I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson » Podcasts

Podcast: What’s New in Flare 6 — Interview with Mike Hamilton

Tom Johnson — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:00:13 +0000

Flare 6 is available today from Madcap Software. This weekend I interviewed Mike Hamilton, VP of Product Management, about the new features Flare 6 contains. In this podcast, we talk about five of the new features in Flare:

Batch processing GUI and macro targets
Topic metadata (e.g., owner, status)
The new link viewer
Mobile targets
Multimedia integration

Mike also mentions some user interface improvements, usability refinements, and hints at upcoming integrations with SharePoint later this year or early next.

Check out Flare 6 on Madcap Software’s site. And if you’re looking for Mike Hamilton’s blog, see http://madcapsoftware2.wordpress.com. You can contact Mike by email at mhamilton@madcapsoftware.com.

With the Flare 6 release, I’m particularly excited about the multimedia integration and link viewer. I signed up for the beta but have been so busy with an upcoming project release that I haven’t had time to evaluate it. Madcap was kind enough to upgrade me to version 6 as a thank-you for the podcast, so I’ll probably be posting about the multimedia integration soon (along with some screencasts using my new mic).

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Podcast: Documentation in the Cloud

Tom Johnson — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:20:14 +0000

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Length: 80 min.

In this podcast, Michael Hiatt at mashstream.com presents to the STC Intermountain chapter on documentation in the cloud. By documentation in the cloud, he’s referring to our move to the web of everything we do on the computer — the running of applications, the saving of our data, the way we access and interact with all the information. He covers at a lot of ground in this presentation, touching on web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, knowledge mashups, documentation mashups, lifestreaming, linked data, meshing, raw data, and more.

Here’s the official presentation description:

Web 2.0 cloud computing, interactive social groups, and real-time global communication promise major changes in software programming, IT management, medical care, and scientific research.

So how will it affect technical communication? Significantly. Major changes are coming for all types of writers, editors, and technical developers as personalized data is streamed to Facebook accounts, web applications are mashed, and content is stored in the cloud.

Our world of in-house authoring of proprietary help files, closed doc sets, and isolated knowledge bases is coming to an end. As web creators and communicators, we need to evaluate our place in the new protocol society where content is king and authors are needed to publish entertaining and relevant information.

About Michael Hiatt

Michael Hiatt is a technical writer and manager with 20 years of experience. He has worked for software companies large and small across multiple products and varying depths of technical communication. Michael co-founded Mashstream.com, where he blogs and develops e-books, application mashups, and integrated linked data solutions.

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Podcast: Riding the Tide of Technical Communications Consulting

Tom Johnson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:40:42 +0000

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Length: 90 min.

Lyn Worthen presented to the STC Intermountain chapter tonight on running your own business as a technical communications consultant. She covers almost everything you need to know as a consultant, including rates, billing, contracts, marketing, taxes, business structures, hours, salary, tools, locations, niche services, portfolios, client communications, and more.

Here’s her presentation description:

Unlike the consistent schedule, workload, and wages of a 9-5 technical writing job, going it on your own as a consultant or contractor is a lot like riding the tide. Sometimes the tide is “in” and you have plenty of work to keep you happily tapping away on your keyboard; the projects are queuing up, the money is flowing, and all’s right with the world.

Other times, the tide is “out” and you find yourself walking on a desolate beach, staring out at the horizon, waiting for your ship to come in — and, if you’re lucky, picking up the occasional small job still lurking in a hidden tidal pool; money is scarce, and as the siren song of Corporate America tempts you back into the relative stability of captured employment, you question the wisdom of continuing to go it alone.

And then there are the “tsunamis,” those times when you have more work than one person should ever be expected to handle; yet in spite of the fact that you’re barely keeping your head above water, you’re reluctant to say “no” to any of it because you don’t know how high the floodwaters will rise or how long the drought that is sure to follow will last.

About Lyn Worthen

Lyn Worthen’s company is Information Design Co: Technical Communications Consulting, based in Utah and serving local, national, and international clients. Lyn is a member of the STC, the Utah Women Tech Council (WTC), and National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). You can find out more about her through her Linkedin page. To contact Lyn, send her an email at lynw@xmission.com.

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Podcast: The Myth of Single Sourcing

Tom Johnson — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:32:20 +0000

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Length: 38 min.

In his controversial post, The Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt explains:

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

In other words, single sourcing your content across the enterprise is an idea that simply doesn’t work. I responded to the post and had a lively exchange in the comments, so I decided to interview Michael for a podcast.

In this podcast I talk with Michael about single sourcing, collaborative authoring, mashups, help authoring trends, and other topics. You can follow Michael’s blog at Mashstream.com.

(Note: We had a brief Skype issue at the start. The audio gets noticeably better at around the 5 minute mark. It’s actually a great example of the clarity that the double-ender recording technique provides instead of just using Skype to record.)

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Podcast about the Podcast Poll

Tom Johnson — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:42:35 +0000

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Length: 15 min.

In this brief podcast, I discuss the results of the podcast poll that I published on my site earlier this week. I mostly wanted an opportunity to try out my new Behringer mixer/preamp, and the results of the poll served as perfect fodder for a podcast. In this 15 minutes of audio, I explain the direction that I plan to take my podcast based on the votes and feedback.

Polls, surveys, and feedback are always a good thing. They help me understand not only what my audience values, but what I value too. Thanks for participating.

A podcast about my podcast …

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Podcast on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging

Tom Johnson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:59:00 +0000

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View PowerPoint
Length: 1 hour 45 min.

Over the last month, you’ve been seeing various posts on my site about the seven deadly sins of blogging (being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive). I mentioned at the beginning of my seven deadly sins series that I was preparing for some upcoming presentations on blogging. I first presented on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging at WebWorks Roundup 2009. I gave a similar presentation to the STC-Suncoast chapter (in Tampa, Florida) last night. The latter one I recorded.

While the content of both presentations was supposed to be the same, that’s not how it worked out. The presentation to Suncoast kind of veers off in different directions half way through. I also decided to bookend this podcast with a few thoughts before and after the presentation while driving (hence the length).

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Podcast from BYU Idaho Professional Writing Panel

Tom Johnson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:53:21 +0000

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Length: 50 min.

Last week I was up at BYU Idaho at a writing conference for students looking to enter professional writing. This is a recording of a panel I participated on with two other writers, Scott Cameron and Keith Harten. The three of us (two technical writers and one editor) answer questions from students for about an hour. For students looking to go into technical writing, editing, or other professional writing careers, this podcast may answer a lot of questions.

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Podcast on Getting a Job in Technical Writing, 7 Steps

Tom Johnson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:52:24 +0000

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Length: 40 min.

Last week I gave a presentation to BYU Idaho students entitled 7 Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. This is a recording of my presentation. You may remember a lengthy post I wrote on this same subject, 7 steps to getting a job in technical writing, as well.

Although getting a job is the focus of the podcast, I also talk about what technical writers do, how they approach a project, how they decide what to create, and how they generate ideas for tasks. Specifically, I talk about about a project people can work on at tech.lds.org. People can start writing help for the project here.

In listening to myself give this presentation, I realize that I have a breathless energy to my voice. As weird as it sounds, “breathing” while I’m presenting is something I’m working on. I don’t know if I need to simply pause and relax more, or if the mic is too sensitive and is picking up every tiny breathing sound and magnifying it. But if you have suggestions, please let me know. Also, you may hear typing noises in this podcast as well as the panel. That’s a student taking notes on a laptop.

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Choosing Between Academic and Corporate Life: Did I Make the Wrong Choice?

Tom Johnson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:59:33 +0000

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Length: 15 min.

For the past couple of days I’ve been in Idaho at a pre-professional writing conference at Brigham Young University – Idaho. The purpose of the writing conference is to bring in published novelists, poets, editors, and professional writers to give students a glimpse into the careers they plan to enter.

This is my second year presenting to students about technical writing. You may remember my post last year about Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing, in which I tried to disabuse students of the idea that technical writing is nothing but boredom and drudgery. This year I focused on Seven Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. But that’s not the focus of this post. This year the conference made me reflect on the academic life I chose not to follow and evaluate whether that choice was right.

A little background. From 2002 to 2004, I taught writing courses at The American University in Cairo (in Egypt) with about 20 other composition instructors. Among those instructors, I met Josh Allen and his wife Suzy, who quickly became our best friends in Egypt. I had so much in common with Josh – both of us were composition instructors. Both of us were Mormon (the only Mormon teachers at AUC). Both of us were married and had children about the same ages. Both of us were first-timers in Egypt. Both of us shared a love of writing, literature, and the university setting.

After a couple of years at AUC, I questioned whether teaching was my vocation. Grading was drudgery, composition syllabi were a bit dull, and my job seemed to have little future. I looked ahead at several options: I could remain a composition instructor, continuing with roughly the same pay and lifestyle, with little prospects of advancement, only to find that at age 40 I had no real career. I could get a PhD in literature and try to move up the academic scale as a professor. As a professor, I would need to publish scholarly essays regularly. Or I could reject both of those options and follow a prompting I kept feeling – to be the writer rather than teach writing.

I chose the last option. After two years, I ended my teaching career at AUC and moved to Florida, where I turned to professional writing, first becoming a copywriter and then a technical writer.

My colleague Josh took a different route. He left AUC at the same time I did, but he applied for a teaching position at BYU-Idaho, which recognized his MFA as an acceptable degree for teaching literature classes. He moved to Rexburg, Idaho, a small town that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the college, and started his four-classes-a-semester schedule, comfortably settling into a spacious home with a garage the size of an airplane hangar.

Every morning Josh wakes up early for his 8 a.m. classes, starts discussions about classic works such as My Antonia or The Catcher in the Rye or some novel by Henry James. He has one or two technical writing or composition classes a semester. He meets with students, reads at length in his office, and lives the academic life.

The life of an academic seems rich to me. Not materially rich, but intellectually rich. Dozens of books line your shelves, you’re immersed in constant learning, you’re surrounded by ambitious, dreamy-eyed students who haven’t yet become jaded. You have summers off, during which you can bury yourself in the novel or short story collection you’re writing. Even during the semester, your schedule is flexible enough to come home in the afternoons.

Being at this writing conference, surrounded by academics discussing recent books they’ve read, listening to a poet read his work, hearing a novelist discuss how she adds energy to her fiction, how she gets inside her characters’ heads to imagine how they would act in certain situations, made me remember my creative writing days at Columbia’s School of the Arts as both a student and graduate instructor.

As a student, I spent much of my time reading and writing, cut off from the world around me. I had freedom to roam the lost books in the library, to open a blank page and fill it with everything and nothing. I rarely looked at a clock. I could latch onto an idea and pursue it wherever it would take me. Every week I wrote dozens of pages. Our classes met in workshop settings, where we talked about narrative structures and character significance and arc.

I also taught composition courses to college freshmen and had freedom to assign my own essay prompts. I would spin controversial ideas for students to write about and then respond to their essays with copious feedback. Sometimes I assigned essays as prompts.

I could have continued in that academic setting, perhaps pursuing a PhD and turning to others publications. I could have looked for a job at a small liberal arts school somewhere.

Instead, I chose to become a technical writer. I figuratively turned in my university library card and stopped trying to publish creative works. I now wake up in the morning and drive to work, parking my car outside a shiny high-tech looking building. After riding the elevator to the third floor, I make my way to a cubicle where I dock my laptop, read and respond to emails in Microsoft Outlook, and work on help materials for a handful of software applications. I devote my time writing for users whom I will rarely meet.

Did I choose the wrong route? Should I instead have pursued a teaching position in a small college in a sleepy nowhere town? Should I be waking up in the morning reading Henry James novels and preparing notes for an 8:00 a.m. lecture?

I talked with Josh about company life versus academic life, and which one was better. Josh had previously spent a few years as a contract technical writer before teaching, but he found that documenting software all day left him with a sense of emptiness. It provided no thought-provoking discussions; it lacked immersion in good literature. The whole endeavor felt a bit worthless. It was just a job for a paycheck, with no intellectual engagement or inspiration.

He had just returned from teaching a class on My Antonia when I met up with him. He had been discussing “the search for the American Dream” and how the idea plays out in Willa Cather’s plots.

Josh has a sharp mind and can extract and analyze reasoning from any subject you bring to him. As we walked around the gardens of BYU Idaho’s campus, he asked what appeal the company life has for me. Why would anyone choose to work in a company rather than burying themselves in the classics and academic discussions? What value does the company life have for me?

Talking with Josh about academic versus corporate life while sitting in BYU Idaho's gardens

Honestly, I didn’t know. It troubled me. As I slept that night, I tried to figure out what had propelled me to move away from academia into the corporate sphere. Did I make the wrong choice?

The next day we talked some more. I began to see an argument forming, but it wasn’t entirely clear. It wasn’t until I listened to a Book Lust podcast with Michael Perry, a nonfiction writer, that I began to understand. In an interview about his creative works, Nancy Pearl asks Perry:

You’ve now written four books and they’re all about your life and your experiences in the world …. Talk about how that all came about.

Michael responds:

The reason the books are as they are, is that I was always living and working in a “real” place while I was writing. So when I had the opportunity to write books, I just wrote about what was around me. And part of that was being on the local volunteer fire department with my brothers and my mom, and being a resident in a small northern Wisconsin town, and now that I have a little family and we’ve moved to a farm and we’re raising our own food or most of it. I guess for me, if I’m going to write creative nonfiction essay style work, if there’s going to be any veracity to that work, it comes from actually living it.

In other words, living and experiencing the world gives you content for your writing. It gives you substance to write about in a natural way.

This substance is exactly what I lacked as a grad student in a creative writing program at Columbia. We had time to write, time to read, but no substance in our writing. Our essays ended up exhausting our personal experiences. Our lives seemed all we had to write about. I ended up writing missionary stories about my two years in Venezuela. Another student wrote about her dying mother with cancer, another about her stint as a nurse in a psychiatric ward, another about her sordid affairs with married men, another about her past relationship with a rich guy in Soho.

While the essays had all the literary devices of narrative fiction, the writing lacked substance and information. It was too navel-gazing and self-centered. It was hard to get outside of our lives, trapped in the cloister of the university. It was almost as if our lives had been paused the minute we entered the writing program. We could only look back on what had taken place before.

I listened to another podcast with writers who explained the same problem. One of the writers had a good friend who moved to Ireland so she could write. In Ireland, she hunkered down in solitude and wrote and wrote and wrote, but her writing lacked substance. The sentences were highly refined and polished, but boring. Those same events that seem to take us away from our writing are also what give us substance in our writing, or so the writers on the podcast explained.

A writer needs to be immersed in the world to have something to write about. You can only experience and learn so much from within the walls of a classroom. This is one reason I like Ted Conover so much. Conover goes out into the world and lives and writes about it. For example, he spends a summer riding the rails with hoboes (Rolling Nowhere). Or he moves to Aspen to live among the rich (Whiteout). Or he becomes a prison guard at Sing Sing (Newjack). His living in the world, almost like a social anthropologist, provides him with material to write about.

Conover explains,

I feel a writer’s real job is to be out there with people who are strange to you.

Could he have written any of his books while being cloistered in the university? His work is nonfiction, but even fiction writers can’t imagine everything sitting in a library.

As much as I like Ted Conover’s immersive method, it seems a bit difficult for me. I can’t simply uproot and immerse myself in an unfamiliar setting. But entering the field of technical writing (rather than remaining in the university) has given me substance to write about. Immersion in projects within a corporate setting brings up all kinds of issues to write about — wikis, content strategy, community, DITA, usability, print versus online formats, quick reference guides, single sourcing, help authoring tools, the STC, presenting at conferences, context-sensitive help, podcasting, and so on.

If you were to take away my experiences in the company setting, the thoughts and problems and ideas and situations that arise from being involved projects, you would also take away all the substance from my writing. I would be in the same situation I was in grad school, twiddling my thumbs looking for content from random personal experiences to string together. Having a career in the world gives me a framework of content to write about, which I can approach from a literary perspective. I can take a topic that might otherwise be dull and make a story out of it. I can approach an issue as a literary essay, mixing personal experience with information and reflection. The result won’t be navel-gazing and insubstantial.

I’m not saying that academics can’t venture out into the real world. Nor am I saying that being a technical writer is the equivalent of an anthropological experience like Conover’s. I am saying that perhaps for a literary writer, it’s better to avoid the cloister — in whatever form, not just a university. Venturing into the world gives you something to write about.

You can make other arguments about the value of company life over academic life. For example, living in the world allows you to carry out the ideas of the classroom. Or the world allows you to prove and evaluate what you read in the library. Or the world gives you an opportunity to serve others with the knowledge you acquire in the university. But for me, as a writer, it comes down to having substance to write about, and that substance isn’t always apparent inside the classroom.

Some subjects will always remain at the university, I imagine. Arcane philosophical discussions, abstract discussions about the American Dream, or transformations of identity through the writing process in John Barth’s novels (my undergraduate thesis). But I am happy to leave those ideas in the classrooms. An idea that only has merit inside a classroom, that emerges from an assigned text, may be refreshing, but it is not the substance of my life.

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My STC Summit Blogging Presentation Is Free

Tom Johnson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:30:16 +0000

As you know, the sessions at the STC Summit in Atlanta last year were recorded. My blogging presentation, Introduction to Blogging: A New Technical Communicator Role, is the only recorded session you can listen to for free. It’s labeled as the “Featured session – free of charge.”

I didn’t even realize this until someone tweeted it this afternoon. I figure it means one of two things — either my presentation was so lame they couldn’t fathom actually charging for it. Or it was so cool they decided to use it to try to get people to buy the entire recorded Summit package. Either way, it’s a good hour and a half discussion of blogging. I talk about how “writing a product blog can help you connect and communicate with your users while simultaneously helping them move up to a more advanced level of product knowledge.”

To view the audio synced with PowerPoint, click the View button at the link above. To download the MP3, click the drop-down arrow in the upper-left and choose Downloads. To include this in my iTunes podcast feed, I also included the MP3 file here.

My blogging presentation at STC Atlanta

By the way, I’ve been listening to other recorded Summit sessions. There’s a ton of informative content available. Of course recorded presentations aren’t always as engaging as a podcast recording, especially when someone is clicking through 200+ slides and answering audience questions (that you can’t hear), but still, by and large the content is highly worthwhile. If it’s available to you, definitely listen to it. I’ve already listened to about 7-8 sessions. Just 80 more to go.