I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

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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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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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