I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

Before I met my Jane 11 years ago, she spent about seven weeks traveling across Europe. It was a time she trying to answer some questions, and during some point in her walking and train-riding and city exploring, she found answers. She also fell in love with Europe—with the little narrow streets, the bustling plazas, the rich histories, the winding rivers, the chocolates and pastries. Ever since then, for the past 11 years she’s been telling me about Europe. So when the opportunity presented itself to go to Vienna and present at the TransAlpine conference, I accepted.

The TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) includes a number of countries across central Europe. Every year the chapter has a technical communication conference in some agreed-upon location–previously Slovenia, Zurich, and Berlin, this year Vienna. Technical writers come from all over Europe to attend it—from Switzerland, Germany, Slovenia, Italy, France, England, Poland, Austria, and other countries. For three days, the group—previously spread out, isolated, and alone—is combined into one. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post by Ryan Schmid. Ryan has worked as a Senior Technical Writer and Information Developer in St. Louis, Missouri for nine years. He has previously been published in Intercom. Contact: schmidr@gmail.com.

The August 2008 issue of Technical Communication analyzed the growing domain of virtual worlds. I contributed an article about the large amount of written text they contain. This seems surprising, given their reliance on visual and three-dimensional presentation. Even the most “action-oriented” worlds are forced to use text to express concepts such as location names, character names, and the representation of currency. They also use text for chat windows, instructions, signs, and advertisements. One must conclude that written text is an essential method of communication in these environments.

I asked Tom if he had ever explored this topic. He sent me this link.

While I can sympathize with Tom’s comments about Second Life, it’s just one of many virtual worlds. Many others in development have not yet been released. We shouldn’t condemn an entire medium and potential field of work because of one example. Second Life and other worlds like Twinity are designed to promote socialization and commerce. Others, such as Everquest II and World of Warcraft, provide deep gaming experiences. The different categories of virtual worlds are blurring as users create games within Second Life and withdraw real cash from Everquest II and its “Live Gamer” trading system.  Read the rest of this entry »

In Utah, technical writers abound but are hidden. Utah probably has at least 500 technical writers spread out across companies all over the state (most in Northern Utah), but communication among the technical writers is sparse. The community is a little disconnected.
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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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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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In a moment of mental relapse, I volunteered to be my chapter’s virtual meeting coordinator. I already do podcasts, which are virtual one-on-one meetings/discussions, and I’ve been wanting to make my podcasts more Web 2.0-ish. So, I thought hey, why not make the last 20 minutes of a podcast open to whoever wants to listen, allowing them to ask questions themselves? How cool, yes, this will spin my podcasts into a more interactive, web 2.0 realm. And I could easily get sponsorship from some company with a conference calling service to lube the virtual meeting wheels.

However, the more I think of virtual meetings, the more I’m having second thoughts. Here are some of my reservations:
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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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