSA). After several months of attending the MSA’s meetings and activities, he develops a close friendship with a Muslim. The friendship completely changes him. Read the rest of this entry »

After a five-month hiatus, Aaron and Scott at DMN Communications returned to the podcasting scene. In this Sep 9 podcast, they discuss whether technical writing is calling or just a job? By calling, they refer to treating tech writing as if you were destined to be a tech writer, as if it was a sacred duty you were compelled by almost a higher power to complete.

Some writers exhibit this tech-writing-as-calling attitude by writing lavish introductions about the tech writing document itself. If you find yourself being too copious in your description of what you’re writing, rather than focusing on the instructional content itself, you fall into the tech-writing-as-calling syndrome. In the end, Aaron and Scott say to take your job seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. Tech writing is only a job — a potentially lucrative job, and a rewarding job. But not a calling.
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The Rise of the Creative Class is a phenomenal podcast by a world famous expert on urban economies, Richard Florida. Florida’s point is that a region’s economic prosperity is not based on having an abundance of companies with high-paying salaries. Instead, the prosperity depends on the degree of openness, tolerance, and quality of life in the area.

So even if companies in your area offer attractive, high-paying salaries, the creative class (which includes everyone but farmers, politicians, and factory workers) will still move to a place where openness and tolerance is embraced and the quality of life is abundant. (Quality of life refers to natural environment and city vibrancy.)

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Search engine optimization helps you crank up your rankings in Google. Here are three easy techniques to make your posts land on the front page of Google’s search returns:

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Ann Gentle of BMC has been researching the use of wikis in documentation. Although wikis have been around for at least ten years, they are finally getting more attention. Ann writes,

It’s funny, in an early blog post I wrote on the internal blogs at BMC I said that I did not see how wikis would be used successfully for technical publications. I have since changed my once low opinion of wikis but I still see them supplementing other documentation, not substituting completely for technical documentation. I’d welcome discussion about wiki as standalone or supplemental end-user documentation. What do you think? Should the merits of wiki for certain products win out as the exact right documentation for that particular product especially one either related to an Agile methodology or social media? Or are wikis relegated to an upgrade to the customer support forum with a kludgy way of entering the information and no good method for outputting an information deliverable worth reading?

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