Here are my notes from Darren Barefoot’s talk, a self-described recovering technical writer.

He leads with what defines social media? Create your own definition around these concepts:

• Conversation - comments on large media sites allow ayone to speak to the media person keeping on the pedestal
• Collaboration - 7 million people collaborating on wikipedia, likely the largest collaboration in human history
• Sharing - some sort of microbroadcasting is built into every type of website
• Scope - there are no longer 42-minute hours on televisions. Your buckets of stuff and time are sliced and diced. Ebooks can be 10 pages to 1000 pages.
• Community - constructing affinity groups is easy, accessible
• Transparency - blogging encourages transparency - medium is the message
• Authenticity - example of knowing it’s fake is fakeSteveJobs.com, Lonelygirl15 is an example of outed fakery

42% of Chinese internet users have a blog

“The people formerly known as the audience”

Survey of 1200 bloggers - why do you create content, do social media? Talk to friends and family first, Keep personal history, Emote top three. But make money bottom response.

How to use a Wiki - video showing how to collaborate without using email (yay).

Updated to add: How to use Twitter - video showing how friends use twitter to keep up with each other between blog posts (these are awesome videos, I now love commoncraft)

An excellent, engaging talk, with the conclusion being, there’s no way to relinquish control, it is already too late.

Here are the takeaways he left us with:

• Relinquish control - realize that the best documentation for your product is already not on your website.
• Users will help each other - put screenshots in Flickr to make it easy for your users to grab them and use them in their own doc
• Empower your most passionate users - for example, the Red Room Chronicles created by a Marriot business traveller. He must be the most passionate hotel user known. Offer those users previews, invite them to focus groups, make them feel special.
• Think outside the page - Twitter troubleshooting tips, and of course, remember video and photos.
• Go where your users are - find their community spaces, be present as needed.
• Relinquish control - again.

Here are my notes from the morning keynote with Joe Gollner.

This session was a wonderful kickoff for the conference. For the first time, someone was able to connect for me that XML enabled Web 2.0 connectivity. The social web is a direct result of XML allowing for easy combinations and the participatory web. He had many nice diagrams throughout history proving his point, and I really appreciated him making that connection.

He began with a description of Saint Jerome, calling him the patron saint of content management, er, librarians. Saint Jerome was a monk librarian.

A funny game that Joe played with an XML group was, “Who came to XML from the most unusual background?” This game came after Joe showed a picture of his car with an XML license plate, humorously proving he had “arrived” in XML. The third place winner was probably Joe, who has been part of the Canadian artillery. The second place winner was a former prison guard, and the first place prize was a former surfer pottery maker.

During this session, I was reminded of the Washington Post article that John Hunt pointed out at the March DITA User Group meeting, Re-Created Library Speaks Volumes about Jefferson. Jefferson did mashups of books by tearing them apart, even different language books, and then would bind them into new books – reassembly of content 200 years ahead of his time. In 1815, in order to protect his collection after a fire, Jefferson sold his library to Congress for $24,000, the price that Congress felt was reasonable. It became the Library of Congress, a U.S. establishment that as one library says in the article, “These are the books that made America.”Jefferson had created his own taxonomy, using the terms memory, reason, or imagination. Wow, are there parallels to reference, concept, and task? Well… task may be from a stretch of the imagination for some products but hopefully they are ground in fact.

A great start to an excellent conference.

Bob Glushko blogs at docordie.blogspot.com, great blog name and a fascinating presentation. I liked that he shared and described his semi-retirement as verbalizing his desire to be a beach bum to his wife, but his wife said, I still like my job and I want to work, so go get a job! He has been teaching at UC Berkley ever since.

Building information supply chains - example of the E. Coli scare in lettuce in March 2007. Basically had to figure out how to track heads of lettuce, similar to tracking heads of people to avoid long lines at security in the airport. With enough data tracking - input and retrievability - you can make informed decisions.

Common themes of new information services - document exchange, patterns, similar to supply chains and distribution channels. There are hidden documents in business processes.

His “ah-ha” moment? he had always focused on the document, but with ordering on the web, his user experience is what really matters - did the business process work? Did the lobsters arrive dead or alive? Did his shipment get to him in time and was it the right order? You have to know the back-end, the time difference, the travel distance, the choreography and design of the pattern determines success and a happy user experience.

I’m reminded of the fact that there are 39 time zones in the world, and for collaboration across the world, we have to figure out the time zone difference relative to the person you want to collaborate with.

Bob offers an excellent analogy for wiki-based, community-collaborative content - a restaurant’s lines of visibility. At McDonalds, you have backstage production lines for food prep, at Benihana you have food prep as part of the entertainment right at your table (remeber that onion volcano so expertly prepared?) We should try to strategically determine where to draw our lines of visibility - what point of view do we wish to present to our users?

Ah, now he’s talking about a cooking school where the kitchen is the front stage for the cooks, and the back stage for the customers. A restaurant’s dining room is the front stage for the customers, but the back stage for the cooks. I’m reminded of a webpage I read where people proved that writing on a wiki actually helps you learn more about the tasks because you have to figure out your conceptual understanding of the task to write about it. If you allow more writing to happen next to the backstage when it’s the cooks in the kitchen, or the expert writers in the wiki, more beginners can learn by not observing or reading but by actually participating in the writing itself.

While you may have identified more with either the front end or back end design issues, you can choreograph the information experience for the user.
Here are Bob’s slides, also found on slideshare.net.

For the first time in history, there are four generations in the workplace. Adobe is working on technologies that bring elearning to the newest working generation. Adobe is hosting a virtual tradeshow in Second Life tomorrow, May 8. I can’t find a link for more information, but his slide showed it would be staffed from 9am PST to 4 pm PST. They want to welcome the new generation and meet their expectations.

RJ showed embedding video into PDFs - plus showing the 3D animations of a brake disassembly imbedded in a PDF file, very cool demonstration. It drew a round of applause, even. I really appreciate that there was no additional plugin to download - it just works.

Also demonstrated Adobe AIR applications. There is a list of AIR applications at airapps.pbwiki.com, and come to find out, Twhirl is an Adobe AIR application that lets you post from multiple Twitter accounts - a use case that my coworker and I were discussing just last week. What if you wanted different Twitter accounts to follow different groups of people? For example, I could have an ASI Twitter account and only follow ASIers, an OLPC Twitter account that tracks OLPC happenings, and so on. I did finally come to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily need to compartmentalize all of my online activities, I guess – the more of “ourselves” we put online, the bigger the overall picture that people can get of me. Just like smalltalk in the office, Twitter can be the smalltalk/water cooler area for “web worker” employees. Twitter is useful for conferences, also, and we’ve started a #doctrainwest tweme that you can view on the web.

Another tidbit from RJ’s talk is that Youtube dominates Internet video more than Google dominates Internet search.

More posts to come from DocTrain West, so stay tuned.

While gearing up for different conference trips and presentations, I’ve been trying to get to know collaborators using asynchronous communications, such as listening to Char James-Tanny’s podcast on techwritervoices.com. She presented “Virtual Ways of Communicating” at a Florida STC meeting and Tom Johnson recorded it and posted it later.

I really enjoyed not only listening to Char speak but also hear the audience questions and interactions. For example, when she showed tag clouds, one audience member asked, does the size and format of the tag words change when a tag is used more often than another? And I thought, wow, I’ve always assumed that is exactly how it works, but haven’t actually asked the question, such as refresh rate or what relative sizing means. It points out to me that I take a lot for granted in the Web 2.0 world due to observing so much of it so often. But, a new fresh perspective offers me the conceptual details that people would seek when first exposed to something like a tag cloud.

As part of listening to this podcast, I found many suggestions for cool videos, popular wikis, and new uses of RSS such as RSS that I hadn’t heard yet. I realize that no matter how hard I try to keep up, there are new applications of technology coming in every day. I thought I’d collect these together though as a nice collection of “have you seen this?” which may not make much sense unless you listen to the podcast, but these were enjoyable to hear about and explore on my own.

• Video - lions rescue a buffalo baby
• Video - how to use a book (Updated to the one with English subtitles, thanks Char!)
• Wiki - Swarm sketch, watch animated historical views of sketches being created
• Wiki - Pirate master from a TV show
• RSS - Yahoo pipes, later learned about the Social Media firehose pipe from Char
• Search engine - Ms Dewey
• Map mashup - housingmaps.com mashup of craigslist and Google maps
  

I’m starting a Twitter theme - a tweme, if you will, called “I’m the Mom Who” or “I’m the Mom Whose” which we’ll shorten to #mom for Mother’s Day - to tell funny tales of parenting. (No Dad Left Behind -
on Father’s day, we’ll start the #dad tweme.) A tweet that contains a “hash tag” like #mom gets pulled together with other tweets containing the same tag at twemes.com.

While there may be a few guilty confessions in there, the goal is to gather funny sayings from your kids throughout the day, or recount funny scenarios, not to pour your guts out in 140 characters or less.
Here are some examples:

I’m the #mom whose 4-year-old son who wants to buy his preschool teacher a gift certificate “For Zales, for diamonds!”, for the holidays.

I’m the #mom who joins in when my kids have a screaming contest.

Every one of these tweets are gathered together for easy viewing and laughing at:

twemes.com/mom

On the Friday before Mother’s Day, this tweme will be a hot pick, so keep an eye out for it.

You might also like the ultimate list of Mom’s on Twitter compiled by eMom Wendy Piersall, which I found in Biz Stone’s Twitter newsletter.

Happy Mother’s Day early!

At a recent Central Texas DITA User Group meeting, Eliot Kimber told me about a project that he’s working on that can take DITA content and transform it to InDesign layouts. I’m completely fascinated, if feeling a little over my head. But for me, blogging is about learning more, and sharing what you learn in the process.

Basically, he’s getting XML that is DITA into and out of Adobe InDesign CS3. InDesign CS3 has the distinction of being the Adobe product (not FrameMaker, boo hoo) from which you can get Digital Editions/ePub formats.

While Eliot hasn’t created When you pair InDesign with Typefi Autofit, a free plug-in for InDesign, you can get even more complex layouts automated. Automatically. I’m blown away by the possibilities for the OLPC XO manual.

This post includes Eliot’s original background information for XML authoring for book layout, and it’s quite long. But it helps you understand the background of where he’s coming from.

The company he works for, Really [ ] Strategies, has a blog where he’s talking about the project and some success with conversions so far, using the Project Gutenberg library. This example Gutenberg layout will be neat to try out on my XO computer as an ebook reader. I want to start by re-reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

So, how do the textbooks talk?

The reason I say he can make textbooks talk using this type of methodology is because textbooks are required to be in some sort of accessible format to the blind or visually impaired by many states, including Texas. So, XML and ePub formats go a long way towards the goal of meeting accessibility standards. Getting textbooks into DITA XML and then into InDesign - brilliant, and accessible.

How can I help?

Eliot’s looking for participants for his DITA2InDesign project in SourceForge. If you want to help out or check what’s available so far, see the project page on Sourceforge.

What an awesome project that is. Please, look for ways you can help if you have XML, XSLT, DITA, or InDesign abilities. (Seth, Steve, any interest? )

I’ll be at DocTrain West in Vancouver next Tuesday-Friday moderating the Meet the Bloggers session as well as co-presenting Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist? with Stewart Mader.

I just put the finishing touches on our Wiki Roundtripping presentation and I have to admit I’m a little excited about it. While much of the focus will be on the DITA-Wiki Hybrid scenarios, there are at least two new scenarios that I’ve learned about since writing that white paper that we’ll bring to the presentation.

The Meet the Bloggers session is apparently going to be popular, so I hope I can pull off the moderator role effectively. I’m no Oprah, but I do come from Cincinnati where Jerry Springer was once mayor. This session will be fun and I expect to learn from Tom Johnson, Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Scott Nesbitt, and Aaron Davis.

Plus, I’m excited for the Unconference sessions Wednesday night. Completely experimental, but this conference seems like a great place to try out some different ways of sharing information off-the-cuff and informally.

Edited to add: Alan Porter was even inspired to update the Wikipedia entry for unconference to add a definition. That addition is very useful. Way to go Alan!

I’m reminded of the power of the product site by this post from the meeblog, the meebo blog. Meebo is a web-based Instant Messenger for multiple IM platforms such as Google Talk and AIM together in one interface. It’s extremely handy, but apparently a product website redesign has really pushed their visibility even higher. I thought, that makes perfect sense. When people understand the uses for a tool, they use the tool even more readily. Here’s their new product site. The meebo repeater apparently got even more attention lately due to this redesign. I don’t think it’s that they made it easier to use, it’s that they explained a scenario for its use - When meebo access is restricted, install this small piece of software on your home computer to access meebo anywhere. Simple and elegant.

I’m now looking for short explanations for why you do things with the product I document, iMIS. A task overview is part of our templates now, an overview that states the principle of why you want to perform the task. In my mind, though, there’s a subtle difference between a task overview and a scenario for why you’d want to do a task. This forced question, why? is helping me write the correct tasks for the user’s goals. It’s not necessarily part of the product site, but it is helping me understand what

Another reason why I’m reminded of the power of the product site is because of the summary in Scriptorium’s white paper, Web 2.0, Friend or Foe? Four out of six of the bulleted list of integrations that summarize the paper refer to the product web site. We need to remember that unless we integrate our help systems, we risk not answering the right “why?” questions for our users.

An interesting read on the front page of wordpress.com of all places. I enjoy random clicking, and this one came up with a great commentary on the difficulty of using a wiki to get how to information.

From Learning about Second Life from Google:

Over at SL, the main source of information is on the WIKI, which in my opinion has some great information but because Linden primarily lets the users run the show isn’t as helpful as some sort of information clearing house. Trying to sort out how to sculpt, for example, is an exercise in total frustration. There are some wonderful tutorials, but SL does nothing to properly aggregate and put these tutorials into context.

I wonder what Second Life could do to properly aggregate those tutorials to meet this user’s needs? I suppose long-time wiki writers would answer: use categories and encourage tagging, while looking out for orphans. Any other ideas?

I got a great question from Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing:

I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on the WordPress Codex, http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page. Yesterday I was looking at this Codex wondering what to make of it all. I think I want to be a contributor, but there are so many topics. It’s chaotic. The organization is like a maize. I don’t know if I should go in there with a wrecking ball and rennovate, or not. Probably 25% of it is outdated. What happens to those outdated pages? Will I offend people if I just delete things that are outdated?

Can you recommend a book or strategy for making sense of massive wikis? Where should I start? I spent a good hour editing a page of it last night that I considered critical. It’s then that I realized this is a huge project and I have no sense of direction. Any insight you can give me would be much appreciated.

With the OLPC wiki, David Farning on the Library list went through the wiki and said he found these categories. It’s quite an accurate content analysis from what I’ve seen, so I was impressed. At the same time, it also helped explain my initial wonderment at how to wrap my arms around the entire wiki - and in fact, it is barely possible to do.

Content
1 Philosophy
2 Contributing
3 Creating
4 Curatoring

5 Projects
Deliverable
In progress
Ideas

6 Management

Once David came up with these categories, he then asked SJ Klein, director of community content and long-time Wikipedian, if he thought the wiki needed structure.

SJ said that the wiki is purposefully without hierarchy - flat, especially for projects, to not force a parent or sibling sense for projects. He also said, however, if you have a specific tree hierarchy in mind, feel free to develop the idea in some temporary space.

So, when working on a large wiki if you have good organization ideas, set them up, and then ask for community feedback. Seems like an appropriate approach to a large wiki.

Other ideas for starting out in a large wiki environment:

While it might seem like it’s a question similar to “how do I get started on a huge writing project?” in my experience, wiki editing has some subtleties due to the collaboration and community vibe already present behind the pages. You have to work harder to figure out that vibe, and then determine your course.

For new people, there’s the whole question of getting a feel for the community so you can start to answer “who am I going to potentially irritate by editing this” and “as a newbie do I have the confidence I’m right?”

So, knowing your role within the wiki community is a first step. You might take a while to get to know who’s there, what their roles are as well, and where you might best fit in. Introduce yourself with your profile page, following the WikiPattern, MySpace - see http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/MySpace.

Just like a newbie on a writing team, find out if there’s some scut work that you can do to get your feet wet, if needed, to gain the community’s trust.

Deletions are going to bring much more wrath in a wiki situation, I would guess, so they seem risky to do to start out. If you do think something needs deletion, message or email the original author or the big contributors and ask if it’s okay to mark it for deletion. Then, mark it, and hope that someone else (a wiki admin) determines if it should be deleted.

Start small, like tagging, or applying templates. That’ll help you get a feel for the bigger picture.

Let us know your ideas for wrapping your head around a large wiki, we’d love to hear them.