5 Latest Podcasts
Tech Writer Voices is a podcast about the latest trends and practices in the field of technical communication. Technical communication includes topics like technical writing (software help), information architecture, usability, information design, web design, illustration, social media, and more.
Most of the shows consist of interviews with tech writing luminaries, or are recorded STC chapter presentations. All shows are audio files in MP3 format, which you can download to your MP3 player or play directly from this site. Be sure to subscribe to the Tech Writer Voices podcast feed and e-mail update.
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May 11th, 2008
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Duration: 15 min.
In this podcast, Noz Urbina talks about how Web 2.0 is changing the role of the technical communicator into one who drives product R&D and interaction design. My discussion with Noz was a light-bulb moment for me at the Doc Train West conference. Read the rest of this entry »
May 10th, 2008
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Duration: 18 min.
Stewart Mader was one of the coolest people I met at Doc Train West 2008. He is a person driven by his enthusiasm for wikis. Read the rest of this entry »
May 6th, 2008
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Duration: 5 min.
In this short podcast, David Holmes talks about how he and his team migrated 50,000 unstructured pages to DITA. (DITA is an XML architecture that allows you to better single source your content.)
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May 6th, 2008
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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.
April 21st, 2008
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Duration: 42 min.
DITA is a topic I’ve wanted to do a podcast on for a long time. When I heard a local technical writer express her enthusiasm about how she was using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) at her company, I knew I found the right person.
In this podcast, Marlene Martineau of New Dawn Technologies explains why they adopted DITA, how they adopted it, the benefits they’re experiencing, and the reasons why she’ll never go back.
If you’re unfamiliar with DITA, it’s a way of tagging your content so that the DITA Open Toolkit can transform it into a number of outputs, such as HTML and PDF. The tags conform to a specific XML architecture, and your information is chunked into small topics that can be arranged in different tables of contents (”maps”).
DITA is quickly becoming the XML standard for technical writers. New XML editing tools are sprouting up that allow you to more easily write DITA content without dealing with code. But Marlene says that she was on a budget; they opted for a more basic XML editor and actually write all their documentation in native XML. Rather than cumbersome, she says it’s quite easy and only takes about a week before the writers become accustomed to it. The XSLT transforms posed more difficulties, she says, but nothing insurmountable. Read the rest of this entry »
April 12th, 2008
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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.
April 2nd, 2008
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Duration: 30 min.
In this podcast, I talk with Theresa Putkey, a usability consultant in Vancouver, about how she transitioned from technical writing into usability. This is part II of the previous conversation with Theresa.
Learn more about Theresa by reading her blog. You can also read Theresa’s articles on Boxes and Arrows. Read the rest of this entry »
March 26th, 2008
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Duration: 30 min.
In this podcast, I talk with Theresa Putkey, a writer/usability consultant in Vancouver, about the largest project of her career. She explains how she approached a project that had upwards of 2,500 help topics, many of which consisted of duplicate content. She explains how she transitioned from RoboHelp to Flare, the advantages she found as well as her regrets, and how she configured the search to make it easy for users to find information.
Theresa recently presented a similar topic at Content Convergence and Integration, a conference in Vancouver. Her presentation was titled “SuperWoman, WonderWoman, UnderDog, and Leprechaun, with Flare: A case study in breaking down silos.” You can view the slides from her presentation on SlideShare.
Learn more about Theresa by reading her blog. You can also read Theresa’s articles on Boxes and Arrows.
March 2nd, 2008
For those of you who missed my blogging and podcasting presentation to the STC-Intermountain chapter, here is the mp3 file of the audio recording.
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Duration: 1 hr 13 min. H4
File size: 65 MB
Additionally, if you’re sitting at your computer, you can’t watch the PowerPoint slides with the audio in real time.
Topics covered:
Here’s a more detailed description of the presentation. As a reminder to those interested in podcasting, Podcamp Salt Lake City is coming on March 15.
February 12th, 2008
In this Jing video tutorial, I explain how to get up and running with Jing. What’s Jing? Check out my previous post that includes several sample Jing videos showing how technical writers can benefit from Jing. You can also see the
Note: If you’re seeing some bracketed text and a link rather than a video player, it’s because the flash-embed plugin I’m using to embed the Camtasia video into WordPress doesn’t display in your feedreader. View this original post to watch the screencast.
(If you listen to the Jing screencasts on their blog, you’ll hear Anton’ s unforgettable German accent.)
February 5th, 2008
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Duration: 35 min.
In this podcast, STC President Linda Oestreich talks about the direction that the Society for Technical Communication is heading. She explains the strategic objectives of the STC and the ways the Board is trying to meet those objectives in a financially conscious way. She provides updates on other initiatives they’ve pursued, such as certification programs, increased recognition, and membership trends. Linda also talks about the awesome responsibility it is to be president of an organization of nearly 15,000 members worldwide.
January 29th, 2008
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Duration: 35 min.
In this podcast, I talk with Mark Hanigan, former international STC president, about ways to go beyond technical writing. I knew Mark at the STC-Suncoast chapter in Florida and often, during “post-meeting-meetings,” listened to him talk about ways to transition from technical writing into tasks that companies perceive as having higher value, such as business analysis and project management.
Mark strongly believes that technical writers often sell themselves short. Given our skill set, our attention to detail, and our comprehensive understanding of the applications we document, we become de facto SMEs who can deliver more than just a software manual. We can create business requirements, contribute UML diagrams representing workflows and processes, create computer-based training, influence business methodologies, implement content management strategies, present training and e-learning courses to users, help meet regulatory standards, and more.
January 19th, 2008
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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 »
January 14th, 2008
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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.
December 10th, 2007
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Duration: 22 min.
RJ Jacquez, senior product evangelist at Adobe.com, talks about the new Technical Communication Suite from Adobe, which includes RoboHelp 7, Captivate 3, Acrobat 3D version 8, and Framemaker 8. Topics we discuss include the following:
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December 5th, 2007
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Duration: 24 minutes
Kevin Siegel, president of IconLogic, talks about show-me demos and Captivate. In this audio-visual age, technical writers need an easy way to deliver Flash-based, dynamic screen demos for their help content. Topics Kevin and I discuss in the podcast include:
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November 19th, 2007
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Duration: 45 min.
Last week I had a good conversation with Scott and Aaron from DMN Communications about the value of blogging and podcasting. Although this is a DMN Communications podcast, they allowed me to post the audio on Tech Writer Voices as well. (If you are not already subscribed to DMN Communication feed, see their site here.)
November 12th, 2007
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Duration: 25 min
In this podcast, I interview Brenda Huettner about strategies for overcoming the top 10 Worst Things SMEs Say or Do. The top 10 list includes the following:
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November 6th, 2007
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Duration: 27 min.
In this podcast, I talk with Svi Ben-Elya about Elephant.org.il. Elephant is an online community he and others created to empower technical communicators in Israel (originally in the city of Yokneam) with relevant salary information to make them more market savvy when they negotiate jobs. Read the rest of this entry »
October 16th, 2007
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Duration: 29 min.
In this podcast, Anne Gentle, author of The Quick Web for Technical Documentation, tackles some of the toughest questions about wikis, such as, How do you reuse and possibly single source your wiki content? If only 1 percent of your users contribute, is the wiki even worth it? How do you deal with the lack of a robust style editor in a wiki? What should you do when you do not like a user contribution?
October 5th, 2007
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Duration: 34 min.
In this podcast, Microsoft Usability Researcher Hugh McLoone talks about Microsoft’s Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Hugh originally gave this presentation to the Puget Sound (Seattle) SIGCHI group on January 25, 2007. SIGCHI stands for Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction.
September 20th, 2007
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Duration: 21 min.
In this carcast, I deliver a 20 minute monologue about the best way to get information from SMEs: sit by them, permanently if possible. Many IT organizations station the writer remotely from the developers, programmers, and other SMEs, but nothing could be more damaging to getting the information you need. Increasing your proximity also increases the communication you receive. Music is from 37Hz.
September 17th, 2007
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Duration: 46 min.
This podcast features the June presentation that Char James-Tanny gave to the Suncoast Florida chapter on virtual ways of communicating. Char is the secretary of the STC and a well-known expert on AuthorIT, RoboHelp, and other tools. In this presentation, she talks about second life, blogs, wikis, mashups, skype, and other virtual ways of communicating. Her blog is at helpstuff.com/blog. Read the rest of this entry »
June 21st, 2007
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Duration: 27 min.
In this podcast, I talk with Kevin Shoesmith about information architecture and the challenge of organizing complicated websites. Kevin explains about the importance of metadata, providing user-driven organization, taxonomy vs. folksonomy, the Dublin core, the usability of web menus. Music from Podshow. Check out Kevin’s blog.
June 14th, 2007
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Duration: 40 min.
In this podcast, Heidi and I try to cover the latest news related to the technical communication field. We amassed a number of newsworthy items on a wiki and talked about most of these items. For shownotes, see the wiki archive page. There you can find links to everything we covered. If you have news you would like to submit to the podcast, add to the wiki here.
Read the rest of this entry »
May 31st, 2007
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Duration: 78 min.
David McNamee presented on Vista and Office 2007 to the Suncoast chapter in May 2007. This is a recording of his presentation. He talks about how the purpose of Vista and Office is to help you create, find, and share information more efficiently. Don’t worry that you can’t see Vista or Office 2007 in the podcast — visualize it. He adds a lot of information about the concepts and philosophy behind the new ribbon approach, in addition to other usability and design factors. Read the rest of this entry »
May 19th, 2007
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Duration: 18 min.
I interviewed about three dozen people at the STC Conference in Minneapolis this year. If you scroll down and look at the last 34 podcasts published on this site, you’ll see that they’re tagged with STC Conference or Leadership Day (which is part of the conference).
Each podcast is short, about 5-10 minutes. Interviewees include both presenters and attendees. To download the podcasts, right-click the download links and select Save Target As (Internet Explorer) or Save Link As (Firefox). Note: If the player stops working on the site, refresh your browser.
May 19th, 2007
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Duration: 4 min.
Jack shares some trends in the technical communication industry. He says writers need to become hyphenated to move forward and be successful in the future. Jack owns a technical writing staffing company and also produces the Lavacon conference, which is in New Orleans this year, but is traditionally in Hawaii. Jack says users aren’t concerned about polished language these days; they just want accurate, relevant content.
May 19th, 2007
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Duration: 12 min.
Geoff is one of the founders of tc.eserver.org – the largest online index for all works related to technical communication. The library indexes works by technical communicators in dozens of categories, and allows users to add new works, rank them, and get RSS feeds of specific topics. There are over 25,000 RSS feeds generated on the site and 15,000 visitors each day. Tc.eserver.org is five times as popular as stc.org. Geoff also shares an upcoming bibliography feature the site will soon have. Overall this is a very cool site – see if anything you wrote (either an article, blog post, or podcast) is already indexed in the library.
May 19th, 2007
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Duration: 5 min.
Rob explains how you can use Captivate to create nontraditional e-learning materials, such as on-the-job training, sales and marketing training, or even bird-watching training. You aren’t just limited to technical how-to information in screen demos. Rob recommends Brenda Huettner’s book on Captivate and also Ruth Clark’s book on Building Expertise. You can also use resources on his own site, at www.userassistance.com.
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