A few months ago, I started to write a post about the cultural shift blogging would create in the near and long-term future. I didn’t get very far and quickly became mired in speculation. But when I learned today that RJ Jacquez now has a blog, I started to remember some of my predictions. Basically, it goes like this:

1. Amateur bloggers start to saturate Google with content that controls the reputation of company products.
2. Companies, fearing a complete loss of voice, start joining the blogosphere in masses.
3. With so many people writing and publishing daily, information grows to a ridiculous degree and becomes difficult to manage.
4. Search becomes the only way to find anything.
5. Writers, especially those gifted at SEO and content creation, and who have a lot of Google karma/page rank, become major corporate players, with more prestige than ever before.

And right about there I didn’t know what came next. I think at some point there’s a major shift and people move away from the web altogether, embracing a new form. But I couldn’t figure out the details.

Anyway, RJ Jacquez from Adobe, Mike Hamilton from Madcap Software, and Alan Porter from WebWorks all have blogs. I suspect AuthorIt will eventually launch a blog, and the dozens of other software vendors. They’re realizing that it’s marketing suicide to be offline and silent.

Although these bloggers are all intelligent, clear writers, with solid reputations to give them an authoritative presence, the question is whether they will have the creative muse to write day after day in a way that engages readers. We’ll find out.

—————-

photo from UCDavis

I recently created a collaborative site called Read Scriptures Together. It probably won’t appeal to most readers of my blog, but I thought I’d at least mention it. In case you haven’t read my About page, I’m a technical writer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We’re commonly known as the Mormons. I work in the IT department writing help material for software applications the Church creates.

I’m also an active member of the Church, and like most male members, served a mission in Venezuela for two years when I was 19. (I’m now 32.) My wife is a lifetime member, but I joined the Church at 15. Jane and I were married in the Manti temple in Utah after only four months of dating at BYU.

I’ve had the idea for a collaborative scripture reading site for a while. About 5 months ago I created a Ning group and experimented with a beta version of the site. We had about 20 members (mostly family and friends), with at least a quarter of them participating regularly. The site was taking off. But then I fell behind in my reading, I became frustrated with Ning (the social network software I was using), and the site lost momentum. It went into a state of dormancy for a few months.

A couple of weeks ago at Church I realized I was slipping into a passive, automatic mode – going through the motions, but not really feeling passionate or engaged. I thought about the collaborative scripture reading project I had going a few months back, and decided to resurrect it, only this time using WordPress, following a reading schedule that synced with the Sunday School curriculum, and opening it to the general public.

I’m not sure if this version will be more successful, but I know that it engages me more. I am simply accustomed to the blog format, to reading and commenting and viewing others’ comments. I think applying social media to a traditionally print-based, physical format may have some interesting results. Right now, I’m the only one commenting on the site. But maybe it will grow into something larger. Anyone is welcome to participate.

You may belong to another faith, or to another group, such as a book club or a creative writing group. You can apply the same type of collaborative model to any situation. The cool thing about WordPress is its flexibility. You can bend it to serve almost any need. (If you remember, I also used WordPress to create my Writer River site.)

But really the technical part is easy. The community is much harder to create and keep going. Some collaborative blog sites, like Times and Seasons, have a tremendous energy behind them, and it is entirely due to the community of readers and participants. Without community, many authors lose motivation to keep writing.

In a nation that prides itself on its freedom of expression comes this ridiculous story—Typo Vigilantes Answer To The Letter Of The Law—featured in The Arizona Republic. The story starts our like this:

“Two self-anointed grammar vigilantes who toured the nation removing typos from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon...In addition to being banned from national parks for a year, the defendants, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government property, are banned from modifying any public signs. They also must pay $3,035 to repair the Grand Canyon sign.

That’s right. You read that correctly, the U.S. Federal government prosecuted the most vicious syndicate of criminals our country has ever seen, the members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League. Their crime? Correcting a “historic” sign at the Desert View Watchtower, part of Grand Canyon National Park. See the criminal complaint (PDF).

It all started harmlessly enough. TEAL members Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson “discovered a hand-rendered fiberboard sign with yellow lettering with a black background,” Deck wrote in the TEAL blog—which has been shut down as part of the plea agreement—and “used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with white-out and added a comma.”

“I know today was supposed to be my day off from typo-hunting, but if I may be permitted to quote that most revered of android law enforcers, Inspector Gadget, ‘Always on duty!’ I can’t shut it off,” he wrote on the TEAL blog, according to prosecutors, adding: “Will we never be free from the shackles of apostrophic misunderstanding, even in a place surrounded by natural beauty?”

According to an Associated Press article on the plea agreement, TEAL was forced to take down their popular website and blog, in exchange for probation. The alternative was jail time, a less-than-attractive option. Additionally, AP reported, “The misspelled word ‘emense’ was not fixed, Deck wrote, because he “was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further. ... Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight,” Deck wrote.

Where Are The Journalists When You Need Them?

The article is pathetic and wouldn’t earn a college journalism student a passing grade. It reads more like a press release for government prosecutors, than a news article, lacking in any details about the case from the defendants side of the story. A proper article would have included the cost of prosecuting the offenders (the story is much more interesting if you know the ROI of the effort—the amount of money the government spent prosecuting these guys to collect a couple of thousand dollars in fines), what triggered the investigation, and why the defendants lawyer failed to win the case. In fact, the story should have included quotes from the attorney, from family and friends of the defendants, and opinions from others. Even the most basic of journalistic principles—showing both sides of the story—was missing from the articles written by the mainstream media. While the defendants are, pursuant to the plea agreement, barred from discussing this issue with anyone until August 11, 2009, there are certainly others, most notably the two other TEAL members—Josh Roberts and Jane Connolly—that could have added balance to the story.

While this corrective action was perhaps not the brightest thing these 28-year-old typo-hunters did on their trek across America to “stamp out as many typos as they could find,” I’m not sure it was worthy of criminal prosecution. Come on, what a waste of taxpayer funds! I can understand making someone pay for damaging an item (the sign) that does not belong to them, even if for the best of reasons. But making them take their website down (please, those photos are already all over the web) and preventing them from encouraging others to fix typographic errors, that’s just prosecutorial grandstanding. Besides, anyone who knows anything about how the internet works knows you can search a variety of online archives and find the web pages the government hoped to protect us from with just a few keystrokes.

The TEAL website is now out-of-commission and a message posted in place of the content that was published there prior to the plea agreement says: “Statement on the signage of our National Parks and public lands to come”. Another plea agreement condition, I’m certain.

It’s obvious to me that these typo-hating do-gooders needed a much better attorney than the lame-ass one who represented them. I’d wager that if the guys would have been represented by one of the many famous television attorneys that make their living taking on the government in high profile cases like those showcased on Lou Dobbs or Anderson Cooper 360, this case would have ended up with much different results. However, stranger things have happened when government prosecutors are determined to make an example of well-meaning citizens.

Ironically, this action by the federal government is probably one of the best things that could ever happen to Deck and company. The controversy stirs interest from talk shows, publishers and conference organizers. The TEAL team will now be more in-demand than they already were. This is the Madonna school of marketing. Remember the book Sex? It stirred so much controversy that some library patrons were removing (stealing) the book from the library and then burning it. While this action removed the book from the library shelves for a short time, it also increased sales of the books (and revenue to Madonna and her publisher—not to mention lots of free publicity) because when librarians noticed the books were missing, they reordered replacement copies. The book burners also helped Sex earn the 19th spot on the American Library Association 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books list. The same type of hype can be generated by the government action against TEAL. I’d expect these guys to get a great coffee table book deal, interviews on dozens of television shows and news programs, and really high internet traffic when they again flip the switch on their now banned website.

Jeff Deck was supposed to be the keynote speaker at our Documentation and Training East 2008 conference. Because the conditions of the plea agreement prevent him from detailing his adventures until next year, we’ve invited Deck to tell his story at next year’s event. Can you imagine the advertisement? Previously barred by the U.S. Federal Government from telling you his story at last year’s event....” It’s a marketing gold mine. And a bargain at $3035 plus attorney fees. The possibilities are endless. And, they’ve got just under a year to prepare for the onslaught of media attention they can get if they orchestrate things correctly. I hope they have a better agent than they did attorney.

Supporting TEAL

I surfed the net to see if there are still TEAL t-shirts available. Of course, there are. Buy one today!

TEAL: The Members

About TEAL

Twing.com, a powerful new search engine dedicated to finding information within forums and communities, today announced it’s taken the ‘beta’ label off its logo. “Initial response to our product has been great and after making changes based on feedback along with adding new features, we feel the product is ready for prime time,” say General Manager Kevin Shea. You’ll have to check out the site yourself to see if you agree.

Twing recently added more features for members and non-members alike. “We’ve added a handy Saved Search feature so users can now easily keep track of their favorite searches and get updated results,” says Shea. “Additionally, a useful and fun tool is our new Buzz Graphs feature, which allows visitors to see the popularity of various terms within the online community space, as well as refine terms by category and share the results with colleagues.”

Some of our readers might find searching Twing fun (you know who you are) or perhaps, a big waste of time. We didn’t find too much relevant content when we searched for “Darwin Information Typing Architecture” (a simple Google search was far more useful in this scenario). However, a search for “XML” and another for “iPod” clearly illustrated the value of this type of niche search. For brand managers, it’s a potentially valuable tool offering insight into what’s being said about products and companies,” says Shea. Twing is also in the process of adding a variety of tools for Forum Owners as well.

The key thing to know about Twing, according to Director of Product Management Scott Germaise, is that, “Twing.com searches across real conversations between real people in the forum space. Forum search can now take its place next to blog search as an important tool for users to seek out and participate in online social spaces.” According to Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2, 2007, those who read online forums account for 28 percent of US Consumers – even more than blogs, which account for 25 percent. In terms of participation, 18 percent contribute to online forums, whereas only 14 percent comment on blogs, with 11 percent maintaining their own blog.

“Online forums are an established – yet growing – medium people have been using even prior to blogs and social networks,” says Germaise. “But those who seek out online discussions to ask questions, seek and offer advice and so on haven’t had an effective means to seek out these spaces until now. Our goal is to help people find appropriate venues to participate in discussions by providing both a forum search and a directory resource.”

In addition to Twing’s multiple search options, the site offers advanced filtering and sorting tools so people can effectively search forums in ways not available until the advent of Twing.com. The company also seeks to build even more awareness of the online forum space. Twing.com is easily used by entering search terms to quickly locate specific discussions and/or topics. Visitors can register – for free – to become a Twing.com member, participate in Twing.com’s forums and take advantage of current and upcoming personalization options.

These types of technologies are making possible new and useful views into existing information channels. For instance, if Twing were to add an RSS feed option, search results could be syndicated by topic or keyword on a site like The Content Wrangler Community. There are tools already taking advantage of this approach. MarkMail, powered by Mark Logic Server, is also a useful search engine that allows you to look inside the discussions that occur on listservs. They already have the RSS option available. Smart. And, a trend we’re sure is going to continue.

See also, Forget Listserv Digests—You’ve Got MarkMail: Interview With Jason Hunter, Mark Logic

Many technical writers, content managers and information architects work on software development teams, or at least tangentially to them. You may have heard of Google’s Summer of Code or BarCamp or PodCamp and wondered, like Janet Swisher did at A Techie Tech Writer, why aren’t there more free real-life community events for technical writers?

A collaborative, creative event does exist for technical writers - it’s the BookSprint (read Anne Gentle’s blog post about the event), originated and hosted by FLOSS Manuals. A BookSprint functions like a week-long workshop where writers come together to learn how to write good user documentation. BookSprints are a social experience where writers form a community who share common goals and experiences.

If you’ve used open source software before, you know that support and documentation are two of the success factors for an open source project - without a community assisting with these two components, open source software doesn’t reach its full potential. This crossroads is where Adam Hyde and FLOSS Manuals comes in. FLOSS Manuals, located at flossmanuals.net, is a collection of manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source software. The FLOSS acronym stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The manuals are friendly and simple, and they are intended to encourage people to explore the wide range of free, open source alternatives to expensive and restrictively licensed software.

At FLOSS Manuals can find a manual for the One Laptop Per Child XO computer, the education project whose goal was to produce a $100 laptop for children of the world using all open source software. Adam is the founder of the FLOSS Manuals Foundation. Adam leads the community of free documentation writers that publish free manuals about free software across multiple languages. Adam offered the FLOSS Manuals tool chain to One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) last year, and OLPC volunteer Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick was working on the OLPC documentation and immediately saw the benefits of the platform for wiki writing and collaboration, plus the promise of PDF publishing and multiple language translations.

Currently, Anne and Adam are inviting writers who are knowledgeable about the XO laptop to a BookSprint to update the documentation for the XO laptop and its operating system, Sugar. The last week of August in Austin Texas, writers will give a week’s time to be curators of information housed in wikis and websites everywhere, bringing it all together into the FLOSS Manual TWiki implementation to be ready for online viewing or gorgeous print output.

If you’d like to be involved by donating money, you can go to flossmanuals.net/donate and give any amount, but here are some ideas:

• $500 would provide hotel accommodations for a writer
• $250 would provide a catered lunch for all the writers
• $100 would provide gas money for many writers all week

If you have other ideas for getting involved, please contact Anne Gentle at annegentle at justwriteclick dot com with your ideas. 

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.”

As we walked, I started to wonder why I myself would want it. Each day I’m bombarded with enough information to bury me. Email, tweets, instant messages, phone calls, SMS, blog comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, spam, newsletters, invitations to LinkedIn, Pulse, Plaxo, RSS feeds — it all gets to be like noise. Communication noise.

In my inbox now, I have 784+ unread messages. Most I’ve never opened because they aren’t … anything. In my RSS feeds, Google Reader constantly tells me I have 1,000+ unread posts. The comments on my blog pour day after day, whether I write new posts or not.

Sometimes the communication noise is even louder. Last week an anonymous lady called me at dinnertime to ask how to convert her WordPress.com site into a shopping cart to sell her art. Then “Sam” from New York (no idea who he is) called to say he’d followed my instructions on adding WordPress photo galleries with lightboxes but could not get it to work. He went on and on as if we were old friends.

(By the way, I now no longer answering my phone to see who it is.)

The more you blog, the more people you attract through Google. The more search-engine-optimized your posts are, the more people find you. The more tweets you send, the more people follow you. The more social networks you join, the more people add themselves to your page. The better posts you write, the more people subscribe to your RSS feed. The more content you generate – in whatever form and media – the more trackbacks and links people generate about you. The more you produce, the more emails and questions you get. You become like a content cloud – attracting Google searches.

Last week my kids pulled out an old home movie taken about 5 years ago — before we were all sucked into the Internet and Web 2.0. We seemed to have all the time in the world: sitting on a couch, or on a picnic table outside. (Yes, outside! in the sun, surrounded by …. nature, and grass! Haven’t seen that in a while.) On the video we smiled and laughed. Time moved much more slowly. No one was checking his BlackBerry, or posting to Twitter, or staying up late to blog. No feelings of concern about email. This was before the Web 2.0 deluge, before we received 100+ emails/comments/feeds/tweets a day. It seemed back then life was so different — before connectedness enveloped me like a fish net.

If connectedness is such a dystopia, why not just cut the wire, or unplug the cable? No one forces me to stay online. If the game is getting boring, no one’s preventing me from going home before the final buzzer.

Truthfully, I am somewhat addicted to connecteness. While 75% of it all is meaningless noise, there are some contexts that become extremely meaningful. Having a public space to write and publish my thoughts — where people actually read what I write and respond with comments or email or trackbacks — it’s motivating. My words no longer live solely in Word documents on an old hard drive, intended to be published in an obscure literary journal after months of slush pile dormancy. My writing freely propagates around the Internet. It freely connects with others. (No doubt for some, I am communication noise.)

Overall, to have a space to write and publish, to wake up the next morning and see half a dozen new comments on a post, to throw out a Tweet in a moment of total consternation at the grocery store, to read meaningful insights from others about topics I’m interested in — whether from social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, comments, listservs, or Twitter – it gets my mental wheels turning. The network cables are already too deep and intertwined to unplug them from my nervous system.

Nonetheless, I admit that I am conflicted. My oldest daughter is seven. She has her own blog. Should I encourage her to post more, and respond to comments from Heather, her little seven-year old friend (who also has a blog, and whom she has met once in Arizona)? Or should I encourage her to play outside, enjoying her offline childhood?

It’s not entirely an either/or scenario, but I’ll let her define her own paths in or around Web 2.0.

———

photo from Flickr

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Sunday I gave two presentations at blogIndiana, a local conference (held at the beautiful Campus Center at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis) that aimed to attract bloggers and others interested in the medium from in and around the Hoosier state. The organizers no doubt exceeded their goal as the event lured just under 200 people, several high profile local sponsors, lots of high quality presenters, and all sorts of media attention.

My first session, Stop Wasting Time: Ten Things You Can Do to Make Yourself More Efficient, was attended by a room full of bloggers and marketers. Blogger Justin Clupper said he liked the productivity tips I provided, especially my recommendation for saving time by using the free, online meeting scheduling tool, Meeting Wizard. It was a fast-paced 45-minutes delivered with my usual flair, littered with the occasional f-bomb.

My second presentation, Syndication and Web 2.0 Tools, was also well-attended, and seemed to draw the interest of a smaller crowd, many of which—I imagine—may never have thought much about my usual message: content is a business asset worthy of being managed efficiently. I made the case for a more unified approach by setting out examples of how syndication of structured content could benefit users in various situations. I touched briefly on how RSS feeds could be mashed together to form derivative information products and talked for a few minutes about the “content as a service” approach works, using the publish/subscribe model as an example.

I also moderated a lively session about building online communities with high profile Indiana bloggers Bil Browning, Tom Britt, John Ramey, Renee Wilmeth and Steve Dalton.

The organizers of the blogIndiana event were savvy enough to use services like Twitter to market the event in advance. One Twitter tweet actually “dared” their followers to drop everything and head to a local coffee shop where they would score a free ticket to the event. Kyle Lacy took them up on the offer and was the first to bolt out the door and head over to the coffee shop, where he was rewarded with a complimentary ticket to conference. He then wrote a blog post about the Twitter marketing campaign, promoted several of the presenters, including me, and hyped the event. This is a great use of Twitter. The blogIndiana folks were smart to take advantage of the 140 character microblogging site to spread the message about their conference in such an innovative way. In addition to the pre-event Twitter chatter, they also projected a live Twitter feed on a large screen in the main conference room. It was being updated as participants added Tweets to the conference Tweme.

Overall, the event seemed to get great reviews and I expect they’ll be a blogINDIANA 2009 on the books. I was surprised that the event didn’t take advantage of Confabb.com, the database of conferences that allows conference attendees to rate individual speakers online, which helps the event organizers avoid killing trees and manually tabulating speaker review data (among other things). Of course, in order for attendees to be able to use the blogINDIANA Confabb page, they would have to have internet access, something that, at this event, was spotty, at best.

Improvements I suggest:

• Avoid working with any university, if at all possible. Conferences held at universities are seldom of the same quality as those held in privately owned spaces dedicated to serving the needs of conference guests. The IUPUI Campus Center is brand-spanking new (and, flawlessly designed), but as is the case with most new facilities, they have yet to work all the bugs out. Parking sucks, food is less-than-spectacular, and you have to navigate the campus property, which on this day was host to a tri-athalon and some other local activities that created unnecessary and frustrating hurdles for attendees to jump over.
• Get a facility that has adequate—and well-tested—wireless access. Take my word for it, there’s nothing worse than attending a blogging event and not being able to blog because the connection to the Internet is flaky. Conference organizers should be able to spend their time schmoozing with guests and coordinating the event, not assisting attendees with obtaining internet access.
• Take advantage of online speaker rating system like Confabb.com. You’ll save yourself lots of time, create lots of post-event Google juice (good to promote next year’s event) and you’ll be practicing the concepts many of the speakers at your event preached about.
• Move away from the weekend! Conferences usually perform better (financially, and otherwise) when they take place during the work week. There are several reasons for this...folks who can get their bosses to pay for a conference are happy to miss work i order to attend. They aren’t so happy about giving up their weekends. Having an event midweek is best, and allows conference organizers to get better deals with hotels and conference centers who often have more of a challenge booking a Tuesday-Wednesday event, than a Saturday-Sunday (most weddings and family functions occur on the weekend).
• Raise the price significantly!. No one believes you can do much with $49 a person—and, the fact is, you can’t. Sure, there are some people who will not be able to afford to attend an event that costs $499, but the quality of the event—and the number of people overall who attend—can be improved with a bigger budget. Aside from that, there’s the issue of perception. Several of my corporate clients said they didn’t plan to attend because at $49, all it would attract are bloggers who blog for a hobby. Perhaps—there were certainly a lot of those type of bloggers present, which is nice, but not really attractive to sponsors. My point is that corporate blogging is also part of the blogging mix and those folks that blog for a living should be courted as well. After all, blogINDIANA sponsors aren’t sponsoring just to be nice. They want to get exposure and reach a relevant group of folks who can afford buy their tools (at least that’s the type of event shareholders expect them to be spending their investment dollars on). Folks who cannot attend a $500 event cannot buy a content management system nor a multi-site blogging platform (the kinds of tools your sponsors are selling). It’s that simple. Growing the event to attract corporate bloggers and folks with bigger budgets is a must. But, you can also find creative ways to get local bloggers who blog for fun involved as well. In fact, if you charge more for the event, you’ll have more revenue and can give away lots of free tickets to individual blgogers who may not be able to afford a full conference access pass.

Again, blogINDIANA was a big success overall and the organizers should be commended for an outstanding first event.

View the event Flickr photostream.

About RSS

This YouTibe video does a great job at exploring RSS: what it is, how it works, and what you can do with it. Take a few minutes and learn about RSS.

Tom Johnson has a post on one of my favorite topics, Tools. It's not that I'm a tool fanatic, it's just that I'm fascinated by how they interact with our creativity to shape the products we make. I've long been an advocate that teaching technical communication without teaching tools is like teaching art students about painting without talking about brushes. An aspect of tool use and evaluation Mike Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547noreply@blogger.com

The Call for Speakers is on for the 2009 Conference for Software User Assistance to be held in Seattle. The Conference is also seeking participants for the Peer Showcase.

A number of best practices for developing modular documentation are described in this article by Michelle Corbin and Yoel Strimling. The concepts discussed include chunking text, labeling topics, and linking topics to each other.

Scott DeLoach of ClickStart has just published CSS to the Point, quick solutions to over 150 to common questions about using Cascading Style Sheets.

Establishing and maintaining healthy, productive, and mutually rewarding relationships with subject matter experts is imperative to project success. This article by Sherry Shadday and Kyle Draney presents techniques for maintaining such relationships.

Not all PDFs; that would be over the top. I just hate user manuals that are distributed as PDFs. They are mainly used online so why the artificial page constraints? I'm in the middle of a topic and all of a sudden there is a page break--not because of a topical shift but because had it been printed on 8.5 x 11 we would have run out of paper. News flash: I didn't print it and I was not running Mike Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547noreply@blogger.com

A few weeks ago I started experimenting with surveys in my sidebar, mostly informal, and mainly to try out different WordPress plugins. Little did I know my surveys would incite so much controversy.

The latest poll, “Which Authoring Tool Is Best for You?” has received nearly 600 votes from people around the world, and was discussed at length on the HATT listserv. In all this discussion, I’ve realized one thing: technical writers are passionate about the tools they use.

“Passionate” is probably too positive a term. More like fanatical or zealous – but really technical writers span the spectrum with attitudes here. Some are fanatical, others are heavily invested, a few are open-minded, others are confused, and some are downright nasty.

The war over tools isn’t unique to the field of tech comm. It’s human nature to cling to a brand and promote it as the best. Think Dodge versus Ford trucks, Harley versus Yamaha motorcycles, BYU versus the University of Utah (replace with your local college rivalries), the Yankees versus the Red Sox, Mac versus PC, iPhone versus BlackBerry, West Coast versus East Coast, Twitter versus Plurk. The war of brands is pervasive and probably dates back to cavemen promoting different types of clubs to maim their kill.

Even as I write this post, someone has just twittered, “Movable Type, the most powerful blog software out there, hit 4.2 today.” Is Movable Type really the most powerful? Or is it WordPress, or some other?

Replace the word “software” with any other product and you catch the spirit of the branding war. Ford, the most powerful truck out there. iPhone, the most powerful mobile device. The Yankees, the most powerful baseball team to ever ….

An Alternative Point of View

Although tools seem to play a significant role in technical authoring, some people disagree. Bill Swallow is “shaking [his] head at all the tools survey nonsense going on lately.” He feels tools should play a minimal role in any project, not foregrounding the more important aspects of content generation. Spending 20% of your time formatting, structuring, designing and styling your content with a tool is “a huge waste of time,” he says.

Instead, tools should play “a very little role in our day to day work (or should).” Writers should simply choose the right tool for the job — like a skilled mechanic selecting a wrench from a toolbox — and go to work writing instead of wrestling with the tool.

Perhaps if everyone could work like this, we wouldn’t so easily slip into Pharisee-Saducee-like tool discussions. But while this scenario is ideal, it’s hard to implement because not everyone has the technical prowess of a Bill Swallow to make a tool eat out of your hand. In setting up single sourcing scenarios, or structured authoring templates, the tools and process can be a monster you battle. (Of course, once you set everything up, it’s no longer such a monster.)

Best Practice Attitudes

My discussion about tools isn’t conclusive nor is it meant to be. So instead I give you three “best practice attitudes” to have towards tools.

1. Embrace Tool Learning

You’re a technical writer, right? This is what you do – learn confusing software applications that engineers create. Learning tools should be your strength, not your weakness.

To make life easier, try not to learn a tool all at once. It’s better to take small bites over a series of weeks rather than pull an all-nighter under pressure.

2. Recognize that the “Best Tool” Is Relative

Certain tools are right for certain situations, skillsets, and corporate contexts. What’s right for you may not be right for another.

For example, WordPress may be tremendously powerful, but many users can’t understand it, so Blogger might be more appropriate, even though it’s less powerful. Similarly, DITA may be the way to go if you have heavy reuse, but if you only have one manual and no reuse, it would be overkill. Camtasia is great if you’re creating screencast tutorials, but Captivate excels at interactivity. Framemaker is better at long documents, but Word is fine if the job’s shorter. Right is relative.

3. Expose Knowledge Gaps

The next time a “best tool” war flares up, ask each person if they’ve used the other tool, and if so, to what extent. When we admit the limits of our knowledge, we’re more apt to be humble and open-minded when it comes to tool comparisons.

Conclusion

In this post, I have not taken a position of tool agnosticism. I do think that some tools are better for certain jobs than others. But we can be a lot more level-headed and open-minded when it comes to discussions about tools.

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photo from Flickr

When you single source from an online help authoring tool and generate an output to Microsoft Word, almost invariably you have some clean-up reformatting to do. For me, one of these areas deals with screenshot images.

I prefer to have Word resize my screenshots (to a smaller size) because images look a lot sharper and crisper when Word resizes them rather than when SnagIt or Photoshop resizes them (even with smooth scaling selected).

Whatever your cleanup process, you might find the following image resizing macro helpful. It only resizes images that have a specific style (p_Result) before the image. It resizes the image to 75% of its original size.

Note: It’s important to isolate images that are surrounded by a specific style because you don’t want to resize all your images. You don’t want your note, tip, caution, and button images shrunk to 75% of their original size. Also, your substep images may need to have smaller sizes than your regular image sizes.

Here’s the macro:

Sub ImageResize()
Dim PercentSize As Integer
Dim MyStyle As String
Dim oIshp As InlineShape
Dim oshp As Shape
PercentSize = InputBox(”Enter percent of full size”, “ResizePicture “, 75)
MyStyle = “p_Result”
With ActiveDocument
For Each oIshp In .InlineShapes
With oIshp
If .Range.Paragraphs(1).Style = MyStyle Then
.ScaleHeight = PercentSize
.ScaleWidth = PercentSize
End If
End With
Next oIshp
For Each oshp In .Shapes
With oshp
If .Anchor.Paragraphs(1).Style = MyStyle Then
.ScaleHeight Factor:=(PercentSize / 100), _
RelativeToOriginalSize:=msoCTrue
.ScaleWidth Factor:=(PercentSize / 100), _
RelativeToOriginalSize:=msoCTrue
End If
End With
Next oshp
End With
End Sub

If you have no idea how to integrate a macro into your Word document, follow these steps. (This applies to Word 2007.)

1. Click the Developer tab, and then click the Macros button.
2. Type a name for the macro, such as ImageResize, and then click Create.
3. Highlight the code that starts with Sub ImageResize and ends with End Sub.
4. Paste the sample code above in its place, and then click Save and close the macro window.

To run the macro, first make sure your images have a p_Result style before them. Then do the following:

1. Click the Developer tab, and then click the Macros button.
2. Select the ImageResize macro, and click the Run button.

RoboHelp,Adobe AIR,Packager,WebHelp,Innovation,HAT,Help Authoring Tool,Technical Communication RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR is Live now, after 5 months of public Beta.  You... Vivek Jain

The last area of reuse is where a topic could be reused if certain snippets could be changed. Most of us know this as conditional text; DITA I believe calls it conditional processing. I'm not a tech comm historian, but I would wager that this is the oldest implementaion of reuse other than copy and paste. The most common applications are where some snippet, phrase, or instruction would be Mike Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547noreply@blogger.com

With gasoline prices rising and the housing market already in a slump, economic fears have led to a national drop in charitable contributions making it harder for non-profits to keep up with an increased demand in services. As more and more nonprofits begin to feel the pinch, many are refocusing their fundraising efforts.

One standout pair of solutions – GoodSearch.com and GoodShop.com – allows supporters to give to their favorite organizations without spending a dime. GoodSearch.com is the Yahoo-powered search engine that donates a penny per search to the charity or school of the users’ choice. Similarly, GoodShop donates a percentage of every purchase from more than 700 top online retailers. 1-800-FLOWERS, for instance, donates 7% of the purchase to your charity, iTunes 2.5%, Saks Fifth Avenue 2.5%. Check out the complete list of sponsoring organizations and their donation rates.

Over 60,000 nonprofits across the country are actively earning funds from the GoodSearch and GoodShop strategy with over 100 organizations submitting new applications daily. Success stories range from the ASPCA which has earned more than $15,000 to care for animals to the Bubel Aiken Foundation which has earned more than $8,000 to send disabled children to summer camp. 

Nonprofits report that GoodSearch and GoodShop are not only a source of significant donations, but also an effective way for supporters to feel connected to the organization everyday. Especially in this time of recession, even small donations go a long way and every extra dollar counts. 

GoodSearch and GoodShop have grown into a massive grassroots movement online, attracting the attention of leaders in the nonprofit industry, students, bloggers, writers, and even celebrities like Jessica Biel, Montell Williams, and Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 who have all created videos on behalf of their favorite charities and GoodSearch.

“When the economy weakens, charitable organizations are often the hardest hit,” said Ken Ramberg, Co-Founder of GoodSearch and former President of MonsterTRAK, the largest online career site for college students (now a division of Monster.com). “GoodSearch and GoodShop are helping to alleviate that strain in resources and make it possible for everyone regardless of how much time or money they have, to give back.”

After a topic title in your help, what do you write? Do you jump straight into the numbered steps, or do you explain why a user would likely perform the topic?

Although I practice the latter (adding explanatory text before the steps), I recently read an article by Mike Hughes that convinced me readers rarely read text that appears before a numbered list.

Here’s the gist of Mike’s article. He’s really talking about on-screen text, but I’m extrapolating the principle to apply it to my online help.

When using an application, users are motivated to take action, and their focus is easily drawn to action objects such as menus, buttons, and text fields.

Once an action object or other visual element on a page has drawn a user’s focus downstream in the focus flow, it is difficult to redirect it back upstream. In other words, if something initially draws a user’s attention to the middle of a page, it is far more likely that the user will continue across and down as opposed to going back up the page. This is especially true if there are additional action objects downstream.

See “Instructional Text in the User Interface: Some Counterintuitive Implications of User Behaviors” for the full article.

Two weeks after reading the article, it still rattles around in my mind. I think just like a button on a page, users are drawn to a numbered list. Although I still add some “why” or “when” before my numbered lists, if the information is critical, I insert it somewhere in the list.

Here’s an example.

The information about why you’d want to make a spinach shake precedes the numbered steps. But the critical information about using frozen peaches is embedded in the list because readers would most likely skip over it in the introduction.

Thanks for a great article Mike. By the way, Mike’s blog is here.

And if you want to read more about Shrek shakes, see Jane’s post: “Shrek Shakes and Twinkies.” We went through a 3 week period at our house where we drank nothing but Shrek shakes. Then one day my oldest daughter said she was sick of them, and we all agreed and haven’t drunk them since.

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Note: I posted Mike’s article on Writer River, as well as a ton of other excellent articles. Have you discovered Writer River yet? You can subscribe to the feed or to a daily email update. Then each morning, when you open your feedreader or email, you can start the day off with information that will help you do your job better.

That last side trip about which voice to use still has my head woozy and so I need to get grounded again by talking about reuse. Reusing snippets Another scenario in reuse is where the unit of reuse is smaller than an entire topic. Common examples include: Product namesNotes, Warnings, and CautionsDescriptions of common user actionsAny sensitive text that has been vettedThere are several Mike Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547noreply@blogger.com