STC Member Forum

Maurice Martin wrote:

Who out there is blogging? Specifically, I'm interested in blogs by STC members that are focused on technical communication or related topics.

Are you writing such a blog? Do you read one regularly? Let's hear it!

>>But Maurice, how does this relate to STC Pubs?

Glad you asked! I've got ideas for blog-related projects that may end up in Intercom.

I am, but mine's a mix of tech comm stuff and personal ;-) And I read Sarah O'Keefe, Brenda Huettner, and Rhonda Bracey (so far...I'll add more to the RSS Aggregator as I find them, or as they answer your question!)

Nice Website, Char! Is there an RSS feed just for the Help Authoring Tools category?

Excellent! Now one last request: Is there any way for me to pull in the dates associate with each item?

Because they come in with no dates, my aggregator thinks they were all written 20 seconds ago.

-mm

Hi Char,

I use the aggregator built into Drupal. I see the problem now--Drupal wanted an atom feed, and I was giving it RSS. I just switched to

http://helpstuff.com/blog/xmlsrv/atom.p … amp;cat=20

and it looks good.

Just got an e-mail from Rhonda Bracey, who says her blog isn't about technical communication... anyone know of any other blogs by STC members that are about technical communication?

-Maurice

Maurice Martin wrote:

Specifically, I'm interested in ... technical communication or related topics.

That's a tall order, perhaps too general. Would a categorization of interests or TC paths come into play with your project? Maybe a few more details about what you have in mind?

I don't write about "technical communication" per se, but what I write about is certainly inherent of technical communication. I need to write more, but when I do write, it's about Web publishing topics. I also have plans to write more about UCD activities and interests, and later this month (hopefully) I start a new facet to my writing activities by publishing select articles in two languages English/French. In fact, some of my first bilingual topics will focus on the considerations of migrating from a monolingual to bilingual Web site publishing process. This process involves a lot of relevant and interesting areas of focus: language readiness (human and technical), Web standards, site usability, internationalization...you get the picture.

Another consideration in all of this: my site is somewhat of a combo...it has the Weblog part (called "Journal") and it's also my online freelance interface (for what that's worth). This is an increasingly common genre of site for independant professionals, and in some cases even for working professionals, like Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street (I don't believe he's a member of STC, but I wish more people with his Web interfacing skills were). Would site's of this genre be discluded from your project?

For what it's worth, I offer mine up for consideration: wion.com. Link is below and left.

I like your project and look forward to how it plays out.

I actually have another Web site that serves as my personal site.  My personal writing and my professional writing are kept completely separate, and that was my intention from the beginning; I think site's that try and cover too much ground (or lack any clear focus) will never see any significant traffic (and isn't that what it's all about online?).

As for the questions, there's a couple approaches you might take to separate the cod from the perch:

One would be to group the site submissions into various types of categories so you can really see what's in the pool. This might seem easy at first, but it's a bit tricky; there's undoubtedly going to be overalp and different angles to consider.

Second (or in addition to) you could create a list of qualifiers by which to compare site submissions. Qualifiers could be numerous and target different things, and that's probably good. The more points a site has against the check list, the more likely it is a candidate for the aquarium.  You might decide ahead of time (by whatever measure) how many sites you can realistically accept, then compare submissions against the list of qualifiers, and then keep the top ranked number of sites that equals your targeted number.

That leads us to...what are the qualifiers? This is the easy part; we're basically talking about different measuring points within different areas of focus. Here's a few examples within each are many possible measures to consider:

    * Focus of content against site objectives (does the site even clearly objectify itself?)
    * Subject matter / Topics
    * Writing quality
    * Standards compliancy (XHTML, CSS, Accessibility)
    * User-friendliness
    * Aesthetics
    * etc.

I don't mean to suggest this is any kind of contest, not at all, but when it comes down to it, you will need some kind of measuring device to thin the catch. Just ideas, I'm sure there's others. After all, it seems you would want quality site representatives to show the world, right?

I've been blogging for five years now and its has totally changed my professional life. I make far more money, have a large network of contacts, new clients from unexpected industries, and invitations to speak at high tech conferences about technical writing and content management. I don't have to chase down opportunities. More often than not, they find me.

My blog, TheContentWrangler.com, is a popular spot for technical communicators, and those interested in the larger, content management related discipline and issues. On an average day 150 people visit my blog. On high traffic days (when I have hot keywords mentioned on my site) as many as 1000 visitors stop by.

My original blog design hasn't changed much over the years. The cost of my blog was $45 for the software and $9 a month for hosting. This tired old design has served me well, but I will soon replace it with a more advanced design that takes advantage of many newer technologies and empowers me to extend my reach even further. I'll be offering seminars design to teach you how to create and manage a blog later this year. I've also been invited by several forward-thinking STC chapters to present on this topic later this year.

I have recently completed several presentations at XML, content mangement, and blogging-related conferences, and will be moderating a panel on a relatively new approach called "structured blogging" at the upcoming Syndicate conference in New York City.

Do you know what structured blogging is? Is structured blogging important? Should you know about it? Yes, it is important. Yes, if you are interested in keeping pace with and taking advantage of faster, better, cheaper ways of creating, managing, and delivering content, you should know about and undertsand its implications. While some tech writers will spin their wheels explaining on this forum why this concept makes no sense to them or does not relate to technical writing, I'll be moderating a panel on the topic with representatives from AOL, Yahoo! and Google. I was invited because I am a technical writing professional that has brought forth new ideas about how structured content and blogging tools can be used. My ideas are simple and are making waves outside our field (more on this later).

Technical communication is changing and is growing far beyond our many preconceived notions. We're not the only ones interested in structured XML content and better ways to streamline the content lifecycle. That's both a good and a bad thing. The good thing is, we were right. We won the battle. We have proved that structured XML content managed in single source repository can indeed provide substantial savings. And, we're doing so in organizations around the globe. However, it's also a bad thing because now we -- as an industry -- are being left behind. Opportunities are passing you by. We're no longer the leaders. We're more-often-than-not .... followers, being drug behind the leaders, kicking and screaming. That's nothing to be proud of -- and it's not going to help us grow our careers and our earrning potential.

If you're not making a six-fugure income in the technical communication field, you're doing something wrong.

Which begs the question -- Are blogs important in the field of technical communication? Can they help you make more money? You bet cha! Why? Here are just a few of many reasons...

1) Some technical writing contractors are becoming corporate bloggers -- their full time job is to find and write about useful information in a specific discipline or industry. They are folks who understand it's not about the tools -- no RoboHelp, no FrameMaker, no Visio, and thank goodness, no MS Word -- it's about the content and its reach. Those who are getting these gigs are well paid for their talents, not their knowledge of software. In fact, those I know of are making far more than the going rate for even the most tool-savvy cubicle-dwelling tw. What's even better, they are valued as important "strategic assets" (not replacable commodity writers) by the organizations that employ them. One of our former regional directors recently told me about how surprised she was to find a client who needed someone to blog full-time. She was happy to find a local technical writing consultant to fill the role. And is looking for more folks to fill similar roles. Talk about an untapped market!

2) Blogs can be used to help anyone create documentation without the need for help authoring tools or expensive XML editors. Thats right! Blogging tools can be used to create some types of technical documentation. I'm working with the structuredblogging.org and several content management system and blogging tool vendors to create plug-ins that will allow everyone (not just tech commers) to create -- for instance -- basic DITA content (valid DITA XML content delivered as HTML help topics) without the need for a help authoring tool. That's not to say that there's not a need for proprietary authoring tools, but the fact is, not everyone can afford these tools. And, not everyone needs them. Keep an eye out for upcoming announcements on this issue.

3) Blogs extend your reach, especially if you are a consultant, contractor, or student. You can use a blog to extend your marketing reach and get more clients/jobs. Your blog can help you position yourself as an expert in your chosen field -- that is, if you are willing to put in some time and lots of effort and you are savvy enough to use the tools to consistently and effectively communicate to your target audience. While other STCers are wasting time responding to endless (and pointless) listserv discussions that do nothing to boost their income potential, you can spend that time using a blog to get your message in front of an audience that really matters -- those who have yet to discover you! You might be surprised how many people need your help but don't realize you are there. A website is nice, but it's really nothing more than a billboard. A blog is a syndication machine that can help you get your message in front of others in ways to numerous to explore here.

4) Blogs support form-based content entry, thus ensuring the content created is consistently structured. Consistently structured blog posts can -- and are -- being aggregated by other web services (folks in the Web 2.0 arena like Edgeio.com, Events.org, Yahoo!, PubSub, and popular folksonomy/social tagging services like Flickr and Del.icio.us) and syndicated widely by services that snatch up blog content from RSS feeds. Publish a structured blog post once from your blog and others can snatch up your listings and automatically add them to their websites, blogs, newsreaders -- or have them automatically sent to them via email (based on keywords they are interested in locating). This is one of the most powerful features of blogs.

I used this technology recently to promote the Toronto STC annual conference. I posted a structured event posting to my blog. My RSS feed made that information instantaneously available to other sites that automatically snatched up the announcement and reused it, re-syndicated it, and republished it without me doing any additional work. Some sites added the posting to their events calendar and then automatically included it in the email newsletter, thereby extending the conference publicity machine in ways that were never before possible. How you might use this approach -- or blogs in general -- might not be obvious until you understand and use the technology and the tools and open yourself to think creatively about how you might utilize them in your organization.

There's a lot to learn about blogging. The possibilities are many. Of course, I'm a visionary who loves to keep up-to-speed on emerging tools and technologies and explore ways they may be  used in an efficient way by large groups of people. I'm looking for widespread adoption, not some one-off approach that works for three tech writers with too much time on their hands.

This discussion forum post is likely to raise more questions than answers. So, if you want to learn more, consider joining my mailing list. You can find it on my blog, www.thecontentwrangler.com.

If you are doing something exciting with blogs, please let me now. I can hep you get the word out to other like-minded folks. Who knows, your blogging project might end up in my next presentation.

Topics you might want to learn more about include: Web 2.0. RSS, structured blogging, blogging, folksonomy, taxonomy, social networking, tagging, DITA, XML, content management, content reuse, information architecture, usability, assessibility, syndication, and metadata. Yes, they're all related to blogging. :)

Scott Abel
www.thecontentwrangler.com

Maurice Martin wrote:

Which STC members' blogs are included in the aggregated feed? There's too many to include them all.

I've discussed this at length with Merrick.  It's difficult for STC to aggregate non-STC content on behalf of members without implying endorsement.  What STC can do is provide a member-configurable aggregator (Web-based), with suggested feeds of interest that are easy to select and deselect.

How do we keep inappropriate content out of the feed-stream? I'm not worried about 'adult' content as much as stuff that endangers STC's status as a non-profit, 503c organization. For instance, supposed one of our bloggers goes off on a rant against a certain politician?

An inherent risk when publishing others' content on an automated basis; can't be avoided with certainty.  That's why we'd make the channels user-selectable: to shift accountability to the user and away from STC.  The only pre-configured feeds would be STC's own and maybe a forum feed, since we have some control over forum content.

How much non-technical communication content do we allow through? There are some very focused blogs out there, but most detour occassionally into personal entries. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But there has to be a line somewhere.

To be listed as a suggested feed, the author would have to provide a feed for that specific purpose, and be aware that it's suggested by STC to members.  Most blogging and small CMS apps make this easy, through tagging.  STC could then remove a feed from the suggested list, if it saw a need to.  But we've already made content a member choice, so it's not critical to monitor very closely.  Just look-in periodically.

Such aggregator would probably be part of a slightly larger service, which we term "not-a-portal".  The idea is to offer a tool, a member-customized page, that can be the center of a member's techcomm world.  In addition to the aggregator, there'd be deep links to important pages within STC.org, plus some clever stuff I won't get into right now.  No stock quotes or weather forecasts, no way to check your email, just a collection point for the techcomm part of your life.

  # # #

I agree with just about everything Scott Abel has said here, and evangelize the same things.

To be frank, many techcomms (perhaps a majority, maybe a substantial majority) trade on expert desktop tool knowledge.  It's stood them well and the market asks for it.  Facility with App1, App2, and App3 is the prevailing employment discriminator.  I'm no slouch with some of them myself.

Nevertheless I cringe at sourcing in the binary, proprietary formats of desktop tools because I flat-out know that -- in an ideal world -- it's unwise.  Nobody but nobody starting a documentation-intensive enterprise today would go that way.  You'd put everything in plaintext content blobs, marked-up with core semantics and associated with metadata, then let databases package it, let scripts transform it, and abstract presentation to a separate, media-specific layer.

Enter the content manager.  She must be intimate with the content, yes, but also with the schemas, scripts, transformations, user-agents, and user needs that make the content universally consumable.

The ascent of the content manager role is inevitable.  If my colleagues in STC and general techcomm don't seize it, another discipline will.  We're the right people for this job, no doubt, but we'll need to morph our skill sets.  Expert proficiency in customary desktop tools is in quiet decline right now, so quiet you almost can't hear it, especially if you don't want to, can't afford to, or don't need to.

But we are not moving into a world that needs more FrameMaker, Robo-Help, and MS Word experts, as a percentage of the talent in demand.  Legacy needs are only a part of business needs.  They erode, then tip.

So I appreciate and support Scott's evangelism. (Please promote only free seminars in the forum, since we must protect STC's tax standing.)

Myself, I'm a post-blogger now.  A lot of us late 90s proto-bloggers turned to the code and away from the word.  There were apps to build and test, standards to sort, and business to be done.  But it's calling me back.  Writing poorly for strangers has cyclical appeal.

LQ

Original question: "Who out there is blogging? Specifically, I'm interested in blogs by STC members that are focused on technical communication or related topics."

I have a technical communications blog. My intended audience is the business community. The blog's purpose is to educate business managers about the many ways that technical communicators can help businesses improve operations & service.

The topics are directly related to the focus of my business which is online communications: information architecture & design, interface design, writing for the web, and a smattering of CMS.

The blog is young, there are exactly three entries. But what I hope it will do is build some awareness about the technical communication field, how big an impact it has on an organization's success, and help usher technical communication into the light of recognition that it really deserves.

I'm certain that in time, the blog will become more focused. And I'm also certain that its focus will change, such is the nature of the web.

At any rate, you can find it here:
http://www.venncommunications.com/index … unication/

There's an RSS link on the page for interested folks.
http://www.venncommunications.com/index … te/rss_2.0

Last edited by Kevin Shoesmith (May 29, 2006 12:23 AM)

Bruce Curley wrote:

These blog pages, and others on my blog, www.poetslife.blogspot, address Maurice's question

Good stuff, Bruce.  Does Blogger these days let you assign categories or free-tags that in turn drive topical RSS feeds?  One issue we're confronting is that members don't use their blogs solely for techcomm subjects, and we're interested in aggregating just the techcomm parts.  I'm pretty sure Blogger can handle this.  Can you confirm?

LQ

Excellent blogage! Thanks, everyone

There's going to be a small teaser article in the July/August Intercom about STC and blogging, with more to come.

Also, I'm pulling together a list of blogs on the communication department Web site: http://www.stc-cdx.org

Well I started a new blog actually, a new start, just like the new position that I just recieved.

I am an CSS XHTML developer that is writing embedded help content in a new application that will be released this winter.  Its going to be a lot fo fun, and I really look forward to learning as much as possible.

I would love it if you drop in some time to say hi!

Corey

http://compulsive.vox.com/