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.

I finally did it, I wrote my first article for the Demand Studios content farm site, eHow. I wasn’t playing the part of a content farmer, though, but rather a farm worker, writing an article for little pay (compared to other rates I have earned as a professional writer).

I signed up for Demand Studios a few months back. There is a company called Pluck here in Austin that was acquired by Demand Media in the spring of 2008. What drew me to them in particular was not only the local connection, but also a fascination with turning search engine optimization on its ear. I first learned of these methods for content creation from this Wired article, The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model. Basically Demand Studios analyzes what phrases are searched for and then enter an article request in their database. There are currently 15,000 articles waiting to be written in their system. The pay for those articles is from $15 to $7.50 or less, and there are some assignments that offer profit sharing based on the numbers of views, apparently.

As a pro writer, I was dead set on following the style guide, knowing that attentiveness to the guidance given is part of the battle in producing good content. In their system, when I “Claimed” the article, it wasn’t immediately apparent which template I would be writing to, which made me a little nervous about attempting it in the first place. After clicking the article to claim it, though, I found that it was the About template. The guidelines were very clear – the About type required five sections with one-word section headers and the first section had to be titled Overview and contain about 75 words. The rest of the sections could contain more than 75 words but at least 50 words were necessary, and overall the article was targeted for 400-500 words. Quite structured.

The web-based authoring forms were easy to use, though it did not include a word count. I found it easier to get word counts in Textpad and then copy/paste the text into each section.

They’ve also very recently introduced an image library that you can search for images, the use of which is encouraged. You could add an image to each of the sections if you wanted. To my poorly trained eye, they seemed adequate but not too glossy, and none of my searches found quite the perfect image, but I included two anyway. They intend to allow people to upload their own photos, which I would have done in a heartbeat as I had one or two that would have been just right.

To my relief, the article I submitted by noon on a week day was approved by early morning the next week day.

It took me about 2.5 hours to write a 500 word article, I’m not proud to admit (or perhaps I should be proud of the quality that comes at that speed?) So my hourly rate for the article was right around $6.00 per hour. At least I didn’t have rewrites (she says sheepishly.)

To reflect back, I did the article because I wanted to see what the authoring system was like, and experience for myself the process of writing in such a system. To be sure, it’s easy to demonize such a system when you’re accustomed to higher pay for content creation. There’s a great interview on ReadWriteWeb by Jay Rosen, who talked with Demand Media founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, and it offers both sides of the issues surrounding content collection and the future of the web. I don’t want to take sides by sharing my experience. I just wanted to collect information based on the writer’s experience.

What do you think? Are content farms cluttering the web and driving down writer’s pay? Or is there an entrepreneurial opportunity here that offers a low barrier to entry for content creators any where to earn pay for  populating the web with content that’s already being searched for?

One of my readers asked for a post about cloud computing. I went straight to my in-Austin expert, Ynema Mangum, and she exceeded my expectations by writing the post! This is a guest post by Ynema Mangum, architect at Hewlett-Packard. She contributed information about web metrics to my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. She’s working on a chapter for the upcoming book Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms. I’ll post a second guest post from Ynema next week.

Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift from traditional IT rooted in heavy process and technology-centric management to agile processes and service-centric management. This shift converges with Web 2.0 and distributed application design, resulting in democratized computing and an economic revolution — where the developer can deploy enterprise grade applications and user services without having to pay the capital expense for the underlying IT infrastructure. It represents a radical change and requires a culture shift for IT when building a private cloud.

Today, confusion exists about exactly what cloud is as well as how it compares to current IT methods and technologies. Clearing the air is the first order of business.

Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud

The public cloud model has is vastly different from the private cloud, creating a chasm in their connection. The current expectation for public cloud infrastructure and platform services is the ability to provision compute, storage, database and networking resources in a few minutes, completely online without establishing an agreement or talking to a person.

Private cloud computing has different challenges for the service provider, but often is faced with the same expectations. Regulatory compliance, security, and privacy are just the icing on the cake. The concern that seems most often forgotten in comparing public and private cloud models is quality and compliance of data.

Public cloud providers, in general, do not care what type of application or data you throw on the cloud. Compare that with an enterprise private cloud, where IT not only owns the performance and availability of the organizational assets, but also has responsibility for ensuring that business assets are used in the proper manner. Applications that are developed and deployed on a private cloud need to go through a series of quick checks before they can be cleared in order to prevent misuse of company assets or the risk of retrofit and ground-up redesign of applications developed outside of IT.

There is an ongoing challenge in enterprises today to segment cloud service offerings, architectures and buyer types into useful, focused categories for strategic planning, according to Frank Gillett of Forrester. For public cloud service providers, two IaaS market categories have emerged, the software Platform as a Service (PaaS) and virtual Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that differ by level of infrastructure service and abstraction offered.

For private clouds, there are two types of compute clouds, server clouds and scale-out clouds.

• Server clouds are built for the traditional needs of the business applications, catalyzed by x86 server virtualization and adding self service provisioning.
• Scale-out clouds are designed for massive, highly distributed applications.

Virtualization vs. Cloud

Virtualization and cloud computing have much in common, including phrase overuse and hype, resulting in a lack of understanding of both. Cloud computing does not equal virtualization, but does use abstraction as a common element in each layer of the cloud. In fact, the most distinct differences between the two terms seem to be in the areas of abstraction and IT maturity.

Virtualization is datacenter-centric and technology-centric, while cloud computing is service and user-centric. Memory, desktops, applications, storage, applications, platforms, and servers can be virtualized, or abstracted from the underlying technology. Cloud computing can use or not use virtualization in its architecture.

Typically, the virtualization referred to for use in cloud computing is operating-system virtualization, where multiple virtualized machines can run on a physical server, secure and isolated from one another. These VMs provide benefits in that they can be provisioned without requesting physical hardware, changed, moved, controlled, terminated, and configured more easily than a physical machine. This results in greater efficiencies and productivity in IT, and also increases agility for the services developed and deployed on these VMs.

Beyond this layer of virtualization, cloud computing adds platforms, agile processes, and services for developers, providing value far beyond virtualization.

Utility Computing vs. Cloud

Utility computing is a business or economic model, whereas cloud computing is about technology and process architecture. Utility computing allows users to receive computing resources and “pay by consumption”. Cloud computing is a much broader concept, taking into consideration the underlying architecture and actual services delivered.

Consumer users have been reaping the benefits of the utility model in cloud computing for years — at the application as a service level. It is developers and IT who are using cloud computing in a transformative way now. IaaS and PaaS allows them to develop, test, deploy and run apps that can scale on enterprise grade technology, all without having to pay the capital expense for the underlying infrastructure. This is creating a new cloud economy and truly represents the democratization of computing.

Boy, it must be getting harder and harder to be a web writer. I’m reading Content Strategy for the Web, and the web writer job description is intimidating! The quote that stuck with me talks about the Web Writers Real Job: problem solvers who write well. I do hope this quote describes many technical communicators today.

“The web writer’s mission? Useful, usable content that’s also enjoyable. It’s her job to begin a conversation with the reader that results in mutually beneficial outcomes all around. A problem solved. An article found. A connection made.”

All of these outcomes can be tied to thinking about technical documentation as a conversation starter. My book talks about social media enabling those conversations. Often, though, social distribution is simply the technique, but the web itself is the medium. When writing in that medium, we must be the best writers with the most considerations taken into account while writing. Search engine optimization. Style and voice when writing for the web versus print. Information architecture, organization, and label naming. Maintaining a content inventory. Auditing and editing content. Testing content. Handling workflow, reviews, and deadlines. The list could go on and on.

And here’s the thing. People are not backing down from figuring out a great web strategy despite the challenges, and finding great success. I had a great lunchtime conversation with Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist. He basically mapped technical publications’ typical goals to the personas that help you encourage a conversion. Fascinating! He describes four personas typically used by marketing writers on the web in the blog post, Relate to Four, Connect with Thousands:

Methodical - Probably the first persona to come to mind when talking about traditional technical documentation, perhaps not even all that web-hungry. They want proof, answers, solutions, in an orderly fashion. They’d probably download and read a PDF file if it’s offered.

Competitive - They want information that will make them better, smarter, or cutting-edge. They may be the implementer at a company who will train others in the product you’re documenting, so they’d want scenarios that make them look good.

Humanist - To me, this type of persona, one who looks for relationships and the human element, might be difficult to deliver technical documentation to. They might pick up the phone to call tech support faster than looking up a question online, unless a community is behind the documentation that they can relate to. The humanist may also appreciate case studies that help them relate to a real story.

Spontaneous - They want to know the answer quickly and move on, so scannable headlines and topic authoring with any topic being a potential entry point will probably work well for them.

I’m definitely looking at my web writing in new ways. Not just in terms of deliverables, but also in terms of the content I can deliver to the right audiences, to help them meet their goals.

Boy, do I have ideas for you if your shopping list includes a technical writer, web writer, copywriter, or content strategist. Heck, I have gift ideas for anyone interested in reading, writing, and the web.

Now, you might think the first gift to buy a reader and writer is an ebook reader, but TeleRead cautions against such a purchase on Black Friday in this post, Black Friday: Caveat Emptor. Good to know!

Web Worker Daily has a great post about finding deals on web worker gear on Black Friday. The best idea in the set is to shop for office gear on Black Friday – from printers to monitors to the chair you sit on. Nice!

I think that cartography and photography hobbies are quite popular among technical writers that I know. If you’re interested in cool maps as gifts, may I suggest these neat city neighborhood posters at Ork Posters? Under $25, which is a great gift price range. There’s an entire calendar of 31 gift ideas under 31 dollars on RealSimple.com.

Then there are the Rand McNally fabric maps, waterproof and tearproof, and less than $10. Here’s a link to the Austin, TX one.

I also love the idea of coloring books with intricate designs. Take a look at Designs for Coloring: Prisms and Paisley Designs Coloring Book. Those books are less than $5 each, and paired with a set of fine markers or colored pencils, you’d be giving the gift of doodling.

Or how about the gift of technology and hiking or exploring? Geocaching offers the perfect combination of treasure hunting with a GPS unit. You can shop at the Geocaching.com official shopping site where they’ll give you ideas for starter kits.

And finally, if you are indeed stumped for gift ideas for the writer you know, query the hive mind by browsing ask.metafilter.com for a while in the gift tag collection, such as “Help me find a t-shirt I’ve only heard described ambiguously!” or “Gift filter: I’m looking for a nifty computer-related gift for a friend’s birthday.”

I also have ideas for treating yourself, you poor, overworked, downtrodden writer who loves to read! Have you tried Amazon’s Universal Wish List yet? If not, download it now and start browsing on any website. When you see something you like, click the toolbar button to add the item to your Universal Wish List. Et voila! You select an image, enter the price, and can even put in a description to help people find you (or your non profit organization) the perfect gift. I managed to build quite the mashup wish list – from thinkgeek.com to crateandbarrel.com to iheartguts.com to uncommongoods.com.

How about you? Are you shopping or wishing this week?

I attended two days of the WebWorks Roundup here in Austin this week and served on a few panels. I enjoyed signing books as every attendee got copies of books from XML Press. It had featured speakers like Tom Johnson and Stewart Mader as well as sessions with Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter to name a few. Here are my summary take aways from the sessions.

Wiki adoption

Stewart Mader is a wiki consultant, probably the most experienced, practical, and sensible wiki adoption expert available today. His message about wiki adoption resonated with me as I look for collaborative authoring solutions for our Agile teams. He said, if you look around the enterprise, people have high adoption of email for their daily business tasks. In the adoption phase for a wiki or collaboration system, you can tie a wiki to email conceptually as this ubiquitous useful way to get work done. If you think about it, more complex systems have a higher learning curve, so people default back to email to get into their comfort zone. But, sending email messages is an isolating experience – email doesn’t let you work together collectively like a wiki does.

For example, working in the shared space of a wiki is like using light rail to get to work. He has made friends on the train he took each day years ago and he’s still friends with them today. In other words, being in an environment that enables social interaction is more powerful. He says to think about the business process a wiki affects – do not just apply what the Internet says to do with a wiki. The biggest and most powerful collaboration going on with wikis in the enterprise is group collaboration – small groups. You don’t want one-off contributions once, you want repeated collaboration and repeated use, as frequent as email and as a simple core tool that they use for everyday business. Preach it, brother!

He also talked about measurements to indicate that adoption is successful. One of the biggest dangers he sees is counting the number of pages created when adopting a wiki. Don’t do it! Better metrics are measure per time period or per some other unit:

Views                    Day

Revisions      per       Page

Comments                 Unit

Tags                     Type

Automation – 1001 Nightly Builds

Some of WebWorks’ customers gave talks and a panel discussion about automating software builds using WebWorks Automap. These were great eye-openers and my ears perked up because they were writers working in Agile environments. They have to release in tandem with internal development cycles, so they automated as much as they could. One doc group used to have a 15 page document on how to create a PDF complete with screenshots for all the settings. Mary Anthony from Palantir said their writers have to document 4 user interfaces, 3 admin GUIs, more than 12 servers and an API, and they used advanced techniques such as text insets in FrameMaker. Using WebWorks, another writing group had automated PDF generation, wiki output, plus HTML output, all from Framemaker source files.

This was interesting to me – they found there was a true documentation domain and it was hard for someone who usually builds software for them to put together docs. Terms like cross references, text inserts, and so on, were foreign to their build engineers. They don’t even have the concept of “book” as a collection of chapters with a TOC in Framemaker. Even using a Windows server to automate builds was outside of the build engineer’s knowledge.

I learned about a tool called Apache Ivy, which is an agile dependency manager. Using this manager helped them integrate their documentation builds with the product builds. Mary Anthony explained that Ivy waits for the outcome of another build – like a refrigerator holding chocolate pudding, Ivy opens the fridge door and gives the build process what it wants (the chocolate pudding, or the fine documentation).

Overall a great couple of presentations about automation from which I learned a lot.

Blogging and Web 2.0

Tom Johnson is a blogger and technical writer and likely the most subscribed-to blogger in our particular tech comm niche. He gave a great talk based on his blog series, Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging. In case you’re curious, the sins are being Fake, Irrelevant, Boring, Unreadable, Irresponsible, Unfindable, Inattentive. (I’ll link to the rest once he has the blog posts finished.)

He had great pictures representing each sin. My favorite quotes were from Penelope Trunk (The Brazen Careerist, Blogs without topics are a waste of time) and Stephen Fry’s blog entry, “Don’t Quote Me“.

This session was a great starting point for our next panel about Web 2.0, although we mostly talked about blogging. The Technorati State of the Blogsphere 2009 report came out yesterday, so it was useful to talk about some of the findings from it (73% of bloggers use Twitter as compared to 14% of the general population, for one.) I enjoyed talking with Alan Porter and Tom on this panel and I may have asked as many questions as I answered. All in all, a great two days of discussion and presentations.

At FLOSS Manuals, we have been using a method called a Book Sprint -  collaborative authoring, one week at a time. In fact, Google’s “Summer  of Code” project has sponsored two of these sprints. The latest was  just this month for a completely open source video format called Ogg Theora. The sprint got a mention on slashdot last month.

The idea of a Book Sprint is that you can get lots of documentation written in a focused amount of time with the right team and some amount of content already in place. Gathering people in the same room when possible is extremely helpful and motivating as well. I like to think of it as using two wiki patterns – the Scaffold pattern first followed closely by the Barnraising pattern.

I often get questions about the viability and value of a book sprint in a corporate environment. Here are a couple of ideas for running a book sprint at a company.

Agile software development

In an Agile environment, the term “sprint” means a timeboxed iteration – a time period could be two weeks, or it could be three or four. You plan out the “sprint” based on the number of people you have and by correctly sizing the documentation goals for the sprint.

The term Book Sprint seems appropriate in an Agile environment. For example, plan the sprint to have the team focus entirely on doc for that iteration. That’s one company-type application.

Scenario-based documentation by Subject Matter Experts

Another company method of focused authoring that I know of is the one that IBM employs to write Red Books. A document coordinator brings in  the subject matter experts, they outline the RedBook in a day, then assign chapters to each Subject Matter Expert (SME). The SMEs usually go off and write for a while, then the RedBook comes back together with the document coordinator (I think this is accurate, but please do feel free to offer more detail by commenting).

Chris Almond gave a presentation at Central Texas DITA User Group meeting last year about using wikis for RedBook authoring – his slideshow is available on slideshare.net.

Writer’s luxury accomodations – seclusion and focus with collaboration

For Book Sprints, what we do is try to get a good group of people a great place to stay for a week and write. There’s at least 4-6 weeks  of pre-planning of the outline and possible content that already exists so that the sprint itself goes smoothly. Getting people to agree to audience and scope ahead of time is crucial. A book sprint  basically forces documentation decisions and priorities under pressure of one week’s time – so you want to get lots of questions out of the way before the actual sprint.

We also make them fun and offer food and “after hours” activities. The fun is crucial!

I just joined the Writer’s League of  Texas, and they actually charge people for writing retreats that sound  an awful lot like a book sprint, except that they’re not collaborative, they’re for solo writers to get writing done in a nice, supportive environment. It’s basically a nice location with some fun planned in as well.

We have case studies and lots of planning in a Book Sprint book hosted on FLOSS Manuals at http://en.flossmanuals.net/booksprints. Also,  the free sample chapter from my book talks about Book Sprints at length, see http://justwriteclick.com/book, and shows how much funding we needed for a book sprint last August that produced about 300 pages of printed PDFs and online HTML-based help.

I spoke with Ellis Pratt with Cherryleaf in London from my home in Austin for a video interview last week, and the shortened version is available online now.

He had many good questions, ones that I enjoy discussing all the time, such as the future of our profession. One good one was “What will user documentation look like in the future?” Also, “Is there too much reliance on search?” and “What are the blind alleys?”

I’m not sure I have all the answers, but I do enjoy talking to people who “get” it like Ellis does.

Here’s a direct link to the interview, which has slides guiding you through highlights of the the questions and answers.

I really appreciated Ellis Pratt and Cherryleaf giving me the opportunity to talk about the concepts in my book. These types of interviews – video, audio, lunchtime, you name it! – lend more dimension to the book than just flat pages. I appreciate it!

I have neglected to excerpt and link to some of my posts from the Duo Consulting blog. I’ve taken a break from writing for them for a few months while finalizing my book, but looking back at these posts, I wanted to share them with my readers! So here goes.

It Ain’t All Business: Using Social Networks for Good

When the social media groundswell turns altruistic, the results can be amazing. Here are two examples of both large and small differences made with a few simple connections. Connections made all the more quickly and with a higher rate of trust with the use of social media tools like social networks and Twitter.

Wanted: Good Home for Good Dog

Photo credit: Jim Sneddon on Flickr found using Flickr-Storm. More…

Web Content Mistakes and Worst Social Media Campaigns

We’re becoming more accustomed to correcting small-ish errors on wiki web pages when we come across them. I catch myself looking for an “Edit” link on other people’s pages, but of course not all web pages are editable. But that habitual reaction has me wondering about web content mistakes and how best to correct them.

What’s the biggest web content mistake you’ve seen (or done?)

Michael Silverman told us about the six-year-old news article that went out due to inaccurate automation techniques, causing a 75% drop in a company’s stock price before it could be corrected, in Save $1 Billion with Web Content Management! Now that is a big web content mistake. More…

Terms of Contention: Who Owns Uploaded Content?

Terms of use and privacy policies, how often do you read these terms before agreeing to them? Most of us would admit we don’t read the fine print even when it’s prominent large type. But when a community member does pay attention to a change in the terms of service and gets 100,000 other people to pay attention also, you’d better believe that the originator of the terms and policies are going to take notice. That scenario happened just last week for members of Facebook, one of the largest social media sites with 175 million active users and the most visited site in January 2009 with 1.2 billion visits according to Compete.com. More…

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.