I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Some people feel that the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime is one of the utopias the Internet brings. For any question you have, the answer is a keystroke away. Google leads you to the site or person who can help. Country walls are irrelevant in the reach of information. You can connect with people in Malaysia, Australia, or Zimbabwe as if they lived next door. With this connectedness, all the silos and walled gardens tend to crumble as people, once strangers, connect and communicate with each other in milliseconds.

Last week while walking past Temple Square my friend John, a product manager where I work, painted a very different picture of connectedness. John asked me about Twitter, and as I was explaining it, Twitter seemed liked just another of the dozens of social media site out there.

“People always talk about how great it is,” John said, “that new media allows you to communicate and connect with each other, but that’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want all these people I don’t know emailing me and pinging me through Twitter, and Plurk and Linkedin and so on. I don’t see why anyone would want that.”

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I would like to take a moment to publicly thank Silahsiz Kuvvetler, the Turkish Hacker, for bringing down my withering Pligg site, Writer River.
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Woopra is a new website analytics tracking tool that gives you enough live stats to write a dissertation. It takes analytics tracking a step further than Google Analytics and allows you to see a live map of visitors on your site — what they’re reading, what paths they’ve taken, what country they’re from, how long they’ve been on your site, and so on.

If visitors have left a comment and haven’t cleared the cookies in their browser, they even appear in Woopra by name, and you can see them. One reviewer said this capability from Woopra allows you to “stalk your visitors.”

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In a previous post, I mentioned my desire to use SharePoint as a help authoring platform because it provides a Web 2.0 experience that is company-sanctioned. SharePoint not only has blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, but also integrates with Active Directory, Outlook 2007, and has integrated search across all content.

However, the more I tried to use SharePoint as a help authoring tool, the more problems I ran into. SharePoint doesn’t handle role-based content very well. For example, if you have administrators and regular users, it’s not easy to create two versions of the same help material. SharePoint does have audience targeting, but only if your audience is already tagged with roles in Active Directory (and if active directory is integrated with SharePoint). Read the rest of this entry »

In Publishing 2.0, Tim O’Reilly says Web 2.0 is “any network effect that makes a system better the more people use it.” Web 2.0 isn’t just user-generated content; it’s harnessing the collective intelligence of your users to make your system better.

O’Reilly’s definition is intriguing because it’s the opposite of the natural law of use. Your car doesn’t get better the more you use it. A music track doesn’t get better if more people listen to it. Your bank account doesn’t improve as more people use it. Your feet don’t get better the more you use them. Very few things actually get better the more you use them. Not Web 2.0. It’s almost paradoxical. The more people who use it, the better it gets.

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I’ve been a long-time reader of Digg.com, but just last week it dawned on me that it would be really great if there were a Digg-like site for technical communication. So I decided to create one. It’s called WriterRiver.com and it’s pretty much a Digg clone, except that the entire focus is on articles related to technical communicators.

Check it out by clicking the image below.

How It Works

When you read something interesting online, you can submit the article’s link to WriterRiver.com through the Submit a Story tab. Everything that looks like a post on WriterRiver.com is really just a link to an article online.

When you initially submit an article/story, it appears on the Upcoming Stories tab. As other readers check out the article and vote on it — by clicking the Float link — the vote count for that article increases.

Notice how the word “Floated” appears grayed out in the lower voting button? That’s because I already floated on the article.

When enough people float an article (in this case, when an article receives 5 floats), it automatically moves to the Front Page Stories tab, which is the main page. Conversely, if you dislike the article, you can decrease its votes by clicking Sink. (Float and sink tie in with the river metaphor. On Digg.com, you digg or bury stories.)

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When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world, a fad that would quickly disappear. But it didn’t, and now that I’ve learned more about how Twitter can be used, I’m convinced it’s an essential tool everyone should have and, ideally, everyone should be following me on.

Twitter is a cross between blog posting and instant messaging. The “tweets” (micro-posts) have to be 140 characters or less, and you can display your latest twit on your site (see the left column for mine). Your friends subscribe to your Twitter feed, and you subscribe to theirs. When you or your friends make a tweet, the others follow it.

Although the question Twitter asks you — “What are you doing?” — may prompt a mundane response, this isn’t always the most effective use of Twitter, especially if what you are doing right now is boring. In the list below, I offer seven ways to use Twitter more effectively.

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Through a very fortunate circumstance, I was recently admitted to the ever-growing community of BlackBerry users. Owning a BlackBerry is a wonderful feeling — it’s like having the Internet in your pocket, wherever you go.

At any point in time, you can check your mail (both work and gmail), read your feeds, check your calendar, instant message someone, navigate yourself on a map, check the weather, glance at the New York Times headlines, go to a website, set your alarm clock, listen to music or podcasts or watch video, read e-books, play BrickBreaker, calculate useless things, make phone calls, and play with the infinite number of notification settings, from one vibration to three for each of the above.

But more than a gadget, the BlackBerry 8830 has changed my life – a little bit. And it may change yours too, even if you never get one. Read the rest of this entry »

In “FREE: The Economics of Abundance and the Price of Zero,” Wired magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson talks about the gift economy and how you can make products free without losing your financial return.

One idea that caught my attention was to give your products away for bloggers to review. With one of his previous books (The Long Tail, I believe), Chris says he sent out 800 copies to bloggers to review. As a result, the web was brimming with buzz and information about his book. Consequently, sales on Amazon led the market for the book. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of us want to integrate innovative Web 2.0 practices into our online help. But if we create blogs, wikis, or other interactive features outside the help file, users may never use them.

I’ve been using SharePoint 2007 as a file repository for my online help mainly because of the publishing control it gives me. And since I was already using SharePoint as my file repository, I thought I could also take advantage of another feature — SharePoint’s blog/forum — to address another problem technical writers face: post-release questions.

After an application launches, if you hang around presentation sessions, user groups, and support centers, you realize that users ask a lot of questions not addressed in the help. It’s not so much that the help has holes, but that users come from so many different business backgrounds and all want to use the application in their own way, according to their own style of working.

When I began to see these questions arise, I carefully noted them and decided to answer them using the blog/forum feature in SharePoint. Because my help files were posted on the same platform, searches made on the SharePoint site returned results from both the online help and the blog — a seamless integration, I thought, between the static online help file and the dynamic wikis and blogs of the Web 2.0 world.

I made a clear link to the “User Forum” on my help’s home page, assuming that users who didn’t find answers in the help would click the user forum and try there.

Then, during a user research session, where I asked a novice user to perform a list of difficult tasks (forcing him into the help), I realized a major flaw in my thinking: The user never went into the user forum. The user never searched from the SharePoint site. The user never knew the forum even existed!

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TechSmith (the creators of Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, and other tools) has the best free tech support I’ve ever seen. I submitted a question yesterday about reducing file size in Camtasia Studio, and today I received a screencast reply from one of the TechSmith staff. He wrote,

Thanks! Here’s a few answers to your questions:

http://screencast.com/t/QNIh41u4

I was blown away by the screencast reply. I bet the time it takes to create a short video and share it with Jing is probably less than it would take to write it out.

By the way, do you use Jing for anything like this? If so, I’m curious to know how you’re using it.

Clearplay is a DVD player that filters out profanity, extreme violence, and sexuality from movies, toning them down from R to PG-13, or from PG-13 to PG (if you want).

Whereas other filtering methods involve physically altering the media, Clearplay works differently. You download filter files from Clearplay’s site, load them onto a flash drive, plug the flash drive into the Clearplay DVD player, select to apply the filter to the movie, and voila, your R movie is suddenly much more family friendly.

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In the pages section of my site (upper-left corner), I’ve added several new features: a Google Reader blogroll, podroll, and a shared Pandora feed. This blogroll is different from the usual blogroll. This blogroll is a javascript that inserts feeds from my Google Reader. Now you can know exactly what I’m reading, and I don’t have to maintain a blogroll list separate from my feedreader list.

It seems that we’re sharing everything these days — what we read, listen to, who we are, what we do. In this post I provide a little technical writer how-to on these topics.

Sharing Your Google Reader Blogroll

To add a Google Reader blogroll to your site:

1. Go to google.com/reader, log into your Google account, and click Settings in the upper-right corner.

(By the way, as far as feedreaders go, nothing can compare with Google Reader.)

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It turns out that you can get out of a slump or handle pressure situations comfortably by merely changing your facial expressions. I have been trying this over the past several days and have been completely stunned with what happens.

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In looking for an apartment, I found ApartmentRatings.com tremendously helpful. This site allows residents to anonymously rate and comment about their apartment complex.

After reading the comments residents wrote about Hunter’s Woods apartments in Murray, I decided that, although the square footage was about 300 more sq. ft than any surrounding apartment, the area’s crime (namely drug dealing) and the poor maintenance responses by the staff were enough to look elsewhere. The overall ratings appear at the top of the site: Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Abel’s The Content Wrangler has a cool example of using AJAX (asynchronous javascript) in his blog to increase usability. Kevin Shoesmith is the blog designer behind the Wrangler’s makeover. I’m really impressed by the new site design, particularly the AJAX functionality. (Here’s Scott’s more detailed explanation of AJAX.) Overall the site looks more professionally organized and designed than it was before. The software running The Content Wrangler is Expression Engine — I’m not sure how much hacking or customization Kevin had to do to integrate the AJAX functionality.

The site also relies heavily on syndicated content. For example, the Podcast button shows the feeds of a number of different podcasts (see the image below). This in part gives the site more content without requiring Scott to spend hours each day writing new content. If you click on one of the podcast links, such as the Wall Street Journal Technology News, the right column shows the syndicated feed without refreshing the page. Nice.

Occasionally people send me links to check out, and they encourage me to use them as fodder for my blog. I’ve let them build up a bit this past month. Here are three. (I’m copying and pasting from their emails — I hope that’s all right.) I haven’t actually explored them yet, but some might be interesting. Let me know if you have any feedback. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been thinking a lot about how we accumulate an excessive amount of “stuff,” which turns out mostly to be junk. I’m not afflicted with packrat syndrome. And scouting out good deals at garage sales is not my idea of a Saturday morning well-spent. In fact, I don’t even have a garage, nor do I want one. Ninety percent of the people I know who own garages fill them with unnecessary items. Still, in packing and moving, I realized that we have accumulated, in just 3 years time, enough stuff to probably fill a 20 foot trailer. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to think screenshots weren’t necessary when it was obvious where buttons and other links were located. For example, if I wrote something like “Click the Subscribe to the RSS Feed link in the sidebar to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed,” you’d think that people could easily follow this instruction.

However, after watching user behavior, I have changed my mind. I now think screenshots are important to include even when interface elements aren’t necessarily hidden. I’m not saying each step needs a screenshot, but we should be more generous than stingy with screenshots, graphics, diagrams, and other visual elements.

Kim Nathans left a really persuasive comment on a previous post. She writes, Read the rest of this entry »

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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