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Posts Tagged ‘eBay’
Contributing to wikis as a technical writer
I’ve been researching an article for STC Intercom about wikis and technical documentation as discussed in my previous post. In about two years of my interest in the topic, I have only discovered a handful of examples of wikis used for end-user documentation for a technical product. And sometimes I even stretched the term “technical product” to include all of eBay. Heh.
If you’re also interested in wiki research, I have also been compiling bookmarks of blogs or websites that comment on wiki use on del.icio.us too at http://del.icio.us/annegentle/wiki.
Anyway, here’s a list of the ones I’ve found as good examples so far, but my criteria are loose and fast, such as recognizable products or geeky products. I’m sure there are more, and this list of the top 57 wikis based on popularity offers an even longer list.
- Apache wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/
- Adobe Labs: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- eBay: http://www.ebaywiki.com/
- Motorola Q: http://www.motoqwiki.com/
- MSDN: http://www.msdnwiki.com/
- Quadralay: http://wiki.webworks.com/FrontPage
- SplunkBase: http://www.splunk.com/base
But instead of soliciting more examples, I want to ask a few more questions myself. How many of these wikis would I use to get an answer to a question? Probably all of them. Now, how many wikis have I contributed to? How about you? If you haven’t ever contributed to a wiki, why not? If you have, tell us which one, and what motivated you to contribute?
eBay offers an informative wiki
I love finding good examples of wikis, so my ears perked up when I saw the new eBay Wiki pop on my radar screen via the Read/Write Web blog. It’s part of their Community content authoring efforts and it’ll be exciting to watch it grow and mature.
The eBay Wiki is a collection of fact-based articles written and maintained by eBay Community members. You can use eBay’s Wiki to read up on topics important to you or contribute by adding topics or making existing articles better.
The information designers have done a good job of creating a navigation system with categories that are task-oriented, such as Buying, Finding, and Selling. Plus you can go into specific areas of auction interest such as antiques or baby items and so forth. To me, it’s a great example of a well-tended, easily-navigable wiki.
I’m not “into” eBay, having never bought or sold there, but I am definitely interested in their user-generated content, especially on such a large scale. Forbes.com had a catchier title for their article, and offers a more business-oriented analysis in “EBay Gets Wiki With It.” Especially interesting to me is how eBay hopes to save money with their wiki by cutting down on customer support calls. That inverse correlation is an often-used metric for proving that documentation is helping users, so I hope that they are able to track and link support cost reduction specifically to the wiki content.
RSS Roundup
RSS must be hitting the big time since Microsoft will support RSS reading in the new version of Internet Explorer, IE7. Charlie Wood (he’s an enterprise RSS expert here in Austin) has already noticed that IE7 won’t be supporting password-protected feeds, however. I don’t yet have any feeds that I read that require a password, though, but I have been enjoying Charlie’s vision on RSS for a while. Fred already thought about secure RSS notifications for banking and so on, but check out Charlie’s ideas for use cases for enterprise RSS.
- Customer Support Use Case
- Marketing Use Case
- Field Sales Use Case (which he has made come to life with his Spanning Salesforce application)
Charlie’s blog often contains insightful and forward thinking for a technology that is gaining attention and adoption rates are increasing. Heck, Scoble reads him, but I found Charlie through an Austin-based RSS aggregate list that used some sort of geography marker to collect a list of Austin Bloggers.
I’m also planning to read more on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog.
I have some notes from the “RSS: not just for blogs anymore”, SXSWi talk, with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines. Each panelist had interesting ideas for what RSS is being used for besides reading blogs.
They estimate that there are 75 million RSS users in the US and UK, but only about 17-32% of the users know they’re using RSS (source: marketingsherpa.com). Adina Levin, the moderator, noted that some users use RSS notification to avoid the flood of emails as a source of information. What’s interesting about that observation from my personal experience is that I find when I introduce RSS feeds to some folks, they would prefer to get the RSS content in their email client (via Newsgator). Some people just prefer a one-stop-shop for information and that happens to be Outlook for them. They want to “open the fire hose.”
RSS is mostly associated with text content, and as Scott Johnson put it, RSS was originally just headlines and links, but has now become “XML that matters to his Mom.” But Feedburner is starting to see more “big enclosures” on RSS for TiVo-like web content. I have often explained RSS aggregators as “TiVo for web pages” so that analogy makes so much sense. Preach it, Chris.
Robyn Dupree of Bloglines had the most comprehensive list of alternatives to text for RSS. Considering that Bloglines has 1.5 B articles in their index (and they only index ones that people actually subscribe to through Bloglines), they likely see the most creative and varied uses of RSS. Here’s her list (furiously scribbled in my notebook):
- Podcasts, video
- “Buzz” on blogosphere with Most Popular Links feature that you can subscribe to
- Notifications on classified ads (craigslist has this, I believe)
- Group conversations (such as Yahoo Groups, which offers RSS feeds for conversations)
- Package tracking (nifty! especially for ebay resellers she says this is a useful tool)
- Product newsletters (again, email alternative)
- Calendars (notification for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
- Higher education (notification for course information)
- Searches for competitive intelligence and other specialized information
After the panelists spoke, they opened up the floor to audience members who had ideas for RSS beyond blogging. Adina tagged all of them using the del.icio.us tag rssbeyondblogs. One of the most interesting ones to me is stuffopolis, helping you keep track of your stuff (and helping small businesses share stuff online, apparently.) Another creative stretch for RSS feeds is actually a couple of WordPress plug-in created by Andy Skelton and showcased on andy.wordpress.com including his 30 boxes calendar and his dodgeball info (although that one is apparently broken and named “Unknown Feed” on the sidebar right now). I sat behind a guy who works at dodgeball (recently acquired by Google) and he was very excited to be mentioned.
Any other ideas for RSS beyond blogging? I think I’ve got to go find some secure feeds to subscribe to just to make sure I’m on the cutting edge of RSS technology.
