I’m listening in on Scott’s somewhat-famous Web 2.0 for technical communicators talk. He has given it 15 times this year already so I’m very excited to hear it here in Austin, TX at the Quadralay WebWorks RoundUp user conference. Here are my notes.
How can writers show they have highly transferable skills? What are the in demand skills?
information architecture, interaction design, modular content creation, localization and translation, document design, standards knowledge= document engineer (read Document Engineering by Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath). How to add value to our careers – by creating human- and machine-readable documents, whatever form they may take.
seeqpod.com – playable search engine. Files that exist and are playable. Does it actually look for keywords within podcasts and let you play the relevant portions of that podcast?
songsza.com
jott.com – what would you like to “jott” – automatic voice recording from your cell phone that can be played back.
tapefailure.com – clips of your users using your website – combine and compare patterns
tagging
del.icio.us – showing his list of tagged bookmarks at del.icio.us/abelsp.
Offered a case study of using for call centers using del.icio.us – have your call center people automatically add tags to items that make sense to them, then the techpubs department can see all the tags, the frequency of the items, and the different vocabulary words used for their bookmarking.
mashups
periodic table of visualization methods
simile.mit.edu/exhibit/ – how you can filter content from a web browser. See the value of visualizing data in more visual ways for the average user.
syndication, subscription
pipes.yahoo.com – visual editor for RSS feeds, bringing them together and combining them.
hosted software (Software as a Service or SaaS)
docs.google.com Google Docs & Spreadsheets (side note – I’ll be publishing my wiki talk from STC Austin using Google Docs’ Presentation tool)
thinkfree.com
zoho.com – documents, spradsheets, projects, notebook, planner, wiki, others
blogs
documentation teams or developers putting end-user doc onto blogs
wikis
interactive voice response company using wiki
parking meter company using wiki
Virgil Griffith created a wiki scanner – salacious edit site – looks for IP addresses and associates them with the company name.
DITA Storm – edit DITA pages on the web.
guided authoring – can developers write role-based documentation if they are guided to do so, with examples and guided templates so they know where content goes.
podcasts
video documentation
viddler.com – allows you to upload videos and annotate them.
See also video jug, expert village, sclipo, 5min, viewdo, teacher tube, youtube howto
social networks
linkedin.com – LinkedIn for Groups – STC and CM Pros will offer a member directory