I’ve published a long-ish article on the WritersUA site where I describe techniques for user assistance that let the user participate. It starts with simple techniques such as comments and moves towards community documentation efforts. Please read and share Putting the User in User Assistance. I’d love to hear what you think about these techniques.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m simply buzzing with excitement because the ink is drying on my first book contract, and it’s with XML Press with the capable Richard Hamilton at the helm.

The title is Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Here’s the announcement and description of the book. I’m nearly done writing it, the designer (the very creative and talented digital artist Patrick Davison) is working on the cover and interior design.

I hope you’ll put it here (on your well-stocked bookshelf):

Bookshelf photo courtesy of Stewart on Flickr.

Though it’s completely possible you’ll put it here (handy at the side of your work station or on your computer):

Workstation photo courtesy of Travis Isaacs on Flickr.

I was asked earlier, why don’t you blog about the process of landing a book contract? I’d love to tell some great story about a bright response on how I brilliantly negotiated a book contract. But there is no such story. : ) I honestly think writing two blog entries a week for the last four years or so has been the best way to explain the point I’m at today with a book contract in hand! Look for the book this summer mid-2009, as I have an aggressive schedule going right now.

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?

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.

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.

I want to extol the virtues of Jon Klem at Feedburner, plus give a status update for this feed and the old TalkBMC feed. Now the feeds have been combined into one, bringing subscribers over with no interruption, and Jon stuck with me for no less than a 16-email message thread so that he and I understood what was going on behind the scenes for this feed.

My goal was to have a seamless transition to my new blog, and thanks to Ynema Mangum, the talented and clever powerhouse behind talk.bmc.com and Tom Parish, the SEO brains and guru for the site, I was able to bring over the subscribers from my old feed to my new feed. So with their permission I emailed Feedburner support to explain my situation and see what the technology could do.

Feedburner has a way to transfer one feed from one account to another, and then transfer the subscribers from one feed to another. Then, the account holder (that’s me) exports the stats from the old feed to a spreadsheet for safekeeping, and then deletes the old feed and stats.

Are you as curious as I was about the most popular posts from my talk.bmc.com blog? I’m sure you’re not, but here are the top three anyway. Your analysis and interpretation is as good as mine.

1. Celebrating moms and parenthood in the workplace — TalkBMC
2. Connecting the dots, or pixels, for service impact — TalkBMC
3. Best practices in tech comm for customer feedback — TalkBMC

I found the Tech Writer Blog directory from a post by Katriel Reichman who recently wrote me an email message in response to my post about Wikis for technical documentation – one writer’s story. Katriel has a nice post about rules for when a wiki would work well for tech docs. I’m looking forward to more posts with his insight on wikis and tech pubs.

He also wrote a post about the Tech Writer blog directory and the only rule about the blog directory is that no one talks about the blog directory. Wait, no, that’s not it. The rule is, if you add your blog to the directory, you mention the blog directory in your blog. Since it’s a wiki page you can edit the page to add your blog’s URL and feed.

I’m pretty excited about it also because it was my first chance to use my newly registered domain name, www.justwriteclick.com, which redirects to my blog here at talk.bmc.com/blogs/anne-gentle.

And the greatest feature of the Tech Writer blog directory (in addition to the fact that it’s a wiki page) is that they’re making an OPML file of the list as well as a Yahoo pipes feed. Neat!

My due date’s next week and I am looking forward to welcoming a fourth member to our family – I should be the mom of two sons before next week is through. Wish me luck. I’m sure I’ll wish for some sleep every once in a while.

I didn’t use the new blogsitter.net service, where you can hire folks to create content for you while you’re out. Instead, I’ve got guest bloggers from BMC lined up for my maternity leave. So keep reading and keep that subscription! I’ll be back next year.

Always interested in trying the next cool communication technology, I jumped at the chance to record a podcast when asked. As a result, my first podcast is live now. It’s about a half hour long, but as you will soon hear, I talk too fast. Not that fast talking makes it go any quicker, but it is crammed full of connections. Ynema Mangum came up with all the interview questions, conducted the interview, and did a great write up as well, thanks Y!

I talk about why I like to blog, how tech writing helps with my blogging, wikis and tech doc, integration doc, system administration, how RSS is like Tivo to me, how enthusiastic I am about DITA, and my excitement for OPML.

Anne Gentle podcast, Exploring Information Technology

Please do listen to our casual and fun conversation and let me know what you think.

Now I have to go listen to Steve Carl’s podcast, and you should too!