Last week Will Sansbury mentioned to me that one of his ideas with the Atlanta chapter site was to provide an example or template of how WordPress could be used for chapter sites. I got to thinking, why isn’t there a standard WordPress template for chapters and SIGs to use?

Further, in WordPress 3.0, WordPress MU and regular WordPress will be merged. This is huge, because it means you’ll be able to create child blogs with a regular WordPress install. Essentially we could have one site like stcchapter.org with dozens of child blogs, containing subdomains such as intermountain.stcchapter.org, wyoming.stcchapter.org, and so forth. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Will Sansbury and I gave a webinar to STC community leaders on chapter and SIG websites. Rather than giving a static, one-way presentation about theoretical concepts with web design, or boring people with technical details they probably didn’t care about, we held the webinar more like a design review workshop, not too different from a writing group workshop.

Although I spent three years in a creative writing program holding exactly these types of writing workshops, in which a group of people provide feedback on the story or essay someone submits, it never crossed my mind that designers probably sit around tables doing the exact same thing with websites. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you go from 5 authors to 47, all collaborating on the same documentation? This is the issue Anne Gentle wrestles with in her post Collaborative Authoring — Tools and Costs. She explores everything from Author-it Live to Drupal, Mediawiki, Alfresco, and SharePoint, including cost breakdowns for each tool.

Anne also cites research from Forrester about the rising trend of collaborative authoring:

37% of organizations surveyed in Forrester’s Q4 2008 enterprise and SMB software survey consider implementing a collaboration strategy important in 2009

My Thoughts:

I think collaborative authoring will continue to grow in the future. Large, expensive solutions may give way to more popular, open-source options. As more groups adopt open-source solutions, the open-source solutions will become stronger. Any time you have thousands of developers and users behind a platform, they create a surge of extensions and themes, hacks and tutorials, enhancements and workarounds.

No single project team can compete with the collective contributions of thousands of developers on a global scale. And just maybe — here’s a thought — the best platforms for collaborative authoring are those platforms that are collaboratively constructed themselves.

I read a blog post the other day that I can’t stop thinking about. In the Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt writes,

The main issue for me is between authoring static in-house documents using single-sourcing methods before publishing, or capturing information sources dynamically after publishing from online social networks, linked data sources, and knowledge mashups.

The myth of single-source authoring is that it actually has a life in the future and remains a viable goal for many information developers. With so many mega-trends against it—such as the belief that static authoring from a single vantage point from a single author paid by a single organization is a workable system—seems ludicrous. Instead, we should be looking to capture, sequence, and give context to the wealth of rich content already published in context from the Web. Collaborating with the many subject experts, authors, videographers, bloggers, tweeters, and writers coming together on the Web with shared interests will be powerful if it can be harnessed.

The myth of single sourcing

Michael undercuts the idea that you can create help from a single author working from a single perspective in a single point in the organization. To add to this scenario, usually that author is an outsider to both the environment and business processes he or she is documenting. Further, the author usually moves on to another project as soon as the software is released.

This morning I had a meeting downtown at SLC headquarters. I’ve become accustomed to wearing business casual clothes to work, but at headquarters, I have to wear a full suit because that’s the dress code. In an early morning meeting, I listened to several department leads explain my new project. It would involve extensive knowledge of cataloging and archiving techniques, a robust off-the-shelf system that had been customized, five main divisions or modules to conquer, each with their own resource leads, about 200 constantly rotating users complementing a core group of specialists, and an aggressive time frame.
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At the Intermountain STC workshop this morning, we talked about how to build an online presence. During my portion of the workshop, I facilitated a discussion using Twitter. With the dozen participants, all sitting in front of computers with Internet access, I told them to go to Search.Twitter.com and search for the #imstc hashtag.

I posed a question for them to answer via Twitter. They responded, including the #imstc hashtag. When you include a hashtag in your tweet (placing it anywhere), you can read an aggregated view of all tweets tagged with that hashtag at search.twitter.com. After everyone responded, we read through the responses out loud and discussed them a bit.

The question I posed on Twitter

When the discussion ended, I posed a new question for them to answer on Twitter and gave them a few minutes to respond. Then we read through the answers one by one, looked at trends and discussed them for a while. We did this about 4-5 times over the course of an hour. You can read the thread here.

The technique worked well because it required everyone to stay engaged. During most presentations, you can sit back and turn on your passive listening mode. But if you’re periodically interacting on Twitter to respond or analyze a question, it keeps you awake. And as a presenter, it’s a lot more fun when everyone is engaged like this.

I’m growing tired of presentations that are little more than lectures, so I’m going to experiment with more user-led techniques like this. Unfortunately, available wi fi at chapter meetings or conferences with participants who have computers or mobile data devices is pretty rare. But if you do have the opportunity, definitely try incorporating Twitter, even if only for Q&A at the end of your presentation.

Last week I listened to David Peralty give feedback to Jeff Chandler about his WordPress Weekly and WPTavern.com projects (see episode 75). David praised the community and visibility that Jeff had created through his weekly podcast and forum, in addition to his WPTavern.com site, but noted that he was aware Jeff hadn’t reached the monetization goals he hoped to achieve.

In other words, Jeff has done a tremendous job at creating a community and audience for his site and podcast, but he hasn’t found a way to make real money off his activities. If you monetize your online activities, you can then justify and devote more time to the activities to establish and grow your community.

But if you can’t make any money, it’s hard to justify spending so much time online. And if you can’t spend the necessary time online to build your community, your site or podcast won’t take off.

Although David was critiquing Jeff, I felt like he could have been equally speaking to me. I listened carefully, waiting for the key ingredient Jeff was missing. What was he not doing? What was he not seeing? How does one move from a hobby site/podcast that has a growing enthusiasm to one that makes enough money to sustain you full time?
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Google recently released Sidewiki, a new feature in the Google toolbar that allows you to add comments in a pop-out sidebar that appears beside every page on the web. It’s not a typical wiki — you can’t edit what other people write. You can only add another comment about the page. Read the rest of this entry »

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As a follow-up to my review of Anne Gentle’s book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, I also interviewed her for a podcast. Now you can listen to Anne talk about some of the concepts in her book in a more personal way through the headphones of your iPod. In this 40 minute podcast, we cover questions such as the following:

• What’s the first step in connecting with your users?
• Why are wikis used more internally than externally?
• How can you build trust with users?
• What’s the 90-9-1 percent rule and how can you change the 1 percent part?
• What three steps can you follow for any strategy with social media?
• What is “read wear” and how can you make that content more visible?
• What happens when you break the listen-participate-share-then-lead model?
• How can you use Twitter into your documentation strategy?
• What mindset is antithetical to building conversations and communities with your users?

Read the rest of this entry »

We launched a new website for the STC-Intermountain chapter this week. We’re using WordPress as the platform. The theme is Streamline from Studio Press. One of the more interesting parts of the site is our Member List page, which shows every registered site user. Usually WordPress only allows you to generate a list of site authors. Authors are people who have written a post. But with the Member List plugin, you can show users of any role. The names of the users listed on the Member List page link to the author pages, where you can read an extended profile of the member. Read the rest of this entry »

On the web, the standard economic model is to give products away for free — from storage to email, music, news, access, and other information. For companies to survive in an economy of free, they have to spin their business models in creative ways, finding profits indirectly, such as through lite/pro versions, cross-subsidies, advertising, or appeals to the attention economy. In the economics of free, writers face particular challenges because their product is information, which is often intangible, and the intangible is almost always free.

Experimenting with Free

My sister is up from Florida visiting this week, and we’ve been talking about iPhone apps, because her husband already created a couple apps, and their million-dollar app idea is just around the corner. My brother-in-law Sean’s first iPhone app, Box of Socks, sold for 99 cents, like most others. Not seeing much profit, he decided to release a lite, single-level version version for free. During the first week, he saw a 50% increase in sales, but after the week, sales returned to normal.

His other application, Tap Dots, ran a similar course. After three months, the application had 400 downloads. Discouraged by the lack of success, he decided to make the entire application free. As a free app, he had 3,000 downloads in four days.

One attempt in making the application free, Sean explained, was to bump up the product’s visibility. If you can get in the top 25 most popular downloads, the sales of your app take off dramatically, because people look for new apps in this top 25 list. The more people download your app, the more visibility you receive, and the more visibility you receive, the more people download your app — the process feeds on itself and pushes you upward. The free giveaway is just one technique to try to move into that hyper-downloaded space. Read the rest of this entry »