I’m late to write up my thoughts on Gordon Mclean’s post, Strange Bias, but I give him a belated thumbs up for great self-inspection and data query in the post.

My take? I read ““Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants” on Copyblogger in December. It’s a great survivor story that you should read in its entirety, but the gist of it is that James is a pen name for a woman freelance writer, who writes the popular blog Men with Pens. Merely representing herself as a man made a real difference in her career trajectory. I was shocked, though, that she never had to talk to clients on the phone and that she never went to conferences or spoke at conferences.

It made me wonder if I’d have 10 times the subscribers to my blog if I had started in 2005 as Tom Gentle. It really did. But we are who we are, and being genuine and transparent is all part of my blogging experience. Many of the opportunities I’ve had in the past 4-5 years are somehow related to my blog and the work ethic it requires to maintain.

And to answer Gordon’s question, “is it just me?” I’d say, my experience with tech pub teams I’ve been on are that men are the slightly minority gender. If you believe Quantcast web stats about the STC website, you see that 61% of site visitors are female. I’ve also observed more women at tech comm conferences than men.

But, socializing being, well, social, means you tend to relate to people like yourself, right? So followers, friends, and fans, being self-selecting as they are, may prove that men follow men and women follow women. I think Twitter certainly reflects this tendency, since research shows men follow men on Twitter. And bloggers use Twitter far more than the general population (See the pie chart on the Day 5 report).

If you read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere you see that 2/3 rds of all bloggers are men. So the 55% blogs written by men that Gordon reads actually differs from the predictive 66% overall population. A great observation, Gordon, well done.

Jakob Nielson and his research group, Nielsen Norman Group, have done it again – letting us know how users are actively perceiving and using social software for different business tasks. This research is important as the social web evolves so that we, as web content creators, know the best ways to present and offer different types of information, especially for corporate sites. He pulls it all together in an Alertbox from October 12, 2009 titled Streams, Walls, and Feeds: Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS.

What does this research mean for user assistance delivered through social means?

Voice matters – People wanted a specific voice for certain corporate brands. For example, the BBC was thought that it should have a more professional voice in its messages. But for other corporate brands, people wanted a more casual style, but the biggest reason for unfollowing a company rep on a social networking site was annoyance at the frequency of posting. My thinking? Don’t post your entire release notes links via Twitter in a week – instead spread them out to avoid drowning out the other people that your readers are also interacting with. I talk about finding your voice in chapter 7 of my book, and this research finding is certainly relevant.

Consider context – Updates that came through RSS rather than social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, were thought to be more “official” and trustworthy. However, readers have a lot more control over what they see – and readers who read the second page of a stream are nearly unheard of. They don’t seek out past postings. I have seen this happen on my blog here at JustWriteClick – once a post drops off that first page of about 10 posts, it’s only seen again when someone from a search engine looks for something very specific, such as the End-user Documentation in an Agile Environment post. What else is interesting about offering RSS feeds for information is that users’ habits haven’t changed in 3 years, though RSS use is on the rise and people are selective of the feeds they track.

Keep up – Twitter and Facebook are sites that are visited daily – can you keep up if you decide to engage customers there? And is there a place for end-user documentation on these sites? My take is that you shouldn’t start unless you’re willing to keep up. And in many cases, you probably don’t need to start on certain social network sites. If your group haa corporate goals like maintaining customer support by tying the social network interaction very tightly with your end-user documentation, then Twitter or LinkedIn may be a good match. Facebook may be a match also, depending on your message. Non profits, for example, find Facebook a great match for education, training, or raising awareness. If your corporate alignment as a technical writer is with the training and education department, you may find a niche case for using Facebook for promoting learning opportunites.

Make it useful - The most successful messages had substance, were timely, and met users expectations. Message usefulness scored the lowest of all the categories. Yikes. I would hope that as more content strategists and technical communicators apply their skillset to these messages, we can increase the utility.

Write well – Writing specifically for the medium is important to get the results you want. Probably the best way to write well for the medium is to read as much content as you can in the targeted medium. Apparently you can’t just repurpose content or use shortened text snippets that point to a longer one – users won’t click through.

Mobile findings

Only 4% of the users involved in the study sought out corporate messages from a mobile device. What I might infer from that finding is that mobile devices are for necessary in-field information, not for corporate messages syndicated through RSS or posted to social networks.

Email still fits

I found it interesting that email messages and newsletters may still be the best way to maintain customer relationships. Even though the user is responsible for deleting those messages, requiring more “work” than social networking sites, users still don’t browse through multiple messages from corporate “streams.”

Nielson’s summary says it so very succinctly that I can’t help but quote it directly:

Summary:
Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

I like to keep an eye on what posts are popular, although with a blog, you can define popular in many different ways. Most comments, most views, or highest average daily views. So if you’re new to my blog, (and the recent uptick in subscribers might indicate that some of you are, so welcome!) you might enjoy these previous posts.

Here are the most popular posts based on total views (I think this is slightly inaccurate for the life of my blog but still interesting):

• Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?: Wiki as the new FAQ I discovered and have been meaning … 7 comment(s)
  
• EMC Adds Google Desktop to EMC Documentum Federated Search Environment: An excellent combination, Google search for your enterp… 0 comment(s)
• Twitter for usability testing or doc testing? Sure, here’s how: My coworker went to SXSW Interactive this year, and I m… 1 comment(s)
  
• Writing End-User Documentation in an Agile Development Environment: This article was original published in the June 2007 is… 17 comment(s)
  

Here are the most popular posts based on average daily views:

• Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?: Wiki as the new FAQ I discovered and have been meaning … 7 comment(s)
  
• EMC Adds Google Desktop to EMC Documentum Federated Search Environment: An excellent combination, Google search for your enterp… 0 comment(s)
  
• Love, love, <3 The Twitter Book: Wow, just got a print copy of The Twitter Book by Tim … 1 comment(s)
  
• Conversational robots: Move over qmail mailer-daemon*, Little MOO from moo.com… 2 comment(s)
  
• Twitter for usability testing or doc testing? Sure, here’s how: My coworker went to SXSW Interactive this year, and I m… 1 comment(s)
  

Here are the most popular posts based on number of comments:

• STC Intercom – themes and advice wanted: I’m quite flattered and humbled (and more than a little… 25 comment(s)
  
• Look out, updated headshots are coming: The headshots I’ve been using (including the one that s… 19 comment(s)
  
• Writing End-User Documentation in an Agile Development Environment: This article was original published in the June 2007 is… 17 comment(s)
  
• DITA and wiki hybrids – they’re here: Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter presented at last week’s … 14 comment(s)
  
• Arrrrrrr, mateys!: I haven’t been churning out blog posts for a while due … 14 comment(s)

What are your favorites – the most discussed or the most widely read? Feel free to leave a comment.

I gave a webinar this week for Scriptorium that will be available online titled “Documentation as Conversation.” The fact that it’s recorded lets you avoid scurrying around rearranging meetings in Outlook just to attend it. It sold out which was great to hear, but I like that the message and conversation continues through the recording. One of my fun examples was the Wordle visualization of my tags from the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us.

During the question and answer session, someone mentioned they felt like social media made her feel like we’re becoming paleontologists. I think she referred to my many examples of how to “stalk” your users to learn more about them and their goals, especially if you document software. I search for my product’s name in Indeed.com job listings as well as look for job titles with my product’s name in LinkedIn to learn more about the people I’m writing for. I wrote up the technique in this blog post, Find your user’s vocabulary and use his or her key terms as keywords.

I also had a follow up email saying that people want to know, where should my team start conversations? Or where should we focus our time if we do start? In my book, I talk about phases: Listen, Participate, Share, Build a Platform. I think you should start with listening and monitoring what’s already being said. Next, start by commenting on blogs or by blogging yourself. A baby step towards blogging is to blog on an internal site, behind your firewall, just to limit your audience if that makes you more comfortable.

Also I’d recommend trying out tools that are already installed that you don’t have to maintain and install yourself. For example, I started justwriteclick.com on wordpress.com and paid $10 a year to map my domain name. When I knew WordPress was a good fit for me and my blogging and site needs, I went ahead and found an ISP and installed WordPress myself. And two years later, I’m hooked on WordPress and I’m even attending WordCamp Dallas in a few weeks.

Sharing content is the next step, and the final step is providing a platform for users to bring their own content in. These steps take time but you will learn valuable lessons along the way and hopefully avoid any stumbling or disastrous results. It’s okay to fail, though. You learn new lessons with each attempt and approach.

So keep an eye out for the recording of the webinar, Documentation as Conversation. The price remains at USD $20 and you get to schedule listening to it any any time of the day. It’s an hour long and if you do listen to the recording, feel free to contact me via email with any questions. I am looking forward to hearing even more feedback!

I finally feel some energy returning after my eye injury about a month ago, although my right eye remains dilated which still means that side is a bit out-of-focus and I don’t like driving at night. I feel like I need to give a status update or some such. So here goes.

Winter Camp

With luck my eye should be just fine in time for a big event coming up: Winter Camp 09 the first week of March. I’ll be representing and working for FLOSS Manuals at this event, held in Amsterdam. From the description, it will be an amazing week:

Network Cultures Winter Camp will be a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done. It will be a four-day program of work spaces and plenary presentations, in which a dozen networks (each of which has 5-15 people) can work on their specific current topics.

The format was inspired by a cardboard box art installation that activates a temporary warehouse of contemporary knowledge from what I can gather from a translation of the page, Re-fitting ideas. Come on, that’s incredible. I am so thrilled to be a part of it. And I know it’s going to be a week of hard work.

Preschool website completed, using WordPress 2.7

We’ve also finished the preschool website I mentioned in my interview with Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting. We used WordPress hosted at Midas Networks. I recorded some screencasts with Jing to show other parent volunteers how to edit content and work with images. All the photos on the site were taken by parents so it’s quite the “do-it-yourself” website. I am hoping that WordPress 2.7 will be easy enough for even those in our volunteer and staff group who are not technically savvy but still give us the growth towards more content creators that we have in our goals for the site.

FLOSS Manuals and OLPC

We’ve sold over 200 copies of the OLPC Laptop Users Guide on Lulu.com, and Adam Hyde gave a copy of one of FLOSS Manuals’ books to Bob Young, the CEO of Lulu, while they were at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. Impressive. I still plan to make the Sugar Users Guide better. Adam Hyde and I are working on a book about how to run a Book Sprint in FLOSS Manuals, naturally, and we would welcome additional contributors.

DITA and Web 2.0

I’ve been approached to help put a public face on standards for DITA and Web 2.0 projects such as DITA for wikis (an example is Lisa Dyer’s DITA2Wiki project on SourceForge) and DITA for blogs (another example is DITA to WordPress or DITA and microformats).

STC Intercom Editorial Advisory Panel

I’ve been pretty impressed with the STC Intercom issues in 2009 so far, but I wrote one of the articles so perhaps my judgement would be playing favorites. I would like to gather feedback from STC members and non-members who read the articles – how’s the content grabbing you this year?

Author-it 5.2

It looks as though 5.2 is the version of Author-it that will allow us to upgrade from 4.5. Our content just wouldn’t publish adequately (Word or HTML) on 5.0 or 5.1, but now that 5.2 is released, fingers crossed, we’ll be moving to 5.2 soon. I should write a blog post about some of our testing on our 20,000+ object database. I’m getting used to the Ribbon Bar as I continue to work in Word 2007, and Author-it’s 5.x interface feels a lot like Word 2007.

Writing a book, do tell me what you want to know

Last but certainly not least, I’m working with a professional editor to try to finalize my book about documentation as conversation that examines the power of social media for writing projects. It walks through the myriad of possibilities of different types of social media tools and analyzes how writers and communities are using these tools for technical documentation. Look for it this spring!

Diane Wieland has a great post at the Duo Consulting blog called Free Expert Blogging Advice that points to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. In the blog entry she encourages bloggers to learn from the reviews of blogs using a standard set of criteria found at Business and Blogging. They say:

Good Blogs will be:

• easy to find
• frequently updated
• written in an engaging manner
• relevant
• focused
• honest
• interactive
• responsive

Bad blogs will be:

• hard to find
• infrequently updated
• censored
• one-way communication
• unresponsive
• defensive

Ugly blogs will be:

• boring
• inaccurate or misleading
• filled with technical jargon (for a non-technical audience)
• full of regulations and legal disclaimers
• self-absorbed
• press releases in disguise

It would be interesting to apply these review criteria on technical writing tool vendor’s blogs. MadCap has what I consider to be a groundswell-blogger-style with personalities first, company second. Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite team’s blog has a distinct corporate and enterprise appeal while still identifying posters by name and letting you get to know them. ComponentOne has a collection of blogs and bloggers but buzz generation fills the first page. Author-it has a new nicely branded WordPress blog. WebWorks has a group of bloggers also and Alan Porter is my favorite blogger there. TechSmith hosts three blogs – the Jing Blog, Screencast.com Blog and The Visual Lounge Blog.

I won’t apply bad or ugly criteria to any of these. I’m happy they’re blogging. What are your thoughts as more and more of “our” vendors begin to join the blog world? Have I missed any of your vendor favorites?

For even more corporate blogging resources, see the link list on Rhonda Bracey’s post entitled Corporate/business blogging.

I have seen the eminent reinvention of technical documentation as we know it, which inspired me to begin chronicling my own observations and shifts in the field of communicating technical topics through conversation.

One such revealing moment happened while I was working on documentation for the One Laptop Per Child project on their wiki at wiki.laptop.org. The Give One Get One rollout  was hurtling towards the organization, and they had not completely designed a support system nor did they have a user manual ready to view online or to print. The Give One Get One program gave the opportunity for the first time for anyone in the U.S to buy a laptop and know that one additional laptop would be sent to another country. Through the nearly heroic efforts of one person building a new team self-named the Support Gang, an all-volunteer crew if I understood the situation correctly, a wiki-based Support FAQ came to life and a support email address was created and a support team made of volunteers was staffed.

The amazing revelation to me was that the wiki FAQ could and did answer so many questions because they came from real people, customers of the Give One Get One program. The questions were real questions from real users, so there wasn’t a delay in seeking out a subject matter expert. These were conversations happening on the wiki Edit tab or on the Discuss tab. See the History on wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ for examples of the questions and answers that happened, and also notice the time stamps for some of the answers. The immediacy of the response is practically like an Instant Messaging conversation via the wiki FAQ page.

How did the community completely fill out these highly useful wiki pages? Or did just a few volunteers do it? It was the work of a few good people continuing conversations with real users or potential and upcoming customers of the little laptop. Community-supported email, forums, and IRC discussions rolled into these wiki pages. Supporting users was the work of college students, of parents who were anticipating their laptop’s arrival, and other non-professional writers. One such volunteer was Katie, a mom who is a mathematician by day, and an excellent FAQ writer by night. Her wiki pages and research around the wireless connectivity were extremely helpful to everyone who bought a Give 1 Get 1 laptop. Without her dedication, many of us couldn’t have connected to the Internet, and the user manual I continued to work on benefited greatly from her wiki contributions and knowledge sharing.

That the community created such helpful, useful, readable pages was a complete turnaround for my attitude about what sweat goes into writing and rewriting carefully crafted topics to then submit for review and sweat over again and again until a deadline comes. I thought, instead of toiling over the exact words and following a style guide, should I try to recruit and entice and motivate contributors from every professional or amateur background possible? Some paranoid types say that laymen and amateur writers could beat us at our own chosen profession. But “beat” is not the right term. It’s not a contest or an all-out competition, it’s a group effort towards a shared goal.

Armed with this revelation, I began studying how conversations and community attract the right combination of content and information to offer the right amount of technical communication delivered in the right manner. Part of my study involved hands-on creation of end-user documentation, including a PDF manual, using the  OLPC community’s wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide, and also using a highly customized wiki engine at FLOSS Manuals, www.flossmanuals.net.

Much of the labor and toil on those wiki pages and especially with the community volunteer atmosphere of OLPC and FLOSS Manuals is coming to fruition next week at the FLOSS Manuals BookSprint to document the XO laptop and the Sugar operating system for the students, parents, and teachers benefiting from the One Laptop Per Child project around the world.

I love this visualization toy, Woordle at http://wordle.net/, and as it turns out, I use the word “love” quite a bit. That and “really.” Who knew?

It’s quite fun to make a Wordle because of the animation you see while the word “cloud” is added to, so I highly recommend trying it for yourself. You can change the colors and fonts. Here’s the Wordle based on my blog:

I also enjoyed reading the backstory of Wordle’s creator – he works for IBM and created Wordle in his spare time with his employer’s approval. Neat!

I’ve been busy lately working on plans for a Floss Manuals BookSprint. A BookSprint is a week-long concentrated effort of technical writers getting together to create a manual for free, libre open source software products. BookSprints are like a workshop where writers come together to learn how to write good user documentation. BookSprints are also a social experience where writers come together to form a community who share common goals and experiences.

Writers are giving 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’re interested in joining us for a day or all week, we’d love to have you. We’re planning to invite local students to the event also.

This picture shows the recent Inkscape BookSprint held in Paris France. We’re planning to hold the XO/Sugar BookSprint here in Austin, but I’m guessing the collection of laptops and cables will be the same here as there!

Inkscape BookSprint in Paris

In this case, we’ll produce a comprehensive manual for the kids, families, and teachers using the little green XO laptop. While the manual that exists at flossmanuals.net/olpc_simple is a targeted effort, it is outdated for the new line drawn between hardware (XO) and operating system (Sugar). Our hope is to expand the manual in advance of the new expanded Give 1 Get 1 program will give educators and children a chance to learn about their laptop, repair it, program with it, and teach others.

What can you do to help? Right now, I’m raising money and asking for in-kind donations to help with this concentrated effort. Here are some ideas, although you can come up with creative ideas yourself if you want!

$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

Updated to add: You can also directly give donations at http://en.flossmanuals.net/donate.

Sponsorship earns not only good “whuffie” but we’ll list your name or business name on these websites: FLOSS Manuals, JustWriteClick, Sugar Labs, and OLPC.

An exciting aspect of this BookSprint is the international effort behind it. Adam Hyde, founder of Floss Manuals, is planning to make the trek to Austin from Amsterdam, and there’s a French Floss Manuals coordinator working behind the scenes to ensure that the document can be translated to French. I’m also working with Yama Ploskonka, admin of the OLPC-Sur list of Spanish-speaking OLPC supporters to find Spanish language translators.

All in all, this is a very exciting effort and I’d love to get readers of JustWriteClick involved in any way you’d like. I’m very excited to be part of this effort and pleased to play host – let’s gather some more community around the BookSprint to make it a success.

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.