What’s your favorite JustWriteClick post?

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.

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Examples of blogs as online help and release notes

I’m always on the lookout for examples of social media tools used to write and maintain online help. One trend I think I am seeing is the use of blogs as the basic release notes for new features in products, especially web applications. Examples are new Google Calendar features and SmugMug, where the entire blog is dedicated to Release Notes.

I’ve also found the Jing online help is written and maintained in Movable Type, a blogging tool. Many blogging tools can be used as content management systems, and it appears that Jing’s writers see blog engines that way too. There are lots of nice built-in features that they are taking advantage of – a nice Search field at the top of every page, and the Categories link at the bottom of each help topic give a nice collection of topics. There’s only one “table of contents” for the help system, and that’s the top page, but it works nicely as a site map. The overall effect is a very simple and elegant user assistance or support system. One detail I did discover while trying out the site, though, is that the MT search engine did not find hits for a search on “mpeg 4″ when the topic titled contained MPEG-4.

The use of a blog overall seems like a great idea for release notes – give your product some Google juice and search power as well as generate buzz for new features by giving other bloggers a well-understood infrastructure to link to you and give your entries trackbacks. If your release notes contain a lot of bug reporting or issue fixes, I’m not sure a blog is a good match since that’s not exactly a positive spin on your product release. Then again, sometimes transparency and honesty is the best policy. What do you all think?

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Social media and web content writings

I’ve got more blog entries published on the Duo Consulting blog about social profiles, blogging policies, widgets for your web content (I like to call it bling for your blog) and general posts about online interaction and learning. I really enjoy blogging for Duo because it’s encouraging me to research in areas that are important for all content management but especially for the content that people make money on, where they content itself is what people are paying for.

If you are interested in web content, you want to take a look at the Web Content conferences that Duo offers – Tampa Bay in February 2009 looks to be a great opportunity to learn a lot, eat great food (according to one of their conference goers!), and meet like-minded individuals. I can swing a discounted registration your way if you email me via my Contact page.

But Mom, Time Online Is Not a Waste

Teenagers do think differently than the rest of us – you probably knew that already or could have guessed that. But did you know that the way teens develop their skills online is actually being studied by the MacArthur Foundation? They have released the results of their study from three years of interviewing young people and their parents. From the article, they conclude, “America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online, often in ways that adults do not understand.” The two page summary report is a great read, and I was excited when I found danah boyd in the list of authors. Read more

Why Create Yet Another Social Profile?

Some days it seems like an invite to a particular network spreads like wildfire. First you get a smattering of invites for LinkedIn, and then Spock invites spread, and then, out of nowhere, Naymz appears in your inbox, telling you to worry about your personal brand management. It’s enough to give anyone social media overload. Read more

Widgets for Your Web Content

Bling is usually characterized as offering a special extra “punch” to an ensemble or outfit. Bling is an accessory, which is how I would describe sidebar widgets on your website or blog. Accessories can enhance the main site but can also offer eye candy or a shiny bauble to help the main site gain more attention at the social web party. Coco Chanel is quoted as saying, “Before leaving the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.”  Do you need to examine your website to see if it has one or two too many widgets that may detract from your site’s main messaging? Read more

How Did You Get To Work Today?

Have you ever stopped to think about all the signs, infrastructure, access, and coordination it takes just to get people to work each day in a major city? World Usability Day gives us a chance to do just that. The day itself was Thursday November 13. I hadn’t stopped on that day to take notice of what the day is all about so I thought I’d take some time now to look into it. Read more

Blogging and Social Media Policies

A blogging or social media policy describes how an employee or volunteer should represent themselves and the organization online. It also describes whose time and whose equipment may be used for blogging or other social media activities, and it also clarifies when someone is representing themselves, and when they are representing an organization. I’ve written blog entries based on a corporate policy at BMC Software, and it was helpful to know what were the expectations for my time investment and also where privacy lines could be drawn. Read more

From Written Reports to Visualization for Website Analytics

Duo uses a persona-based approach to website designs – which should help answer questions like, “Are potential clients or current clients the most common website visitor and your target for content?” Personas help designers and programmers visualize real people reading and acting on the content they find on a website. But after the design is done and the website is implemented, you have to know what your visitors are doing, how long they’re spending doing that, and whether your website is efficiently “converting” the behavior you want to see – buying a product, signing up for a class, or connecting with other like-minded individuals. So you constantly monitor your website to answer the questions related to your personas’ behaviors. Read more

Searching is Easy – Finding a Community is Hard

Twitter, Twine, and now Twing – I have signed up for all these web applications that start with “Tw!”

Twing is a specialized search engine for deep searches within community discussion groups or forums. So if you want to find niche communities or specialized discussion, actual online conversation, about a topic or a brand, Twing offers a way to search through community content that Google or other search engines may miss. Twing sports a directory listing of different communities so you can click down through the forums that interest you (or may be of interest to your clients or customers). Read more

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Corporate blogs learning from reviewers

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.

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Finding and following conversations – applicable for technical writers?

Bryan has the following ideas for finding and following conversations, and I think these are quite applicable to our role as technical writer also. The only item I find wanting in his post is – what keywords do you use? My initial ideas are: product name, keywords for the problems and solutions that your product addresses, and company name. Perhaps even the job titles for people who use your product like I’ve blogged about previously.

Finding and following conversations

1. Search on Google Blog Search
2. Search on Technorati
3. Use an RSS reader such as Google Reader
4. Start subscribing and listening to podcasts through iTunes
5. Subscribe to Google Alerts
6. Reading blog comments
7. Jump onto Twitter and establish a presence in Facebook

I found an excellent case study of technical writers engaging in conversation through Dee Elling, who is the tech pubs manager for a programmer’s IDE. She has a blog post called Help on Help where she gets lots of comments from users – some of whom are in her camp, others who are ready to go to battle for the help content, namely the code examples that had mysteriously disappeared between releases.

Dee answers honestly and really empathizes with their need for those examples, and has a plan in place for replacing them. Her blog post is a great case study for how to have ongoing conversations with your customers.

I’ve been thinking about the writer’s interaction with customers a lot lately, because of blogging and podcasting and wikis other social media pursuits that seem to lead us towards documentation as a conversation with customers. As Tom Johnson found in his Web 2.0 experiment, some users think that the help system has boundaries. How can we break down those boundaries (seems like search is part of the answer)? How could Tom have ensured that his customer sought out conversation rather than answers?

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Examples of content providers blogging for customers

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.

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It’s the network, not the media, plus, the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

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

Join the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

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

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

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

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Social Media Marketing Playbook – book review

This book was an easy, fun, read, and seemed especially pertinent after all the immersion into social networking I’ve been doing with SXSW Interactive. The 100-page book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, is aimed at your company’s marketing department for them to read before deep-diving into the social media landscape. Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot share their stories and even their somewhat embarrassing lessons learned, sparing you from the same fate while also encouraging you to start the conversation.

At talk.bmc our entire intent was to start the conversation. So I know how daunting and intimidating it can be, yet you also have to dive in and sit back and listen. It’s not an easy road to walk. But sometimes ROI stands for Risk of Inaction, so eventually you should learn your way around the tools of the trade. I still like Reach Or Influence for the ROI acronym when applied to blogging.

This book gives you specific examples of tools and technology you can use to start the conversation, and also has the proper amount of caution about being genuine and having good intentions. One of my favorite quotes:

The vast majority of products are
ordinary. Worse, most customers
have made their buying decisions
about staple purchases years ago,
and it’s difficult to change their
minds.

So, what to do? Pull off the “online equivalent of a publicity stunt,” create a meme. To me, this is such a daunting task I can’t imagine writing a book about how to do it. But sure enough, these two have the experience and case studies to show for it.

I also liked the “influencer” chapter, describing the rules for interaction with bloggers. Looking at it as a blogger rather than a marketer, it’s good insider information to have. For example, check out this trick! Let’s say someone has a feedburner feed, but they haven’t published that little graphic that shows how many subscribers they have. Just insert /~fc/ into their feedburner URL, and voila, you have the little graphic! Example: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/JustWriteClick. Super secret way to check out your friend’s blogs and see if they have any subscribers to speak of.

Glory be, they like their technical writers as monitors!

Darren has a background as a technical writer, and when the book talks about who is a good candidate for the sometimes time-consuming task of monitoring the blogosphere, I’ll bet it’s Darren who’s giving the nod to the technical writer. My other favorite quote:

On the development side, technical support engineers
or technical writers are often a good choice. They’re good
communicators, tend to have a broad awareness of the
company’s products, and can even reply to basic
support-related posts.

I agree whole heartedly. I think the Agile technical writer that Sarah Maddox describes is precisely the right person to be identifying keywords, get RSS watch lists configured, and read, read, read, and respond when necessary or find someone in our company who can respond correctly.

Wikipedia doesn’t like marketers – tread carefully

And, my personal favorite topic, wikis, is addressed. The book has an excellent section about what to do and what not to do when it comes to the tricky waters of Wikipedia. To me, this section alone is worth the $29 for this book! Solid advice with the proper amount of respect for the community behind Wikipedia.

All in all, nicely done and a great read for marketers and bloggers alike.

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Look out, updated headshots are coming

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

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

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

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

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

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Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?

Wiki as the new FAQ

I discovered and have been meaning to write about Wiki is the new FAQ, an excellent blog post talking about SAP’s use of a wiki featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal. I especially like the play on words in the title. Reminds me of “brown is the new black” or “pink is the new blog,” hee hee.

A wiki can be a Frequently Asked Questions repository, much like the knowledge bases in their heyday in the late 80s. My favorite line from the blog entry has to be its closer: “It’s about a different way of thinking around how to interact with the community.” And that is what I have explored with my wiki presentation, about how to build community with a wiki and be an active member of that community. But what are other uses of the wiki?

Wiki as the next-generation customer forum

For many information seekers, wikis are better than forums because they are more easily searched and once you get a hit, the articles are meant to be scannable. Compare and contrast this to a long thread on a support forum where the answer to your question might be buried in the middle of a discussion about the mysterious beep in someone’s house. In my beep example, there are literally 78 pages of forum discussion, and if you read through the threads, you discover that a group of people took it upon themselves to go to the person’s house to find the beep. It has probably two years of forum discussion around the possibilities. Quite a fun and entertaining read, though, but not that efficient. Still, consider the community that built up around beep troubleshooting. Great stuff there.

But consider that your software users might not have the time to read through even a few pages of a forum discussion about a solution to their problem. That is where a wiki could be more useful than a forum. While forums are a fun online community for many, wikis might be the new generation of forum and many wiki engines offer comments on each article which are the next evolution of a forum – you can discuss the article itself. Another blogger, Leigh Blackall of Learn Online, discovered “The gold in a wiki is often in the discussion pages.”

Wiki as an easy HTML editor

Wikis originated as the quickest way to create a website without having to know HTML code. Really, wikitext is all about quickly doing headings, paragraphs, and lists.

Unfortunately each wiki has different rules for how to indicate a heading or list item or type of list. For some, it might be easier to just learn HTML code. And in the case of the Drupal CMS, there’s the ability to either use a rich-text editor or hand-code the HTML. It’s easy to troubleshoot when you can just view the HTML code, but what’s odd is that sometimes the resulting <div> tags generated out of your webform entries in Drupal seem to overlap.

But most wiki engines offer the fastest and easiest way to make a web page with a URL that you can consistently refer to.

Wiki as the new book

Some folks are pre-populating their wikis with book content, which is always an interesting test of what parts of a book are considered essential for “bookness” or “wikiness” – do you keep a table of contents? Is there any index? What page metaphors do you subscribe to in the wiki? These questions can be answered by looking for examples and analyzing their success. I especially like using wikis for the wiki aspects that go above and beyond books. For example, I’ve been exploring the Meatball Wiki site (Thanks Janet!) – and they have an excellent page with all sorts of Indexing Schemes categorized, such as Readership and Authorship which are fascinating for use in wikis as opposed to books. The Ontology category seems the most book-like to me, and I really like how that page offers ideas for all the possibilities that wiki offers.

Wiki as the new website

Does any company use only a wiki as its public-facing website?

Wiki as the new Content Management System

Eventually, the wiki can be the source files for important content, and I would guess there are people moving towards this wiki-as-cms system already. With my work with the OLPC project, I am learning more about wikis as source files, and found that the compare is actually quite powerful visually. Take a look at two versions of the demo or release notes from a release done in September. There is color coding and side-by-side comparison of text that is easily scanned for what changed, was added, or deleted. I’m learning so much about wikis for localization and translation efforts as well with the OLPC project. For example, this past week, I added links to translated content, such as the Spanish translation of the Simplified User Guide. The wiki engine itself (in this case, WikiMedia), lets me list the additional language pages in a blue bar on the original page, and then each language page automatically links back to the main language page (in this case, the English page.) Automatic is nearly always useful.

Do you see wikis being the next generation of other documentation outlets? Do tell.

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