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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.
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.
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.
Stories from SXSWi 2008 – Future of Volunteerism
I can’t believe it, but SXSW Interactive rolls around again this weekend. I found still-unpublished notes from last year’s Future of volunteerism, Adapt or Die session. Woops! They’re sloppy but fun to revisit so I’ll go ahead and post.
Virtual Relay for life – awareness, advocacy, fundraising
running in parallel, not a replacement
complementary – reaches new constituents
Amer. Cancer Society
National Geographic
March of Dimes – Story telling is a big part of engaging volunteers in social spaces – stories are about babies, preventing birth defects.
Every baby has a story – people can tell stories about their babies.
Flaws from Amer. Cancer Society
-fragmentation – recruiting volunteers different ways for different divisions – moving from Kansas to NYC would give a volunteer a different experience
- no one under 60 wants to stuff envelopes, they want to be more active
- don’t miss opportunities based on location – developer example
- 2 million volunteers – active groups on the ground, driving people to treatments, etc. But no nationwide strategy to communicate
What they’ve shifted to
- new campaign “a little time, a lot of good” (sounds like microvolunteerism!)
- talent strategy officer now
- if they want to keep volunteers, they have to find new jobs for those volunteers
- online team shares for events
“your PR and marketing person isn’t your webmaster, need chairperson for each event online”
-created Facebook volunteer recruitment, building applications that let Facebookers get credit for gathering volunteers.
-opened an “office” in Second Life
-Frozen Pea Fund – yay Austin connection through Connie Reece!
-Youtube has more “social” people uploading video, growth is exponential
- Pew study says 2007 22% shot their own video, 14% posted it online
- looking for case study on usability for the new site
Be honest, be responsive, spot trends, speak up.
Technology and non-profits can go hand-in-hand.
Yahoo now selling ads based on time spent and depth of engagement.
Email asking them to take an action – if they actually place the phone call, the level of engagment is superior.
- they don’t ask much but when they do, they really show up.
Peace Corp – government – nervous about the Internet.
Red Cross – They had volunteers build up the Second Life presence, were able to show money was raised there, they didn’t hire anybody. And with sweat equity and extra hours spent, they could be on Second Life despite their general counsel being very nervous about it.
Metrics – number of friends, money raised, page views.
12 Networks, One Camp
Last night we all gathered in a movie theater setting and each network attending Winter Camp gave a five minute presentation about their network and each member introduced themselves, in English, even though only a handful of the 160 people here speak English as a first language.
I was both humbled and in awe of the activism and energy my fellow Winter Campers display. Many, it seemed, are artists in new media or curators. There are some developers here as well but the majority of attendees seem to be actively running conferences or in-person events themselves. There were few US-ers there, with many more Europeans represented. One other network organizer said she invited her US activists but they were busy with a potential union organization of reality TV script writers.
Not only is the artwork for Winter Camp cool, the vibrant participants are making this event really interesting. Rather than a t-shirt giveaway for the event, we all got European-sized pillow case shams. Great idea!
Andy Oram, an O’Reilly editor, has two blog entries already posted and I wanted to be sure to link to them to offer his perspective which has been extremely valuable. Today I learned that large publishers consider a book’s “buzz window” (my term, not the publisher’s) to be about three weeks only. In other words, you only get about three weeks to promote a book. He discusses “a network of networks” in his first post (be sure to click through to the video) and OLPC along with many other networks in his second.
Today we met from 9-6:30 with an hour break for lunch, and had great discussions about not only the writer’s experience with the FLOSS Manuals tool, but also what experience are we creating for readers? I gave a short presentation about Book Sprint planning and we discussed ideas for improving and building on the Book Sprint experience for at least an hour.
The upcoming Book Sprints are listed on the FLOSS Manuals blog, but I’ll also list them here:
PureData Book Sprint
We are trying to work out the dates now for a sprint in NYC. Hans-Christoph Steiner and Derek Holzer will be at the helm.
Possibly it will be in late March, in NYC.
FSF Book Sprint
The Free Software Foundation will host Book Sprint (Organised by Andy Oram and Adam Hyde ). It will be to work on a manual introducing newbies to the command line.
Boston, March 21,22
Doctrain Book Sprint
The Doctrain conference will host a Book Sprint in California. Janet Swisher and Adam Hyde will co-ordinate. The sprint will be about FireFox, and the Mozilla Foundation are sending Chris Hofmann (Director of Engineering at Mozilla) to participate.
Palm Springs, California. March 17-20.
Open Translation Book Sprint
A Book Sprint to write a manual about Open Translation tools. being organised by Adam Hyde and Allen Gunn (Gunner from Aspiration Tech).
Amsterdam, June 26-30.
Happy holidays to all my blog readers!
Happy holidays to one and all
I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and are looking forward to an enjoyable 2009. It looks to be a great year even though money will be tight for many of us, and time may be tight for all of us.
I’ll be studying the Trend Blend and Beth Kanter’s blog and trying to figure out how it affects technical communication. I’m also attending Network Cultures Winter Camp in the new year, representing FLOSS Manuals. I hope to get to a few conferences also, such as the STC Summit and Web Content.
I’m anticipating editor markup on my new book this week, and the new year should bring you the opportunity to read my book, Documentation as Conversation, about harnessing the power of social media, networking, and communities for writers.
How do you develop a strategic website?
My son’s preschool has decided it needs a new website. Parents and board members want an online presence that has more interaction, dynamic logins, and password-protected content. We have goals! Elementary and private schools have followed many paths to achieving their web presence including an all-parent volunteer web staff to hiring freelance web designers to $30/month services.
I wondered how these services differed from what a firm like Duo Consulting did to develop an organization’s website. So I interviewed Duo Consulting CEO and visionary, Michael Silverman. I quickly recognized that Duo’s web content strategies for businesses far outpace my preschool’s relatively static content needs. But what I also learned was that the goals of websites for many business models are often similar.
Its All About Content
What Michael told me is that websites that have a lot of changing content represent a breed of website. These may be content publishers or transactional websites. But the universal feature is that they all experience a challenge sharing their copious information online. Professional service firms, like law and accounting firms, have a lot of intellectual property that they publish on their websites. Universities, colleges and other higher education clients market themselves with their content.
Transactional websites, essentially online stores, receive considerable visibility in media coverage of the Internet. But helping organizations publish authoritative and informative content that helps them achieve their business objectives is a more challenging goal. Michael said one thing they’ve learned is that Search Engine Optimization and other traffic generation strategies is only a first step. You also need a highly usable and easily navigated site so that once visitors arrive at a site, they have a meaningful business experience.
Experience Managing Content Produces Client Dividends
With a focus on helping its client manage content, Duo has clients in multiple market including newspaper and magazines, professional services and non-profit organizations. Having experience with these industries permits Duo to more effectively scope a project when they’ve done one like it before. And they can bring best practices to the client for their particular type of business and online presence.
Having content management experience helped Duo to be chosen by the Christian Science Monitor to implement their Web-first strategy. The Christian Science Monitor intends to convert their content from a print-based periodical to a weekly web publication system. Duo has the experience with online periodicals to design and build the online interaction that they will need to be successful with this new direction for their content.
Wikis and Social Media Serve Non-Profit Organizations
Non-profits, especially those that do online fundraising, need an evolving strategic web presence to accomplish their business goals. According to Michael one of the trends Duo is seeing with non-profits and web content is a strong interest in using wikis. Volunteers collaborate using wikis when they’re on committees, they share files and communicate with the wiki. They’re also seeing much more uptake of social networking in a website’s strategy, adding functionality for websites so that people can easily form groups for discussion or common interests or other tasks. He mentioned Google Friend Connect which has been in private beta until now. It lets you add social features to your website, and indicates Google is ready to compete outright with Facebook.
When You’re Thinking About a Website Think About…
Michael said he’d like to leave people with two suggestions for strong web content – one is that a web site should have a “job description” just like any employee does. They ask people, what do you want your website to do, and how do you measure its success at doing those tasks? You may not want to set specific numbers to reach within a particular time frame, but you do want to see continual improvement.
Along those lines, he also says that you are never really done with a website. Do not expend all your energy and resources just towards a launch of a website – ensure that you can have the sustained power to see how it’s performing, then look at improvements along the way and milestones that you want to reach with your content.
OLPC Book Ready for G1G1!
Tomorrow, Monday, November 17 is the launch of the new Give One Get One campaign for 2008 – meaning, once again you can buy your very own XO laptop. The tagline for this year is Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop. Change the World.
You can buy yours at amazon.com/xo.
All our community author’s work has culminated into a book that’s now for sale on Lulu, and as soon as we can get it listed on Amazon, the book will be available there as well.
The back cover of all FLOSS Manuals books say “Please copy!” We fully intend for the OLPC Laptop Guide to available to anyone who wants one. You can purchase a printed copy at Lulu for a modest markup (that funds future booksprints and the like), or download the PDF, or remix the content at FLOSSManuals.net.
The neat thing is, once you’re done with a real book, you can pass it on to the next person who wants to learn about their XO. My hope is that XO users around the world will get a book and pass it on.
Shows front and back covers of the Laptop Guide for OLPC
How does search affect delivery and presentation methods?
Search technology and its application by our users is an ever-growing aspect of technical documentation today. How many times have you seen “I found the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article using a Google search.” (or have you been guilty of doing the same yourself?) I say “guilty” because it’s funny that Microsoft has built the best content site in their Knowledge Base and yet a competitor’s search engine brought the user to the site.
Sure, any knowledge base absolutely must have a search engine and search box available to visitors to the site. A manual of some sort was once a requirement for a consumer product, but I’m not sure if a book-like manual is a requirement any more. Will the custom crafted search engine go the same way?
In the case of someone finding the content using another search engine, it means that for that particular visitor, all the resources and time and money spent on providing a search engine specific to that knowledge base was wasted. There was zero return on investment for the search engine but all return on investment on the content itself.
Anne Gentle is the author of 
