What can you do when expert content is hard to come by? I’m talking about the upper-crust trusted sources of technical information, much like how A-list bloggers are set to get the higher page rankings on certain topics. Even Technorati is allowing you to filter by authority now when you search for keywords. From the Technorati blog: “The new Filter By Authority slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them.” So is there a shortcut to authority? No, but you can find ways to connect to authoritative content. Here are a couple of ideas.
So let’s say you’re a work-a-day humble tech writer and you haven’t yet made it to a high level of authority on a technical subject, but your users are constantly looking for higher-tech, higher-value documentation. What can you do? This blog post explores two ideas about expanding the sphere of collection when it comes to technical documentation. Look high and low and especially outside of the content owned by your company ,and you can find documentation that your users want and need. Both of these ideas are not mine originally, I just helped implement them technically. A former manager of mine gets all the credit for thinking creatively about technical documentation and jumping through the legal hoops to make it happen. Thanks, Mike!
The first idea I’ve presented at an STC Conference and published as an article at WritersUA. In a nutshell, it’s go to the companies that have products that your companies’ products integrate with, and talk to them about information sharing. I’m talking about single sourcing in a whole new way. You’re sourcing content from other companies, and giving other companies your source to integrate into their products. This concept is what the future of technical publications can look like, especially with XML-source standards such as DITA and Docbook to facilitate sharing. Although, in this case, unstructured FrameMaker was the source file. You can read the links to discover the details on converting that source to the output we needed.
In this case, the particular type of content we pursued was error messages — message text, explanation, and user response — for the major database vendors IBM, Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server. The product our team was documenting at the time integrated with all these database vendors and often the product passed through the vendor error directly. Since Oracle (and all the others) had comprehensive error message documentation that was similarly structured, we asked for the source files and with some legal contract work, received them. Once we got the source content, I wrote up a process for transforming it all to structured XML, then wrote an XSLT transform that could work in the product itself, transforming the content on the fly, offering HTML that contained both the explanation for the error and what you could do to correct or workaround the error. Now that is expert content, directly from the vendors who create the error message.
The second idea I haven’t really written up yet, until now. Mike Wethington talked about it at the Region 5 conference in the fall of 2003. An email exchange with Cote and a post at his People Over Process blog prompted me to write it up here. The other place we sought out expert content was from O’Reilly, a well known and trusted technical book publisher. It was in the first year or so that Safari, the online book repository, was offering content using a subscription model. With much legal wrangling that I know little about, my manager and the BMC legal team wrote up a contract with O’Reilly book publishers to offer selected reference books in an online format for selected expert database products. The book titles were all Oracle-centered titles, and we selected books that we knew were popular sellers and contained the information that users of our database products would find helpful for both day-to-day tasks as well as future planning and fine-tuning tasks. For this particular product, we supplied a “teaser” set of content, letting the user know that O’Reilly books are available and giving an example of the content they would get if they purchased a permanent license. According to Cote, CITTIO claims they were the first product to integrate with Safari. That may well be, but we had a precursor to that, imbedding the content, shipping it with the product. They claim access to 3,300 books, and we just had eight. 🙂 I’m not sure which implementation is the more usable, but I love that more and more expert technical content is being distributed and shared in these ways.