just write click

Sarah O’Keefe wrote up a nice summary of the WritersUA Pundits Panel, and Bogo Vatovec (of Bovacon)  made a statement something like this:

Introverted technical writers will not be writing help any more and will be replaced with experts moderating support forums. … Technical writers can no longer afford to hide in their cubes, they must go out and become experts and talk to the users.

I left a comment on her post that I see a similar future for our profession, although I do not have a value placed on introversion versus extroversion - likely introverts make perfectly good community managers and forum moderators since they can do that from their desks for the most part.

But, it does take some bravery to put your real personality online. I’ve found that a few of us are doing that - going from technical writer to blogger writing directly to customers.

While many of us blog to an audience of other professional writers, there are technical writers out there who are blogging to their end-user audience. Here are two examples:

• National Instruments here in Austin has a blog called “technically speaking” that they use not only to talk about their daily work but also to keep their end-users informed about documentation. For example, here’s a post about a wiki that LabVIEW users will find helpful.

• Another example is Dee Elling’s blog for CodeGear users. This entry offers a great example of a real conversation with customers. I applaud her bravery (and emailed her to tell her) in facing these sometimes abrasive responses with a sense of customer service and helpful attitude. She doesn’t always have a good message to bring (they are working furiously to give their customers more code examples which we all know is time-consuming and difficult). But she brings a message directly to customers anyway.

Is anyone else talking directly to their customer base with their blog? Consultants in technical writing and content management are definitely talking to current and potential clients - Palimpsest is Scriptorium’s blog, The Rockley Blog, The Content Wrangler, and DMN Communications to name a few. But what about conversations with end users? I’d love to see more examples.

Another one of my takeaways from last week’s South By South West Interactive conference is that it makes sense to use the term “social networking” rather than “social media” to describe sites and tools that help you stay connected with others. We’re not all journalists, and the “media” part of the term seems to signify that you want to share media, but in reality, you want to share interests, ideas, and connect with others.

Join the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

There seemed to be an amazing convergence for me last week, when not only did I witness some neat interactions at the conference in person, online I was also having neat interactions with other members of the Content Wranger Community on Ning. I’ve started a Blogging group there as well, and I posed two questions to the group - one is, How do you find time to write blog entries? and the other is, Blog engine as a CMS? Or CMS as blog engine?

Please feel free to add me as your friend, add a comment, join a group, connect with me on The Content Wrangler Community. I’d like to get to know my readers!

Austin’s own STC president Leah Eaton invited the most people to join the community in the 3-day timeframe for a contest, so she gets to choose from a list of conferences to attend. Naturally, I encouraged her to attend DocTrain West where I’ll be moderating the Meet the Bloggers session featuring Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Aaron Davis, Tom Johnson, and Scott Nesbitt.

The headshots I’ve been using (including the one that stays on my blog at talk.bmc.com) were taken by my husband one morning before work. In fact, my son is on my lap in one of the ones that didn’t make it to the “released” state.

Since those were a few years old, I decided it was time to update my headshots. So I asked my photographer friend Beverly Demafiles to come over to the house one late afternoon this fall for some professional shots. And wow, did she deliver the goods! I highly recommend her services if you’re looking for professional portraits or for wedding photography. She’s here in Austin and does spectacular work.

As a blogger, I’ve found it important to ensure that people know there’s a real person behind the writing. By offering updated photos I think I can continue to ensure that you know it’s really me. Plus, with some of these perspective portraits, you can know that I’m pretty short, really. My friends mostly think I’m taller than I am, though. I guess I must “stand tall.”

A few years ago, I accidentally painted our house pink. Pepto pink in fact. I have since vowed to buy quarts or pints of paint and try out colors on the side of the house so the neighbors can vote before any paint is applied in earnest.

So, in the spirit of trying out portraits before plastering them everywhere, which portrait do you like best? Your vote matters so let me know which ones you like best by leaving a comment with the number.

With the announcement that WordPress now realizes the difference between tags and categories, I’m going through my 34 posts to date and re-tagging them and limiting the categories.

The way I see it with my technical writer lens on, categories are broad general topics and I’m hoping my blog will have about a half dozen categories. Tags, on the other hand, are more like index keywords. So I’m re-reading my posts and trying to define categories very conservatively and carefully, but with tags I’m probably going overboard, approaching it like creating an index on an entire book, using any keyword I can find in the title or the text or the headings and making the keyword a tag.

To avoid being the anti-social taxonomist that I can be sometimes, I will keep an eye on what other people using WordPress.com are using for their tags so I can be like them. Apparently not a lot of folks use “techpubs” for their tagging so I’ll probably start using “technical-writing” instead. Another case-in-point of my tendency to use odd keywords for tags - while Michael Cote uses “thekids” in del.icio.us to bookmark links pertinent to what the Net Generation is doing, I would probably chose to tag mine “tehkidz” because I’m a dork that way.

Twenty-two more posts to go.

I want to extol the virtues of Jon Klem at Feedburner, plus give a status update for this feed and the old TalkBMC feed. Now the feeds have been combined into one, bringing subscribers over with no interruption, and Jon stuck with me for no less than a 16-email message thread so that he and I understood what was going on behind the scenes for this feed.

My goal was to have a seamless transition to my new blog, and thanks to Ynema Mangum, the talented and clever powerhouse behind talk.bmc.com and Tom Parish, the SEO brains and guru for the site, I was able to bring over the subscribers from my old feed to my new feed. So with their permission I emailed Feedburner support to explain my situation and see what the technology could do.

Feedburner has a way to transfer one feed from one account to another, and then transfer the subscribers from one feed to another. Then, the account holder (that’s me) exports the stats from the old feed to a spreadsheet for safekeeping, and then deletes the old feed and stats.

Are you as curious as I was about the most popular posts from my talk.bmc.com blog? I’m sure you’re not, but here are the top three anyway. Your analysis and interpretation is as good as mine.

1. Celebrating moms and parenthood in the workplace — TalkBMC
2. Connecting the dots, or pixels, for service impact — TalkBMC
3. Best practices in tech comm for customer feedback — TalkBMC

Is the world ready for time-warped RSS feeds?

As feed and subscription technology ages ever so slightly, I thought there might be a need for the ability to read RSS feeds only from a certain window of time. Plus I had just finished the book “The Time Traveler’s Wife” which seems like chick lit until you realize it’s practically science fiction, or speculative fiction, an amazing love story entwined in the leap of faith the reader takes, accepting that the husband can time travel. That powerful book left me wondering about the passage of time and how to immerse yourself in another time.

So, about two years ago I wrote up the idea, and what-do-you-know, Bloglines has added a longer time span to their return content feature, allowing you to read from feeds from 2001. When you’re logged in and on the Feeds tab, click the Search tab in the right-hand pane and then click More to get the advanced search.

One usability note in case anyone at Bloglines reads this: it might make sense to have the second set of date selectors automatically be set to December 31, 2001. 

This post outlines some use cases for this RSS search specialty.

Overall description of retro feeds, or time-warped feed reading

The general concept is a mash-up of archive.org and an RSS aggregator like Bloglines. One approach would be to design and create a plug-in that would work with many of the popular RSS aggregators, or, another approach is to write a web form where users just enter the feed URL and the date window.

Use cases for retro feeds

Many thanks to Charlie Wood at Moonwatcher for his use cases so I could expand on those excellent RSS use cases for time-warped RSS use cases.

• Journalists who want to dig deep into a story from the past, such as the Enron accounting scandal, can immerse themselves in an RSS news story feed that is from early 2002. Put this string into the Search for Posts box in Bloglines: enron scandal betweendate:20020101,20031231.
• Researchers or reviewers of technology who want to follow all blog posts from LinuxWorld October 26 - 28, 2004.
• Time warped RSS feeds on campaign finance reform in 2004 could show the influence of a topic for beginning an upswing or starting a downfall.
• You want to see non-standard media outlets covering the surgence of RIAA lawsuit letters going out before 2005, so you also click the Exclude news radio button and make the date range pre-2005.
• A public relations person wants to discover when blogs first started talking about a problem with their product, such as the initial scratchability discovery of the screen for the iPod Nano.

Please, let me know your feedback on these use cases. Are there other uses for retro feeds that I haven’t covered? Have you ever needed to limit your blog searching with date boundaries?

Last week I got an email asking me if I had taken over someone else’s blog since WordPress.com had a slight problem with feed glitches. Eep, I did nothing of the sort. But then I got a second comment asking if I was aware that the talk.bmc feed now gives justwriteclick.com content, and I realized that I hadn’t ever explained to all my previous subscribers on the talk.bmc feed that the feed now goes to my new justwriteclick.com blog. Sorry about that!

If you’re subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TalkBMC-AnneGentle, you’re now subscribed to the content on my justwriteclick.com blog. You can delete that subscription and subscribe to the new feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/justwriteclick so that you’ll continue to get content updates when the old feed goes away eventually. I’m working with Feedburner technical support to get an official rollover to occur. Apparently people do this type of blog transfer quite often as they weren’t surprised by my request.

Ideally you don’t have to do anything (unless you’ve subscribed to both and are now annoyed by the double-content push, and if that’s the case, unsubscribe from the talk.bmc feed).  I appreciate you sticking with me and reading my blog, always. Let me know your suggestions and questions and I’ll do my best to address them. In another blog entry I’ll talk about URL redirects and domain name registrations, which have been easy with Google Applications and WordPress.com, plus fun to learn.

I haven’t decided whether it’s the just write click blog, or that I’m telling people to just write, click, blog. Blog as a noun or blog as a verb? Like Pimp My Ride, I’ll noun a verb and verb a noun.

Anyway, welcome! I am so excited about a hosted Word Press solution and thanks Cote for helping me decide that this solution is the best. You can always get here using www.justwriteclick.com, and the feed is always active. So please, just subscribe, read, and comment, to the new just write click blog.