I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson » Web 2.0

Podcast: Documentation in the Cloud

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

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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What Would a WordPress Template for Chapter Sites Look Like?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:00:08 +0000

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.

For those chapters that just wanted a simple web solution, they could create a child blog from this site. They could also point their regular domain to the site. The themes and plugins available in child blogs are dependent on what the parent blog chooses to provide.

I think the idea of providing a site template from WordPress is ingenious. It made me think about exactly what a chapter WordPress template would look like. I wish I could say our Intermountain-STC site is a perfect example, but it’s not (not yet anyway). I spent a good chunk of time this weekend tweaking a few things. Here are several elements that I think a chapter WordPress template would have.

Subpage Lists

To accommodate this simplicity, the sidebars for each of the pages should show all the subpages for the current page. And here the amount of content in the sidebar can be as abundant as you want, from three page links to thirty or more. The submenu page list hides the complexity. (Fortunately, showing a list of subpages for the current page is simple with the LJ Subpages Widget plugin.)

Subpages appear on right for the selected page, allowing you to hide the complexity of information up front and only show the information when a user is on the relevant page

Custom Sidebars

Implementing custom sidebars feature takes the concept of the subpage lists to another level. Each main page should not only show the subpage list for the current page but also have an entirely unique sidebar showing content specific to that page.

Why? Two reasons. If you have the same sidebar content for each page, the reader’s eye becomes blind to it. So even if you have the changing subpage list at the top, the reader may not notice the changing links if the rest of the sidebar remains the same. But if the entire sidebar changes for each of the seven or eight main pages, that’s something you notice. The reader can anticipate that the sidebar content will contain unique content for the specific page he or she is viewing.

The sidebars are unique for each page the user is on. For example, with the Jobs page, the user can see information on subscribing to job email alerts and a jobs RSS feed.

Second, having a custom sidebar for your page gives you more room to present information for that page in an attractive format. You can give more information to the reader above the fold, without having to scroll.

Author Pages

Above all else, a chapter site should be collaborative. Multiple chapter members should be able to access it, author content, and publish. You want to highlight and promote the collaborative nature of the site. Posts usually contain a byline, and the byline is a hyperlink to the author’s name that shows the author’s bio and posts. The default author template called is the author.php page, so you can customize this page to show the author’s picture and bio information at the top, like this:

Author pages show contact information, profile text, and posts published by the author

You can also show a list of authors in your sidebar (see the lower-right section of the image above).

Special Widget Sections

One of the cool things about WordPress is the drag-and-drop widget feature. You drag the widgets you want into the sections on the right. Most people don’t realize that you can create additional sections for your widgets that map to different areas of your templates. For example, you can create 10 or more special sections that correspond with the different pages. This way the people who maintain the site can configure the sidebars without even touching the code.

In the following screenshot, you can see that I’ve created a new sidebar section for each of my main pages. You can now drag whatever widgets you want into each of those sections, depending on what you want in the sidebar for that page. This is one way you transform WordPress into a CMS.

You can create new sections for your widgets

Custom Homepage

Rather than showing About information or a list of the latest posts, I think the home page best serves its purpose by showing the next chapter meeting, the latest jobs added to the site, the latest blog posts, and general news. The home page of a chapter site should give you a summary of all the important information you may need to know.

The home page shows a summary of the most important information

These are just my initial thoughts about what a chapter WordPress template might include. I’m currently trying to convert the Intermountain-STC.org site into exactly this template. Any thoughts on what else a chapter or SIG site would need?

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Fragmented Communities and the Chapter/SIG Web Site Problem

Tom Johnson — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:33:18 +0000

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.

Design Reviews

Regardless of the topic, the methodology of the workshop is mostly the same. In a tactful way, you explain what works well and what could be improved. Others either agree or disagree with your analysis, and hopefully they explain why. The only difference between critiquing creative stories and websites is in the questions you ask. Rather than ask, what’s the story here? Are the characters believable? Does it have arc? You ask questions about findability, simplicity, readability, and so forth.

I found that in looking at websites, my feedback could be grouped into about seven categories:

Purpose

What are you trying to achieve with the site?
What do you want the audience to do on the site?
What do you want feedback about?

Findability

What are some things your users might be looking for? Is it easy to find them?
If you search for something, are the results accurate?

Simplicity

Is the site navigation simple to understand?
How does the site handle submenus to provide additional information?
Is the site busy?
Is there enough white space in the site?

Readability

How easy is it to read the content?
Is the font size, column width, leading, and typography working together in a readable way?
Can I subscribe to the content with Facebook, Twitter, RSS, or e-mail to read it in the format I want?
Are the paragraphs small, broken up with lists, blockquotes, and other formatting varieties?

Interactivity

Can I add comments on things I read?
Can I read other people’s comments and reply to their comments in a threaded way?
Can I contact someone through an email address or contact form? If a contact form, do I know where it goes or if it sent correctly?
If I have a job to post, can I submit the details myself? Can I even post it myself?

Content Appeal

Is the content interesting to read?
Is the content current?
Can multiple people author and maintain content, so that all the burden isn’t placed on one person?
Do you integrate your news into real-time articles/posts on the site?

Design Appeal

Where do my eyes focus naturally focus on the site?
Are there any design element repeated?
Is the site attractive to look at? Why or why not?

For more on running a design review, see Scott Oberkun’s How to Run a Design Critique and Makiko Itho’s The Delicate Art of (Web) Design Critique.

Trends from the Analysis

If you go through each of these categories, you usually find something worthwhile to say. We analyzed six different sites: Quality Process SIG, Twin Cities, Heartland, Tech Editing SIG, Orlando, and the Contracting and Independent Consulting SIG.

The webinar description suggested that we would explore ways to build attractive online sites where members could interact and find value, because fewer and fewer people are physically gathering for meetings.

As we moved through the sites, it was clear that a lot of people were trying to move in exactly this direction — towards collaboration and participation. The Quality Process SIG adopted SharePoint to make it easy for numerous people to author content. Twin Cites integrated a social networking component in a custom CMS where members could friend each other, add personal details, and even write blog posts. Orlando was in the process of moving their content to WordPress because their old site was a “dinosaur.” The Tech Editing SIG built their content on a wiki platform containing a section that showed posts from their email list discussions in an automated way.

What’s Missing

To enable participation and collaboration, many of the platforms allowed you to comment, subscribe, interact, log in, and manage the content. This makes sense.

But the platform is only the first step. Whether you’re using WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, SharePoint, Ning, or any other Web 2.0-capable technology, a larger ingredient is missing from the recipe for a thriving online site where members naturally gravitate to for interaction. Your site can be as interactive as anything can be, and yet still remain dormant, unused, unexplored, rarely visited, and rarely even noticed unless you provide a reason for people to come together as a community.

For example, although the Twin Cities site offers the ability to friend others, blog, and add personal details about your location, interests, and other details, it isn’t generating the activity you see on Facebook.

What’s interesting about Facebook isn’t that it allows you to write on other people’s walls, provide status updates, or add other people as friends. What’s interesting is that so many people are on Facebook, checking it and posting to it daily or even hourly.

Is it possible to create an online platform that technical communicators would use with as much popularity as Facebook or Twitter or even Stack Overflow?

The problem, I think, is in gathering a critical mass of community. Chapters are so small, it’s hard to see much activity from members on a site. For example, our chapter now has about 20 members (as opposed to about 75 from last year). To think we’ll convert the site into a thriving hub of online interaction is an illusion. You need thousands of people to build up the exchanges that take place in a popular community. When you have the thousands of people coming to your site every day, they begin to interact, and the interactions fuel more comments and replies and posts. At some point, you have a thriving community. But you don’t build a community without a critical mass of participation.

Without a critical mass of people to form a community, you end up with a dormant-looking site — for example, what most chapter sites look like.

The Ning Community Scott Abel created comes closest to the thriving online site where members can interact, but even that site seems underused. I just logged into the other day for the first time in months.

Again, the main problem is in the critical mass. There just aren’t enough people in chapters to form a presence on a site. Chapters and SIGs fragment the already small online technical communicator audience.

Additionally, although SIGs have greater potential for online interaction, most of the activity is often better expressed through e-mail listservs and threaded forum discussions. As old-school as email or forums are, they’re fast, immediate, and reach almost everyone.

The Solution?

I’m not really sure what solution is for chapter and SIG sites to move from dormant sites to thriving hubs of interaction. Technical writers are a small niche of overall people on the web, and when you fragment that already small niche into even smaller groups of chapters and SIGs, they never seem to come together in a critical mass of people.

This problem isn’t unique to our group. It’s a problem that stems for many independent publishing locations and sites. Conversations are taking place on blogs here and there, email listservs here and there, forums here and there, and the consequence is a bunch of whispers that you can’t hear (unless you look in each of the individual places).

I believe the solution won’t involve centralizing the information/people into one site and location. Instead, it will involve aggregating the sources through RSS and other technology.

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Collaborative Authoring Trends and Costs

Tom Johnson — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:55:28 +0000

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.

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Why Help Authoring Tools Will Fade

Tom Johnson — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:30:26 +0000

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.

As I listened and glanced through the archiving and cataloging procedures (did you know there’s a Society of American Archivists, and that they have in-depth protocols for how things should be done?), I realized that learning the business process surrounding the application would require complete immersion in each of the five divisions over the course of several months. I would need to constantly interview subject matter experts, participate in the actual archiving and cataloging processes, and make sure everything I created was reviewed, checked, and edited for accuracy by each of the five major subject matter experts. The end documentation would probably be several hundred pages for the initial release.

Keep in mind that I have about three other concurrent projects that I’m working on with approaching deadlines (unlike developers, no writer ever gets to work on just one project). Could I pull something together by February/March?

At this point, Michael’s post was resonating like a blinking banner in my head. Authoring from a single vantage point from a single author is … ludicrous.

Even if I were to import existing documents and materials from SMEs into a HAT, who would own it after I finished? Would I become a permanent installation in the department, constantly processing updates, verifying instructional clarity, addressing gaps and making edits? If not, would the documentation become stale six months after release, when SMEs decided to change their business processes?

In an organization where several thousand people have only a handful of actual technical writers, we’re a scarce resource. I bounce from project to project, like a little visiting angel (or devil) who works a little documentation magic and then moves on.

Another group on my team is tackling an even larger project, one that involves complex financials. They’re using Flare. They started using X-Edit and entitled a handful of business writers to contribute content with it, but X-Edit proved either too buggy or unworkable. Now the business SMEs are passing Word documents to the guys with Flare, who are inputting the information into the HAT. After release, the idea is to have the business department own the documentation and continue making updates using Flare. It will be interesting to see if they actually do it.

In thinking about these robust software scenarios, where products require extensive knowledge of business processes, have elaborate interfaces with hundreds of possible tasks, and are run by dozens of specialists constantly refining their own business processes, is there any other platform besides a wiki that can actually work? What else can you use to enable 10 different authors to make simultaneous updates, to maintain the documentation after the release? How else can you infuse the documentation with the intricacies of a department’s business processes?

Using any of the standard authoring tools — Flare, RoboHelp, Author-It, Doc-to-Help — leaves you with the ridiculous model of a single author working from a single vantage point from a single organization trying to pull together an ocean of information. Because that model is untenable and unscalable, HATs will fade in favor of collaborative web-based authoring technologies.

Note: Stay tuned for more on this topic. I’m interviewing Michael for a podcast this weekend. It turns out he practically lives in my backyard.

WordPress note for Thanksgiving: Remember that I do WordPress consulting, including design, development, and implementation of WordPress sites. Thanksgiving is a perfect weekend to get your blog online. If you need my help, contact me. Even if it’s only a small site tweak, such as changing font sizes or integrating Share This buttons, I can help you out.

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How to Incorporate Twitter into Your Presentation

Tom Johnson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:16:34 +0000

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.

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The Long Tail of Online Profitability

Tom Johnson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:27:11 +0000

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?

I have a few notes, gathered from anecdotes and people I know:

Just recently Cameron Moll, a well-known web designer whose blog is Authentic Boredom, quit his job and turned to freelance full-time. He sells posters and job listings on his site and does some freelance work, I believe.
A basketball buddy of mine explained that, according to Jason Van Orden (who creates the Internet Business Mastery podcast), I should be making $1 per month for every follower I have with my site. Translating that, I should be pulling in more than $2,000 + every month.
My former brother-in-law taught me that information products about making money online are more profitable than selling regular products. He’s an eBay mogul who earns thousands of dollars teaching people how to drop-ship products on eBay. The business of teaching others how to drop-ship is more profitable than actually drop-shipping.
About a year ago Jane kept prodding me to sell some ads in my sidebar. I finally did, mostly by contacting companies separately and pitching ads, and it worked. But ad revenue doesn’t scale. I only have about 12 spaces there. (By the way, there’s an empty spot, if you’re interested.)

Lately I have been mostly resigned to the idea that “information wants to be free,” and that the real benefit of having a blog or podcast is the capitalization on the attention economy of my audience, as cool and unprofitable as it sounds.

But the other day I was talking with Sean, my brother-in-law (a different one), who is an interactive programmer and runs his own company, HD Interactive. Sean manages a successful online business, so I asked him what I am missing. What is that missing element that I could adjust so that I would be profitable? Create a premium version of the podcast? An online site with video tutorials for WordPress or other software? Sponsored posts? WordPress blog design projects? T-shirts? Webinars? e-books? A forum?

As I talked with Sean, it became clear to me that no single product would provide an online revenue model of the sort I’m searching for. There is no missing ingredient. Rather, the revenue model of the Internet is the Long Tail. Of course! I should have seen it coming.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Long Tail, it’s a model by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson and purports that online stores such as Amazon.com make more from long-term sales of their niche products than they do by selling mainstream products. For example, the Grateful Dead Mug from 1979 that someone purchases from your online store for $5 combines with a thousand other low-selling, inexpensive niche products to surpass the income that you make from selling top-of-the-chart music CDs or other mainstream products.

The neat thing about the Long Tail is that it seems to apply to so many phenomenon online, not just revenue. There’s a long tail of participation. A long tail of travel. There’s even a Long Tail blog, where all of this is discussed. I never thought the Long Tail could apply to my attempts to make money online.

But as I spoke with Sean, I realized that the revenue stream for online activities really is the Long Tail. You won’t make your fortune selling one product or service (even though some have). Instead, it’s the combination of various revenue streams, of selling a variety of products, that combines to create an income to equal your goals.

For example, you sell a premium and paid version of a podcast, and maybe 50 people sign up for the premium version. You sell ads in your sidebar, and maybe a dozen sign up. You create a forum and offer a tiered membership, and some more sign up. You sell T-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia, and some more sign up. You sell video tutorials and e-books and print books, and more sign up. You present at conferences and coordinate webinars, and more sign up. You offer one-on-one tutorials and online training, and more sign up. Any of these methods alone would produce income that is weak and unsustainable, but the combination of them all accrues a revenue stream that is substantial.

Now that I think about it, this is also the strategy Jason Van Orden recommends in a podcast with a hobby geneologist (though I didn’t realize it at the time).

The Long Tail may be the model underlying a number of phenomenon on the Internet. It may also be the best answer to the conundrum of making money online from a popular blog or podcast.

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Google Releases Sidewiki and Adds to the Growing Trend of Conversation

Tom Johnson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:44:10 +0000

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.

After you install the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki, look for the Sidewiki button on your Google toolbar (see image below). When you click it, it expands a sidepane for the page you’re viewing. Then just add and publish a comment.

Google's Sidewiki opens a pane on the right of a web page where you can add a comment

Google’s Sidewiki only works in Firefox or Internet Explorer (not yet in Chrome). You can read more about Google Sidewiki here.

Google Sidewiki furthers the idea of the web as a conversation. “Conversation” is also the word on many people’s minds in the tech comm field right now. Gordon Mclean says if there was one word he wanted to focus on in his presentation at Technical Communication UK, it was “conversation.” Gordon writes,

My presentation had a theme, a single word that I was focussing on, so throughout the first day, in all the sessions I attended, I was listening out for that word. … The word I was looking for throughout the first day was “conversation”, and I was pleasantly surprised when I heard it crop up in the later sessions of the second day and I admit I was quite pleased when the closing speaker, RJ Jacquez from Adobe both mentioned my presentation and had a similar view to mine.

David Farbey also noted the emerging theme of conversation at the Tech Comm UK conference:

“Conversation” emerged as a major theme of the conference. Various speakers touched on aspects of new media and social media as ways of breaking down conventional barriers between writers and readers. My own presentation was about the importance of talking to users, and was largely very similar to the presentation I gave in Vienna in June, but also included interim data from my 2009 User Documentation Survey which is ongoing.

Conversation is also the dominant theme of Anne Gentle’s recent book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. And it’s a theme in Ginny Redish’s book, Letting Go of the Words.

In short, conversation is a trend that only continues to grow. How are you incorporating conversation into your documentation?

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Podcast with Anne Gentle about her Conversation and Community book

Tom Johnson — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:39:41 +0000

Download MP3
Length: 40 min.

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?

Additional Resources

Companion site to Conversation and Community on XML Press
Anne Gentle’s blog
XML Press
Tweets converted into T-shirt themes
Posts about Participation Inequality (the 90-9-1 rule)
Sarrah Maddox blog
Stewart Mader
Review by Jefro
Review from Sarah Maddox. (Sarah’s post also lists other reviews.)

To contact Anne, see the contact button on her blog, Just Write Click.

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New Intermountain-STC Chapter Site

Tom Johnson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:19:12 +0000

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.

In trying to come up with a strategy for the site, we wanted to put news on the front page, with meetings and jobs as the prominent buttons. The news, jobs, and meetings pages are post categories, so adding new posts updates the RSS feed, which also auto-generates a new post across Twitter. One of the jobs pages also incorporates a feed from Indeed.com, which provides more listings than the few jobs submitted by local companies.

The front page has a lot of images, which it pulls into a flash slideshow from the Featured Content Gallery plugin. It’s part of the Streamline theme, but you can incorporate this plugin into any WordPress site.

I’ve launched a few sites before, and I can tell you that the content is almost always more interesting than the format. People may raise an eyebrow about the new design, but unless the content is engaging, the site will lack appeal. Because of this, we’re trying to feature more regular news on the home page. These news articles may include member spotlights, president’s messages, reviews about articles in the the STC magazines, notes from board meetings, announcements about chapter meetings, and anything else we can conjure up.