The lines between a “Blog” and a “Website” are blurring faster than a speeding bullet, yet many business people still think blogs are platforms for personal publishing and self-expression, when in fact, they may be the most powerful tool to connect with your customers on the ‘net today.

Large and small companies have joined in with blogs, but the reality is, it’s not just the idea of having a “blog” - but having a Content Management System that puts you in the drivers seat instead of some web geeks.

The beauty of using blog software as a CMS is that it already has all the cool “Web 2.0” features already built in. From marketing to support, if you aren’t using RSS, comments/feedback and building community, you aren’t going to survive. As an added bonus, they also generate perfectly compliant W3C code- meaning not only will your site meet ADA requirements, Google will love everything you do.

If you think blogs are for lightweights, come to this session and learn why blogs may be the biggest, baddest marketing and communications tool on the planet. Oh, yeah- you’ll also be entertained while getting your education.

When you think of authoring any kind of content, what tools come to mind? Probably software like FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, Author-IT, RoboHelp, and a few other tools that are considered standard. But have you consider the Open Source alternative?

Many people equate Open Source with Linux. But here’s definitely a lot more to it than Linux. In fact, users of Open Source software can take advantage of a number of content authoring tools which give writers—technical or otherwise—the ability to create and publish professional content.

In this presentation, Scott Nesbitt will highlight the strengths and drawbacks of Open Source tools. Scott will introduce some techniques for developing content the Open Source way, and give you a peek at how some vendors use Open Source tools for their documentation and collateral. You’ll also learn when and when not to go open.

This presentation will also look at a variety of Open Source tools for creating quality content, including:

• Word processors and wikis
• Help authoring tools
• Markup languages and how to publish with them
• Software for generating developer documentation
• Graphics and multimedia applications

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML structured publishing solutions, like content management systems in general, run the gamut in cost from free to millions of dollars for some of the largest implementations in big corporations, such as Adobe, Autodesk, BMC, EMC, IBM, Nokia, Salesforce.com, and Sybase.

The toolsets alone can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars when a fully automated publishing solution is integrated with an XML CMS, such as those from Astoria, Vasont, and XyEnterprise, or integrated editing, styling, publishing, and content management systems from PTC Arbortext.

Significantly, however, where free content management solutions have been driven by the open source community——who built the leading CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla, and Plone——the free structured publishing option for DITA is the gift of one of those large corporations: IBM.

IBM actually gave the intellectual property rights for the DITA standard to the leading XML standards organization, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS).

The heart of free structured publishing is called the DITA Open Toolkit (OT). It is managed by IBM, not by OASIS, which is responsible only for the standard, not particular, implementations. Most implementations are based on the OT, with the early leader in structured publishing, Arbortext (now PTC), opting to develop its own DITA publishing implementation.

All you need to get started with structured content is to download and install the OT and get yourself a DITA XML editor. Judging by the traffic on the technical communication community mailing lists (i.e., STC and TECHWR-L), there is hardly a technical publications department anywhere that does not have someone studying DITA to see if and when it will be adopted.

Four years ago, I was one of the founders of the content management professionals organization CM Pros. We had a small but strong group interested in structured publishing, and we put an early version of the DITA OT up on a web server so members would not have to install it themselves. Now those tools are available at DITAUsers.org.

Technical writers are typically good writers but poor techs, and IBM’s gift is easy to install only for programmers. Besides, installing the OT on a laptop or a desktop limits its use to one individual. When the OT is on a web server, many writers can share it, and their publishing deliverables can be seen immediately on the web. This is the SaaS (software-as-a-service) model for highly scalable content publishing in the future.

Our DITA Users organization provides free access to the online DITA OT and a copy of the Inmedius DITA Storm WYSIWYG XML Editor. Each member gets an online workspace folder with multiple sample projects, including the files from the only DITA textbook: JoAnn Hackos’ Introduction to DITA.

Our DITA Tools from A to Z section on the DITA Users website lists every software and service up to publishing solutions costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. But our policy of free member access to online tools means that anyone anywhere in the world can at least get started (our membership fees range from free to $100 a year).

We call our approach “DITA from A to B,” authoring to building and, of course, publishing structured content.

Your competitors are using wikis. Your customers are using wikis. So are others in your organization. You need to use wikis, too. It’s where your future is. And we’ll show you how.

We’ll explore:

• The business value of wikis
• How to make the case for using a wiki in your group or team
• How to encourage participation
• How to use examples of current wiki success to build excitement and drive adoption
• How do wikis change an organization’s culture for the better?
• How do wikis “fit” with other business tools like SharePoint, blogs, content management systems, and email?

Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns and the Grow Your Wiki blog, and a panel of wiki experts from companies like Bank of America and BearingPoint, will answer these and take questions directly from the audience.