Since I write user assistance for a living, I’m naturally drawn to the devices the Google Wave team is implementing in order to teach people how to use Google Wave.

For me, there were a few waves in my inbox from the start. First, Doctor Wave, impersonating a Bill Nye the Science Guy character appears in the “Welcome to Google Wave” wave as an embedded YouTube video, and points to different areas on the screen while embedded in a Wave. It’s a nice welcome and a great navigation aid to the user interface, very clever in that the perspective is as if he’s talking to you from the inside of the interface. I liked it despite my normal reluctance to take two minutes and twelve seconds to watch a video about something I need to understand better. The video won’t be nearly as effective outside of the Wave, but you could still learn from it if you view it in YouTube instead of in the Wave.

From embedded video to try-and-see to blog entries

Next I started clicking around, and was naturally drawn to my Contacts to see who else is on this invitation-only site? The ones pulled from my Gmail contacts were nearly all from OLPC, since that account is my main email account for that project.

After that, nearly all of my learning process came from Mashable’s blog entry titled Google Wave Guide, and videos about using Google Wave. I also studied their entry titled “Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal” before getting my invite. One of the best “getting started” guides is also by Mashable. Wow, how did Google get third-parties to write their Getting Started Guide? In reality, the Mashable blog entry also serves as a map to the Google help itself, by pointing to the list of Advanced Search terms for Google Wave, for example.

Only after logging on for another two or three times did I find a Google Wave FAQ, written as a wave. I think this FAQ is a great example of documentation when you need it, simplified and task-oriented.

Mostly I am learning by exploring. Last night, Char James-Tanny set up a public Google Wave for STC, the Society for Technical Communication, called STCWave. I found it by searching for “with:public STCWave”. By using that Wave I was able to add more technical communicators to my contacts list, especially those that I didn’t have a Gmail address for previously.

Agile team collaboration tool

I have to wonder aloud if Google built Wave as an essential part of their development teams’ collaboration arsenal. Real-time collaboration is so important to being successful at Agile. Having searchable archives of team decisions and team discussion can be extremely helpful, and photo and document sharing can help a team “gel” so well. We’ve been using Etherpad and Campfire for text-based discussions and some file sharing as well as shared document editing.

Search integration

I have also found it essential to know some basic search phrases to help you find Waves that will be useful to you. One is “with:public” (no space after the colon). With that search delimiter you can find all Waves with public users invited, and other user names and group names can be substituted for public. You can search based on participants, creators, the state of the wave (such as read, filed, and muted), and the types of attachments in the Wave.

Being a student of the Wave

So what are the best ways to learn Google Wave? I think that conversational and community teachings are the way of the Wave. Text is still a huge part of learning, yet printed artifacts are not (yet) a part of learning Google Wave. Video and screencasts are proving to be made by many people.

And finally, learning by experimentation is how many of us will learn Google Wave, especially since its access is to a limited release and invite- or nomination-only web application.

Update – The Complete Guide to Google Wave is now available. A purchase of the print copy goes to a great cause.

I’ve been collecting decent search data for only about three months now, after an initial misconfiguration. Since we have  multiple help sites and multiple search engines, some of the data from the early months of implementation isn’t as useful – for example, I didn’t have the code quite right for stripping out the parameters from the URL, so for “Search Term” we got a lot of search keywords for “15-0-Docs” which is one of the URL parameters for our separate search engines, not the term folks were searching for. If I drill down on the 15-0-Docs link in the report, I can see the keyword parameter, but it’s not an easy scan.

I can re-run reports using only the dates where I had corrected that problem, and then the Search Terms are more accurate. The main thing I want to keep doing now is continue to collect data!

I have sent out early reports to other writers and to our product managers when it seems useful for learning what our users are searching for.

I’d love to hear from other help authors – what are you doing with reports about search terms? These questions lifted straight from Google Analytics seem like a good start.

Visits: Who searched and when?

• When did visitors use site search?
• How do visitors who searched compare to those who didn’t?

Search: What did visitors search for?

• Which search terms did visitors use?
• Which categories did visitors search?

Content: Where did visitors search?

• Where did visitors start their searches?
• Which pages did visitors find?

Now, what would you do with the answers to these questions? How would you redesign your site or content based on the answers? I’m going to dive deeper into those two questions with the information I keep collecting.

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.

Here are my notes for the Creating findable rich media content session at SXSW Interactive. Listen to the podcast for yourself if my haphazard notes are difficult to follow.

• Navigation typically not followable for Flash, etc. Text is embedded, not retrievable by spiders, key text is not prominent or differentiated (even XML).
• Lack of a unique URL hurts your linkage and Google ranking subsequently.
• If content is not coded or tagged correctly you’re not as findable.
• Disney example – their entire site is Flash. You can make Flash search-friendly, navigation is key – just make sure spiders can get through.
• Javascript function detects non-Flash capable browsers, so viewers get primary content (text, anything you can add to an HTML page).

Samsung example – Flex and AJAX for 20,000 SKUs of different tv models, used XML site maps to get all the deep links (which were previously unfindable).
Economist has a video site – 1 page for each video linked from master.
Tubemogul lets you upload videos in bulk with good tags, good titles.Not always rich media that’s the problem, but the execution, making sure you think about search and findability early on in the project, and tag early.

Sometimes content goes up only for a month and then comes back down, so search is irrelevant. Plus, if you want a rich experience, then you don’t worry about search – you actually want fewer people to have that rich experience.

Creating a findable strategy – or make your content find your users. (Now that is an interesting concept to ponder for technical writing.)

Fiat website – Flash-based
Layered approach – CMS backend with XML that transforms either to HTML or to have Flash consume the content. This approach could be mistaken for a form of cloaking, make sure intent is legit and alternative is a faithful representative of Flash content.

Other SEO suggestions – break up container, create deep links from blogs to specific content allowing inbound links.

Other findable strategies
Never ending friending report 2007
Asked people ages 14-29, if you had 15 minutes of spare time, what are your top two choices for using that time? Social networking or talking on cell phone were the top answers.

Target example (Adweek article) -Back to College campaign on Facebook
2-3 months lifespan, so this is an example of not worrying about findability, but rather ensuring that your content finds your users. How does Target create a dialogue with college students; one that would inspire and support their transition into college life?
Give freedom to kids to discuss produts, within their own community.
Personalized checklists sent to mobile.

Funny side note – I think this Target campaign was a nominee of one of the “Suxors” as one of the worst social media campaigns in 2007.

Consider everyone’s accessibility – mobile phones, text to speech, and so on.

Google webmaster tools – google.com/webmaster – these are relatively new.

Q: What is the biggest challenge coming up?
A: Something should be invented to work in the authoring stage to give info to the search engines.
Q: What about exclusionary methods? They don’t understand the ping pong effect something that’s cool will come around everywhere? His clients don’t want to pay for the bandwidth and so on.
A: I don’t think they actually answered this other than to say viral is always good.

Q: What about microformats?
A: The Google panelist said it needs to get more standard and have more attached to the content. He did point to http://www.google.com/experimental/.

Next week I’m presenting at the Alamo STC Chapter, giving a talk titled “A Technical Writer’s Role in Web 2.0 — Wiki-fy Your Doc Set.” It’s at the Igo Library in northwest San Antonio and you’ll want to refer to their website for directions. It’s Tuesday February 12th with the presentation starting at 7:00.

I plan to update the presentation from the last time I gave the presentation at the Austin STC chapter and I’ll post the slides to slideshare when they’re ready. I’ll take it out of Google Presentation format and go with PowerPoint since the 800 x 600 display was pretty dismal using Google Presentations. It’s too bad because sharing that presentation was so easy.

The week after next on Wednesday February 20th, the Central Texas DITA User’s Group is continuing the wiki panel discussion we started in January with three more speakers talking about their wiki experiences, including one wiki that uses DITA as source. Here are the presenters:

• Lisa Dyer, Lombardi Software
• Michele Guthrie, Cisco
• Alan J. Porter, Quadralay Webworks

The networking starts at 7:00 with the panel starting at 7:30. It’s at the Freescale campus on Parmer and directions are available on the DITA wiki. I’m looking forward to this presentation as an audience member as well to learn about more wiki best practices and DITA conversions to wikitext.

I get the greatest blog ideas from my lunch companions lately. This week it was a few former BMC writers. At BMC, the writers have an annual book exchange around the holiday time, and it was so popular we sometimes repeat it mid-year.

At our book exchange, everyone would bring a wrapped book, place it in a pile, then draw a number out of the hat. The person who drew the lowest number would chose from the pile, unwrap the book, read the description, and then the person with the next number would choose to either “steal” the already unwrapped book or take from the pile. The person who drew the highest number would have many unwrapped book titles to choose from.

For a few exchanges in a row, Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell appeared in the book exchange pile, so all four of us at this lunch had read and enjoyed the book very much.

Could you hoard all the information on a topic if you wanted to?

Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell is a wonderful fantastical story about the return of magic to England due to the two people in the title (well, and due to other forces). There are humourous parts, and the fun of the book is that each magician has a very different approach to learning magic again. One hoards all the books about magic. ALL the books. This aspect of information hoarding was especially interesting to us writers at our lunch discussion. Could you even do that in modern day – collect all the books about a certain topic (albeit a narrow focus?) No way.

Another observation is that the cautious one is the one who hoards all the information and only very reluctantly shares it with his reckless pupil. I’m working on a panel discussion on collaboration and I can’t help but remember this book and how fruitless and unsuccessful it was for Mr Norrell to attempt to keep all the books on magic in a single library. The similarity I would draw is how difficult and unhelpful it is to try to write all the information and hoard your topics, never to be remixed into other deliverables.

If the information is hoarded, how is it released to the wild?

Another story that came up in the same week of lunchtime conversations was one from Don Day. He has had a certain camera since he was in high school, and never knew that much about it. He has taken it apart numerous times, and looked for books about the camera, searched on the web with all the identifying text he could find inside the camera, and tried to find any additional information about it, but never found out more.

But! This past year, when someone (I believe the book’s author) uploaded several chapters from a book about specialized vintage cameras to the Internet and it became indexed by Google, Don learned that his old camera that he couldn’t previously identify is worth a couple thousand dollars! It was like the TV show, Antiques Roadshow, had delivered an appraiser to Don through the Internet.

Don’s love of cameras comes full circle in the information sharing sense. Don maintains a wiki about cameras called “Light of Day” and has wonderful photos there. I like this quote from Don’s bio in a wiki entry about the Central Texas DITA User’s Group meeting for October. “I work in high tech, but I love simple things, which is why I feel that an early camera, made of leather and wood, but fitted with a precisely-polished lens, is such a great complement to my own life experience.”

With these two tales of information collection, I hope you see the beauty of share and share alike. Any one else have a great story of information suddenly revealing itself? Or a tale of an information hoarder who met with trouble?

Not long ago, I was tipped off to a handy add-on tool for Windows XP that lets you right click and open a DOS command window in the context of a folder you right-click in Windows Explorer. It’s called, simply, “Open Command Window Here” and you can download it from Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows XP page.

Here’s a screenshot showing the context menu.

For working on batch files, testing Ant scripts, FTPing files, or just about anything that requires a command prompt this is a great shortcut. And check out the other PowerToys like the Alt-Tab replacement which gives you a thumbnail view of the application window when you press Alt-Tab. Nifty!

Now after reading Steve Carl’s Google Office Beta post and Writely and Friends post, I’ve got some more tools to play with some more! I have been working with Google Spreadsheets and find them great with only one more feature I want — I want that drag-and-fill feature that Excel has where your formulas are calculated all the way down a row. I’ve got a shared spreadsheet for doing mortgage qualification calculations. I think anyone can have access to it which is a very cool feature, I think. Google Spreadsheets had all the financial formulas I needed to re-create an Excel spreadsheet I made and since I’ve shared it with friends and family often, it seemed like the perfect candidate for sticking into Google Spreadsheets. So there you go, a practical application of a collaborative tool.

Earlier this week I posted about how good product documentation can sell a product, but today I came across “Manuals, conversations, and RSS” by CTO Sean McGrath, where he talks about playing “a well known IT adventure game known as “catch the randomly recurring problem in the mission critical system”.” I’m sure many of you IT adventurers have played this game as well.

He estimates that his information seeking time is being spent in these areas:
10% Reading vendor manuals
20% Googling, then reading
70% Reading developer blogs, user mailing lists etc. Of this 70%, he further breaks it down as:
RSS feeds: 20%
RSS-only search engines: 20%
Blog surfing: 30%

Connecting to conversations, that’s what it’s all about. What an interesting look at two different approaches to getting the info you need to solve a problem. Perhaps debugging requires more detailed information than setup and administration as the previous post talks about? Still, it helps me realize that product doc doesn’t always provide for every user’s needs.

That said, we should constantly strive for some good combinations of deliverables and delivery methods that can work for a broad range of needs. For example, the concept of a DITA/wiki combination offers structure to an editable web site that both the product developers and end users could edit and add to in a structured way. We’d need an authoring tool that’s like a webform that can validate XML against a DTD, and a wiki that can accept the DITA XML topics and display them as navigable, editable wiki pages.

Another neat combination that’s already out there is user-supplemented help, as described on the Usable Help blog, where the help itself can contain comments and conversations occur through those comments. As Gordon Meyer says, it “allows end-users to communicate directly with the developer, and more importantly, with each other about the quality of the documentation and the features of the software.” Well put.

While I can’t always retrace the exact steps I take to a certain article, I like to explain how I find some of these links, and in this case, I found it as a link from “Exploring Agile Methods for Web Design in a post titled ” Why QA professionals throw away manuals and blog instead.”

I won’t ignore the fact that the blogs at talk.bmc.com are also the opportunity for conversation with our end users. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on documentation, our products, BSM, ITIL, you name it, and we’ll talk about it. Think about ways that you can open conversations with your end users when you roll out new IT applications. What are some of your ideas?

Yep, yet another Google-related post. I guess I can’t get away from Google lately. Documentum is the storage location for much of BMC Software’s technical documentation, and this press release announces that EMC has chosen to integrate Documentum ECI Services with Google Desktop for Enterprise. It’s based on version 5.3 and offers full-text search capability across all types of documents stored in Documentum.

I also learned from this ComputerWorld article that Documentum already supported Google Web site search and the Google Search Appliance. This announcement touts the ability to use the Google Desktop search index.

The article also says that one target for this type of search is the call center employee whose job success depends on finding answers fast. I think many of us know how helpful it is to find answers fast regardless of job description. But certainly this is a tool for keeping your help desk and service desk fast and responsive.

I was working in Word 2003 this morning on a white paper and wanted to create an outline. I deleted the body text between headings and THOUGHT I had saved the file as a new file. To my horror, I realized that I had saved over the original file. I frantically searched for .tmp files, backup files, the clipboard text in case I had copied some text, but the sinking feeling in my gut was the realization that I had truly written over the file with no hope for recovery. (I didn’t have the magical Save AutoRecover info every option (on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab) selected as I learned on this Microsoft KnowledgeBase article.)

I’m not the first to sing the praises of Google Desktop here on talk.bmc.com, but today I discovered a great new use of the tool! In looking for pieces of my text using Google Desktop, I found that Google Desktop had cached versions of the Word file stored about every 10 minutes! So I clicked the Cached link with fingers crossed, and lo and behold, there was the text of my document. I quickly copied and pasted it into a new Word doc and heaved a sigh of relief (or was it a shout of victory? Ask my hallmates.)

Nothing left to say but WHEW.