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Conversational robots
Photo courtesy a voir etc...
Move over qmail mailer-daemon*, Little MOO from moo.com is my new favorite polite responder. Check out the auto-response I received after asking their support team a question using their webform. New favorite polite robot responder:
“Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so please don’t reply to this email. You’ll find our Service Agents far more conversational.”
Plain awesome. But obviously written by a human, unlike this robot chat program that won a prize last year for being most likely to fool people into thinking it was a human. The transcript of the robot’s “interview” is entertaining reading. They programmed it to be sarcastic and entertaining, which comes across as plain cheeky sometimes. Talk to him yourself at Elbot.com.
*In case you’re curious, the previous robot response winner for me is,
“Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mooseworld.org
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the
following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up.
Sorry it didn’t work out.”
Does anyone else have favorite automatic responses that you’ve written or received? Please do share.
Does designing content for scanning devalue the content?
I just read a great post by Rajesh Setty on the Lateral Action blog called 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online. Maybe it’s because I’m in the final countdown before my book is permanently affixed to the pulp of dead trees, or maybe it’s because I’m looking at online user assistance tools to see how they can enable conversational documentation, but it struck me that user assistance gets stuck in that first low value category often. Here’s the excellent visual that shows how return on investment increases as the response to the content becomes more and more spreadable, actionable, returnable, and impossible to ignore.
Image courtesy Rajesh Setty
We are told as writers to make our online help scannable, that people don’t linger on it, they just want to find the answer, get in, get out, get on with their work. With the classic online help tools available, we rarely break into that second tier where readers can stop, save (as in social bookmarking), and shift their thinking based on the content.
And the final tier, send, spread, and subscribe, are actions not yet available in a classic help authoring tool. The “send” action can be via email only, and most help systems have to have that type of link specially coded. Spreading a link via social networks is not yet enabled in online help systems that I know of. And how many help vendors offer a subscribe or notification system?
If these response mechanisms are what your audience requires, you may have rethink your Help Authoring Tool selection and look at comment tools, blogs and wikis, and create a help system offers the features that give opportunity to leverage content and engage the readers. I believe Adobe has accomplished these goals with a hybrid approach that offers traditional online user assistance that includes the ability to “talk back” to the help writer via comments on each help topic.
I benefited from their approach this weekend in fact. I have a lot of footnotes in my book that point to relevant web pages and blog entries. I wanted to collect them into endnotes for the entire book. So I searched in the Indesign Support Center site. You can either search their Community Help or search the Indesign Online Help. The Community Help feature is in public beta according to the About page, and they are using a Google Custom Search Engine to “selectively index only the most high quality sites and resources.” I found a series of comments on the topic about footnotes that led me to a blog entry from the lead writer on blogs.adobe.com. His blog entry describes gathering footnotes into endnotes that use cross-references – apparently an old FrameMaker trick! And, to make it even more clear that a community helped this writer, he credits a forum post comment in a InDesign user forum with giving him the answer. Plus, after the blog post was published, another community member commented on the blog entry, giving him a link to the scripts that would automate the footnote to endnote process described in the blog entry. I was utterly blown away. Community documentation at work for me.
What do you think? Are the tools that cater to the needs of technical publications crowd already available? Or are technical writers going to move content to blogs and wikis due to feature demands from their readers?
Webinar available now from Scriptorium Publishing
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!
Progress on the Conversation and Community book
The final details for my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, are coming together. Lots of news to report, so here goes.
I’m so excited to announce that Eliot Kimber has agreed to use my book for the DITA for Publishers project, taking the content from Adobe InDesign to DITA.
Tom Johnson also posted a fun interview he recorded during the STC Summit. I told Tom, I can hear myself grinning. This book is just fun to talk about.
I’m often asked, how long have you been working on it? I answer that I’ve been working on it for over a year now. It combines lots of stories from my corporate blogging days at BMC Software with my foray into the open source community with the One Laptop per Child project, SugarLabs (the education project that runs the open source software on the OLPC laptop), and most importantly, FLOSS Manuals, providing free software for free documentation. My thirty-hour work week at ASI has afforded me the time to write out my journey and my observations along the way.
What a journey it has been and I’m so pleased with how the book is turning out. This week I am furiously indexing (is there any other way to index besides furiously?) and often messing with recto and verso pages, something I haven’t done in InDesign before and boy does it show. My PageMaker days as a graduate assistant at Miami University’s Center for Chemical Education are coming in handy, no doubt about it.
I think we’ve finalized the cover design, which for me is a very exciting part of real bookmaking! I’ll see if I can share it on my blog soon.
Four fine people have agreed to do technical reviews and I know some of them are at least 100 pages in. I hope they have insights – but not too many that may cause me to think too hard. Just kidding, Alan, Will, Sarah, and Scott! 
Keep reading and keep your notes at the ready because I’m ready to make all the changes needed to keep this project rolling. This book’s time has come.
Love, love, <3 The Twitter Book
Wow, just got a print copy of The Twitter Book
by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) and Sarah Milstein (@SarahM, user number 21 of Twitter). Thanks go to Andy Oram, @praxagora, for referring me to it after he read a draft of my upcoming book.
The layout, form factor, full-bleed color page numbers, and color screenshots and photos (Twitpics) throughout the interior are just wonderful. This design combination makes it an excellent hand-held object, worthy of being print-based! I’ll keep this one out in my living room. But I’m kind of nerdy that way.
It has important and useful information about Twitter (www.twitter.com) and why it’s so powerful. Just thumbing through it I found two things I didn’t know about Twitter (and I’ve been on Twitter as @annegentle since early 2007.) One is, it really is a big deal that Twitter removed the setting that allowed you to customize which @username replies you saw and your followers saw. There used to be three settings in the Settings>Notices tab (page , now there are none. But Twitter reversed the original policy decision, and Read Write Web gives a graphical explanation (it’s strange enough that it needs explanation.)
The second informative tip is that for the most part, people tweet the most on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And most people, if they don’t see your tweet in the first five minutes of you posting it, won’t see it at all. I bet that the more uptake we have desktop grouping helpers like TweetDeck, the longer that tweet click-through duration will last. But even with better grouping so that you don’t miss tweets from people you really want to read, as more and more people join Twitter, it’s harder and harder to ensure you get the information you want. So you might want to think about using TweetLater to post a slightly re-worded micropost at another time.
I have to admit, I do like Chris Brogan’s idea of using the hashtag #getoffmylawn for celebrities who use Twitter in an annoying way. But better yet, have more and more people read The Twitter Book to get better and better at their Twitter use and micropost writing.
And finally, words to live by, in Chapter 3 “Hold Great Conversations.” On Twitter or any other community and communication site, it’s not about you! The best part is about contributing to the community – make a positive impact. “…the more value you create for the community, the more value it will create for you.”
Social weather in online communities
I’m writing this as the rain falls down in Austin, Texas. I’m learning that with practice, you can learn the ebb and flow of a conversation and become a meteorologist for the “social weather” that’s ongoing in a community. For an example of social weather, do what Clay Shirky describes in his description of the course with the same name at New York University. Simply make some observations next time you walk into a restaurant. Is it noisy or quiet? Slow or busy? Are there couples or groups dining? That collective atmosphere is the social weather, which I first read about on Jason Kottke’s blog.
In a restaurant you have visual and auditory cues to give your inner meteorologist a chance to assess the social weather. In an online community, you need to understand the cues that occur in writing, in emoticons, and in frequency and intensity of updates to content. In the presentation “Blogs and the social weather” at the Internet Research 3.0 conference in October 2002, Alex Halavais describes a deep dive into analysis of blogger’s discourse.
“By measuring changes in word frequency within a large set of popular blogs over a period of four weeks, and comparing these changes to those in the ‘traditional’ media represented on the web, we are able to come to a better understanding of the nature of the content found on these sites. This view is further refined by clustering those blogs that carry similar content. While those who blog may not be very representative of the public at large, charting discourse in this way presents an interesting new window on public opinion.”
While this concept may sound new and exciting, it is quite 20th century. I was surprised to learn that analyzing newspaper content to determine public opinion was researcher Alvan Tenney’s original concept in 1912. 1912!
Climb collaboration levels with me in Atlanta
Photo courtesy lollaping
I finished my presentation about Climbing the Levels of Collaboration for the Collaboration Institute at the STC Summit and I’m so excited about it I can’t stand it! True confession: I was up until 1:00 AM finishing it up and uploaded it quite late.
I found this great collaboration exercise that I’ve incorporated into the session. So we’ll be drawing with Crayola markers. Maybe even collaboratively. I’m hoping for quite the Back of the Napkin experience.
This session walks through the different ways you can collaborate with your users (and co-workers) especially when wikis are enabling the collaboration. I’ll be talking about Book Sprints and FLOSS Manuals and tell stories from my experiences. I was inspired by the examples of amazing group accomplishments described in Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Groups can take action even quicker than ever before in history thanks to tools that amplify group communications such as wikis, blogs, and instant messaging. There are three distinct levels of collaboration that a group can attain and what they accomplish directly correlates to the level of collaboration.
People I talked with definitely wanted to know best practices for wiki authoring techniques. One person even wanted to know how to incorporate user-generated content into their help system. I’ve heard that request before – such as, how could you import wiki content into Robohelp? Also, what I learned at last weeks’ talk was a high number of people wanting recommendations for wiki engines. There are over 90 to choose from on wikimatrix.org. Eep. Writers also wanted to how to organize content on a wiki. I won’t promise to have all the answers or any of the answers but I am looking forward to sharing my stories and hearing yours.
Gather ’round, Wikify your Doc Set slides now available
I had a great time talking to the New York Metro STC chapter from my office in Austin, Texas last night! There were twenty-some in the room, plus an additional twenty or so online. This was a great turnout for a chapter meeting with a virtual component.
I found I needed the chat backchannel to get me through the blindness and silence on the phone – the audience was so polite and didn’t interrupt but I found myself constantly checking for feedback and realizing the only feedback I could get was from the WebEx chat window flashing orange and white every once in a while. And the discussion beforehand about Twitter (editing tweets and tweeting edits) was light and entertaining and certainly kept my nerves calmed by letting me snicker with my hand over the phone mic.
I’ve made my slides available on Slideshare and I hope you’ll comment there and ask any additional questions you may have. I was energized afterwards! I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about wikis and wiki-like documentation.
Social networking and generalizations
I’ve seen a few too many email blasts and blog entries with a lead that dramatizes social media with these sweeping generalizations about age groups using social software. The average age of Twitter users is 32, so any line about 30-40 year olds is plain wrong. The average age of Facebook users skews upwards due to the pranking popularity of choosing “69″ as one’s age.
Recent demographics from Facebook say that in the last 60 days (from end-of-March 2009), the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55. Over 4 million more US women 35-44 and nearly 3 million more US men 35-44 used Facebook in March 2009 compared to September 2008. The majority of US Facebook users are now over 25.
Because the data doesn’t match these types of age scales, I cringe a little when I see age generalizations associated with social software.
There’s ethnographic data from danah boyd that describes that the actual difference between people using different social software sites is in fact class-based.
People are networking as always – and I’d argue, the usual is to relate more to people your same age in a similar life stage. But you miss out when you box people into age groups.
I blogged previously about the need for visibility into younger age groups to getting involved in associations like the Society for Technical Communication (STC). As a result, I had great pointers to 20-somethings who were doing neat things in the tech comm space. Tony Chung, your name came up! He’s a fellow blogger with me at the Duo Consulting blog. Another woman had been given her mother’s tech comm consulting business at a quite young age and was succeeding mightily.
Ann Wiley wrote a great email about how much age doesn’t matter when it comes to technology. And I agree, and I hope she doesn’t mind if I quote her here:
Those of us who came into the world in 1948 are blessed indeed. The horizon is very big, looking out from that year, and it gets bigger all the time. The war was over, our parents were indulgent, and technology came our way. The question is, what can we make of all that opportunity?
It doesn’t matter what age you are when you get into social technology, but your attitude does matter.
One last personal anecdote about the benefits of spanning generations in all your activity. One of my best running partners of all time is now in her seventies, and I ran at the same pace as she did when I was in my late 20s and she was in her mid-60s. She was and still is a faithful companion, a good listener, and a wonderful mentor and coach.
Go vote, STCers!
It’s quite easy to vote online for STC officers, just dig out the email you received from stc_election@stc.org that has your STC identifier and password, click the link to https://eballot.votenet.com/stc, and enter your ID and password. Once you’re on the voting site you can click through on the ballot to read each candidate’s position statements.
I’m tickled that two people of the most energetic academic instructors I’ve met are on this year’s ballot, Hillary Hart and Sandi Harner. Hillary Hart is in the Austin chapter and teaches engineering students about technical communication at the University of Texas. She and I worked on a committee to build the program for our hosting of the Region 5 conference, and Hillary’s great to work with, plus just fun to talk with. She uploaded a 30-second video about her candidacy to YouTube – take a look. The live oak trees behind her and the sunny breezy day are Austin classics!
I’ve talked to Hillary about the Body of Knowledge and she accepted and listened to my concern about overlap in effort with the eServer Technical Communication Library, a resource I frequent quite often. Hillary explained that the BoK approach is much more like a portal, offering pathways for those who have no idea what technical communication is. They are using personas to design the portal and I enjoyed reading those very much, but they must have been embedded in the survey because I can’t find the list online. One of the personas is available online in a Tieline article – the age 50 plus persona. Another persona may be a hiring manager or HR representative who is not familiar with technical communication. They are looking to partner with existing content sites as well as offer original content too. Quite the resource! Side note: the forest contains the trees contains a forest of trees – the Tech Comm Library has a category about Body of Knowledge.
Anne Gentle is the author of 
