Since I’ve been away on maternity leave since October 2006, I missed the arrival of techwritervoices.com,, all podcasts related to technical writing topics. Very exciting stuff, birthed the same month as my new baby! I had already stumbled across a blog entry on a site called Monkey Pi depicting controversy where they referred to the podcast with Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software on Tech Writer Voices. I won’t jump into the comments section there since I don’t use RoboHelp or Flare for a Help Authoring Tool. But podcasts are a great way to get your story heard if this discussion is any indication.
This week one STC president candidate used the techwritervoices.com site to campaign for her election. One feature that is so great about this podcast blog is that they have collections of links that were discussed during the podcast, making for easy perusal and perhaps valuable link gold. I’m certainly intrigued and impressed at their dedication to podcasting as a means to communicate about technical writing topics.
One of the writers and podcasters of the techwritervoices.com site, Tom Johnson, writes about work-family balance and how listening to podcasts during commutes helps him keep up. Another reader said that she found it helped her stay current while taking time off to raise young kids (an ongoing task on both counts!) While I don’t have a long enough commute (just 8 minutes) to listen to lots of podcasts, I like the idea of staying current by listening as well as reading. Pretty neat.
I also just made the connection that Tom Johnson had asked the Austin chapter about blogging software last year when we started a blog as a substitute for our chapter newsletter. Our STC chapter blog is at http://stcaustin.blogspot.com/. I think the personal connections are a big part of blogging and our little corner of the blogging world is no exception.
I’m also reading this thread about blogging on the STC Forums with interest. I especially appreciate Scott Abel’s testimony about how blogging has changed his professional potential greatly. His enthusiasm for structured blogging makes me want to install WordPress or Moveable Type on my home server and get that structured blogging plug-in working!
There are many ways that tech writers are embracing podcasting and blogging as a means of communicating with other like-minded colleagues. I’d like to see how we take the next step to communicate technical topics to our end-users. Of course, every post that I write where I talk about technical communication instead of actually communicating about BMC products proves I have a comfort level with information design and I feel I’m still on the learning curve with information technology topics. But I plan to write a lot about my new product assignment, BMC Configuration Management, formerly named Marimba, over the next few weeks.
Ynema, our talk.bmc.com producer, gets credit for interviewing a tech writer early on with my podcast from last year. Y, you early adopter, you. She is doing amazing work with video as well and I’m very excited to see the new things she is producing here. Maybe we can come up with a screencast about the BMC products I’m learning about and share with you all.