In this podcast from TechWriterVoices, Tom Johnson interviews David Holmes at DocTrain West 2008 about how he and his team migrated 50,000 unstructured pages of content to DITA.

One of the sage pieces of advice that any content management consultant will offer is to beware content migration. It’s not the sexiest stage of a content management project. In fact, most organizations would rather like not to think of that messy part of it at all. It’s like the “losing weight” part of the diet. Everyone likes to think of themselves in the smashing outfit later on, not all red-faced and sweaty in gym during the heavy-lifting stage. Content migration has traditionally been the messy part, the complex part, and the expensive part. In content management projects, it has traditionally been under-estimated, under-budgeted, and under-valued. But the business community is waking up to the value of content. Joe Gollner, VP of e-Publishing Solutions for Silo International, has noticed that, “Content is so important that we can no longer afford to treat it like a cottage industry. Corporations are starting to realize that we need to apply the same care and discipline to them as we do with the rest of our database assets.”

With that awakening of the sleeping giant—the term is apropos, as the amounts of legacy content deemed valuable enough to be tagged for migration are vast—is the need for strategies to convert that content without breaking the bank. Stilo Enterprise Solutions, long known for its ability to manipulate massive amounts of data in exceeding complex configurations, has extended its expertise in this arena to deal with this growing industry need. With Stilo Migrate, organizations have access to an on-demand migration service. This shift in the publishing industry could mean a change as radical as ATMs were to the banking industry, which brought the public the ability to conduct every-day banking transactions on-demand, without the need to go into a bank or schedule an appointment with a banker. This model further democratizes the content conversion process, as the “pay as you go” model will inevitably remove the current substantial cost barriers that smaller organizations now face when trying to enter this space.

To learn more about the world’s first on-demand content migration service, visit the Stilo site.

The distinction between technical documentation and the content that surrounds it—from upstream documents such as specifications to downstream documents such as service bulletins—has largely been artificial, and often separated by the technologies and writing structures that bind the documents together. Technical communicators keep their documents controlled, and for good reason, in structured documents, in specialty mark-up languages in specialty software. Their colleagues tend to use standard-issue software, and while they may have started off with company-issue templates, these tend to morph over time to a point being recognition or repair.

Just when it looked like these two camps would drift further apart, as DITA gave technical communicators tighter control over their content structure and wikis allowed the rest of the content to become as free-form as possible, Inmedius Software found a way to marry the two content forms in a way that considers the needs of both sides. By adding a DITA wiki to their content management suite, they have a browser-based DITA solution that can be used by non-technical content authors.

What this means for the industry is content portability, and speed of content portability. Instead of looking for Word documents on shared drives or SharePoint sites and converting it to DITA before incorporating it into a document and editing it, the content can be, simply, shared. The DITA formatting is already in place. For a glimpse into the future of a DITA-wiki hybrid model, read the case study published in the STC Intercom magazine.

The focus of content development professionals has, until recently, been on getting content into their content management systems, with a big interest in authoring tools and techniques. But equal emphasis was not given to getting content out of the content management system. The advantages are powerful, but the transition to an XSL publishing paradigm can be nerve-wracking for content producers accustomed to an environment where content formatting can be changed on a whim. As content developers learn to better navigate the content management landscape, they are paying more attention to the output side, and look to Antenna House as a beacon to guide them.

Given that the output is the client-facing content, a logical assumption might be that great content output needs to benefit from the various promises of content management in terms of accessibility, usability, and branded output. XSL (XML Stylesheet Language) turns bland XML content chunks into user-meaningful outputs through special transformations. For example, done well, XSL-FO transformations can turn a DITA-mapped content into PDFs, complete with headers, footers, TOC, and corporate branding. XSL can also transform content from one “flavor” of XML to another, allowing content portability between systems and databases.

At this stage of the content management journey, XSL tranformations are where DITA was to technical communicators a few years ago: mysterious, inaccessible, and a little frightening. Yet as some intrepid technical communicators hit the XSL highway and return unscatched, more and more follow in their footsteps. Antenna House, the leading provider of software for formatting XML document for electronic and print output, has provided a map of sorts, with a stylesheet tutorial plus sample files of formatting objects and sample stylesheets, available on the Antenna House site.

Single-sourcing between outputs of the same type is supposed to be, in the words of British chef Jamie Oliver, easy-peasy. The work on DITA started by IBM and eventually donated to the OASIS standards organization in 2004 made content more and more portable. The wide adoption of XML - DocBook, and then DITA - and custom DTDs, removed much of the pain of moving content between manuals.

The component content management system (CMS) vendors quickly got on board with the newer standards, and today, virtually all component CMSes support XML in at least the DocBook and DITA flavors. The number of case studies grew as organizations wanted to share their successes.

However, the situation on the training side isn’t as advanced. The authoring tools aren’t standardized, the learning systems often don’t support XML, and the end media may not take accept the outputs from content management system. What’s an organization to do when training deliverables are part of the content mix? Linda Urban, a long-time content development consultant, has worked on many a project where training has been one of the components, and has had to find ways of handling this as part of the documentation suite. Linda tells you what many vendors won’t, and helps you work around some of the technology limitations you’ll have to live with until the training industry catches up to the documentation side.

Linda shares her insights and strategies at Documentation and Training West in a case study on Modular Training Content.

Want to go to topic-based authoring and leverage the advantages of XML but can’t get management to invest in a component content management system? Here’s a not-so-secret secret: when IBM first invented and implemented DITA, they didn’t use a content management system.

Sure, it takes a little more work, and is a little more cumbersome. But IBM, with their plethora of developers and technical minds, tackled a lot of the technical problems, worked out a lot of the kinks, and developed a number of tools that, put together, can create a prototype. At the very least, it’s the show-and-tell needed to demonstrate to your executive level what you need. Alternatively, it could be a way of helping writers structure their content into topic clusters.

Technical writers who learned help authoring in an academic setting will find task modeling and topic clustering simply new labels for familiar concepts. Writers who learned help authoring through a more organic route will find this a way of modeling human activity into a hierarchy of help elements that increase the effectiveness of a help system and the value to users.

Mark Wallis, an award-winning information developer for IBM Internet Security Systems, shares his experiences with task modeling in DITA, at Documentation and Training West 2008.

In the early 2000s, MadCap Software took the online help industry by storm with their flagship Flare product. With the attention to detail in the product interface and the completely portable XHTML files, which allowed non-Flare users to open a file and fix a typo, the product was an instant winner.

MadCap didn’t sit on its laurels with the launch of Flare, despite the capture of 25 percent of the online help market by end of 2007. What they lacked in corporate size, they made up in development enthusiasm. Madcap followed its release of Flare with a complement of tools that a technical communicator needed to create a complete online help project. The lynch pin for the suite, called MadPak, was the interoperability factor. All the tools worked seamlessly together, to create an experience unlike any the industry had seen until then one, where technical communicators didn’t need to hold their breath while importing, converting, or compiling...just in case.

MadCap continues to build out its suite of productivity-enhancing software. Hard on the heels of Analyzer, the beta of Blaze has been released.

• MadCap’s Sharon Burton talks about how Analyzer speeds authoring by letting authors analyze projects for problems like broken links
• Sign up for a Blaze demo (think the simplicity of Word authoring with the power of XML structuring - for an under-the-hood look

The ability to weave user-generated content in with editorial content, and social media into the corporate website, intranet, or extranet is simple when the content management system is RedDot. The RedDot CMS is Windows-based application that allows web content management in a multi-user environment with multiple content contributors. The RedDot architecture makes the inclusion of social networking components such as blogs, forums, wikis, comment fields, and ratings easily.

As well, RedDot realizes that web projects don’t have the same boundaries as databases, so ensures that any content can be re-used between web projects. This keeps all relevant content in a single repository, leveraging content for use in business contexts.

Authors simply select files or images, and incorporate the applications into the website as easily as they would select and attach text. In addition to the usual ability to author, edit, and publish, RedDot allows authors to seamlessly connect any other content in the database, whether that is in a forum, blog, or wiki, to create a richer user experience, and for users to search across all content, as well. The logical extension is personalization, and RedDot has been extended to take advantage of its Web 2.0 capabilities. Users can be served by specific languages, regions, occupational groups, departments, interests - by whatever audience designation is of use to the organization.

RedDot has published a white paper to help organizations understand how to facilitate corporate survival and growth.

If you were to see her home office in the early evening, with rows of blinking green, yellow and blue lights and the multitude of screens casting an eerie glow (two laptops, a flat screen, a TV; all turned on), and the productivity gadgets connected to all of it, there would be no doubt in your mind. Here lives and works someone who doesn’t like wasting time. A “multi-tasker”, who can actually pull it off. Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with her knows that its not easy to keep up with this self-professed geek. On occasion, and only half in jest, she has attributed her high level of productivity to ADD high-functioning ADD, that is.

But there’s another explanation: passion. Rahel Anne Bailie is absolutely passionate about what she does which is why shes so good at it. As one of the leading content management strategists and usability experts in the Pacific Northwest, Rahel has developed a solid reputation as an innovative thinker, with a keen sense of business, and with the expertise and the network to get exceptional things done. Most recently, she chaired the very successful and critically acclaimed first annual Content Convergence and Integration conference, bringing together speakers and topics that are seldom connected. If your reputation is also shaped by the company you keep, well, lets just say Rahel keeps some excellent company. Don’t miss her presentation at DocTrain West, Content Management Successes: Separating Fact From Fantasy. She’ll inform and inspire you, guaranteed.

Read Rahel’s blog. You can reach Rahel via email or via telephone at +1-604-837-0034.

Why stop at user guides or online help when leveraging reusable content? How about reusing content to create presentations? With Author-it, you can output feature-packed presentations that include: transitions between slides, bullet-by-bullet progression, fully-functional Flash objects, and that’s just the beginning.

Create sophisticated presentations by simply dragging and dropping existing content. By leveraging the single source architecture through your presentations you guarantee those sales figures are up to the minute correct when you deliver your presentation, even if your presentation was written months ago.

Using Author-it’s object oriented approach, presentations can quickly be chopped and changed on the fly to suit your unique situation. Absolutely no repurposing required. No copying and pasting or tricky conversion, simply find the content you need from other presentations or media, and drag and drop.

• View a sample presentation
• Learn more about Author-it

If you’re not yet taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies because of one of the following reasons, you’re not alone. Common reasons for not adopting Web 2.0 include: “Not enough money.” “Don’t understand it.” “No technical resources.” “Not enough manpower.” “No visible return on investment.” “Fear of ridicule.” “Fear of slander.” “Fear of permanence.” “Fear of the public running amok.”

In his technology column in The New York Times, David Pogue offers this advice: “When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.”

Matt Sullivan sometimes jokes that training feels like trying to eat an elephant, so it’s best to take it a byte at a time. So when the new Adobe Technical Communication Suite came out, Matt decided to make a meal of it. He used the new suite as a single-sourcing solution to manage his entire suite of training materials - print manuals, training videos, and help systems- from a single source, and deliver the contents to multiple audiences without going through any conversion efforts.

Sullivan has decided to share his considerable knowledge of Adobe products - not just the Technical Communication Suite, but also the Creative Suite and related products - by setting up Single Byte, a site with tips, tricks, and tutorials. Catch his workshop, Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite: Using FrameMaker to Manage Print and Help Authoring, at Documentation and Training West.

The virtual world was built on metaphors of the physical world. The desktop, trashcan, and recycling bin are all taken from physical offices, and folders and files are based on the filing cabinets of decades gone by. In many cases, the metaphors have come full circle. People talk about not having enough RAM to remember all their tasks for the day.

The use of metaphors were never perfect. Take the web page. The Web screens became called “pages” - likely because printing what was on the screen became a page and because, well frankly, the metaphor stuck. So what happens in an Ajax-driven, Web 2.0 world where the concept of “page” ceases to exist? How does this change how information architects, interaction designers, and, yes, users think of sites? How does it change their interactions with the components on the screen?

Such are the musings of Jess McMullin, co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and founder of nForm User Experience. He has addressed the issues of designing and documenting interactions in a pageless world in Beyond the Page, which can be found on the nForm site.

Jess will be sharing his business acumen with his workshop, Hands-On Methods to Increase Your Influence at Documentation and Training West.

In the progression from delivering documents on paper to delivering them electronically and on the Web, then as Help, then as a combination of various media, the concept of the “document” has changed from a contextual, linear chain of content to a modular, topic-based content bank that users can tap into, on demand, and pull out the answers they need. The advantages of topic-based documentation have been extolled for a decade now, but in a Web 2.0 world, a new trend has emerged, that of including content from various sources. The idea is to direct users to up-to-date product information as well as provide ad hoc technical support, consulting, training, sales info, and other content, all in a single place. The overall effect is to make users more successful, more quickly than by simply providing the standard documentation set.

Nicky Bleiel, an information developer with Component One, has done just that, and documented the proposal process for an ”Answer Station” that acts as an information portal, working with an existing corporate website, to provide a winning user experience.

Nicky will be sharing her expertise in this area at Documentation and Training West, with her session on Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World.

Given that Darren Barefoot is a well-known blogger, marketing communicator, and has just published a book on marketing strategies using social networking media, how does this connect with the convergence of social media and technical documentation?

A number of years ago, Darren first demonstrated his knowledge of how to leverage the then less-known aspects of social networking by integrating technical information (his lesser-known background in technical communication came in handy here) with technologies that responded to user need: the social factor. It’s many years later, yet many companies are still talking about the “fire and forget” method of brochure-ware marketing, whether that be websites, PDFs, or physical bulletin boards (do business people still actually browse those for business information - well, anybody with any decision-making power?).

The content publishing world has gotten a lot more complex over the last decade, and without a way to coordinate efforts—to converge content where appropriate, to integrate content where appropriate, to aggregate, to syndicate, to archive, and otherwise govern your content—you’d spend all your time creating those authentic conversations and no time getting any other work done. To get some work-work balance going, you need to learn and apply techniques that help you devise a strategy that works for you and lets your maintain your sanity. How you do that is to listen to Darren speak at Documentation and Training West where he is delivering both a keynote presentation Social Media 101: now Everyone is a Technical Writer and a 60-minute presentation, The Many-Armed Starfish: Today and Tomorrow in Social Media. And, grab a copy of his new book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Primer (co-authored with Julie Szabo).

In the world of learning, there is a generally accepted principle that the retention of the material is directly related to how much the student participates in the training. The educationist Edgar Dale created a Cone of Experience that demonstrated that the most passive form of learning—reading text, listening to audio, or looking at pictures—leads to the lowest retention rate, while hands-on simulations and direct, purposeful experience helps participants retain the material the longest. Not to mention learn more of the material and have more fun in the process.

So why, in the world of technology training, are most learners subjected to the Death by PowerPoint method of instruction remains a mystery. A study at Indiana State University found that learners who reinforced their training with computer-based practice doubled the knowledge they retained over students who had only classroom-based training.

Thomas Aldous decided to tackle this “forgetting curve” with a unique blend of instruction, practice, and post-class support materials that boost retention. By videotaping the class, burning it to CD, indexing the contents, and providing it to students for a contextual reminder, he found that retention rates jumped by over twenty percent. Aldous brings his interactive teaching style to DocTrain West to lead a workshop on converting unstructured documents to structured XML.

When it comes to technical documentation, we hear the far-too familiar lament, that the organization won’t invest in doing right by the documentation department. Mid-level management doesn’t have budget, and the organization’s C-level executives don’t even know the group exists, or if they do, consider it a cost center. However, on the front end of the bell curve, there have been great strides made by those who “just do it” and pave the way for others to follow in their footsteps.

Ann H. Adams is one of those pioneers. She has spent the better part of a decade finding ways to creating content in smarter ways - making the content better, while producing it more efficiently, and with a smaller budget. As a Technical Communication Specialist for Kyocera, Ann deals not only with a wide range of hardware makes and models, but has the added complexity of producing her material in over 30 languages. The localization requirements - language, culture, standards, and so on - provide a veritable arsenal of metrics to demonstrate the ROI of structured documentation. In a multilingual world, where DITA meets XLIFF, Ann’s presentation on Evaluating DITA-Enabled Content Management Systems is a good starting point.

Ann Adams presents Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level at DocTrain West.

Sherry Michaels is no stranger to change. She has been in the documentation and training industry long enough to have seen the changes. In documentation, it’s gone from linear documents to topic-based writing; in training, it’s gone from classroom to online delivery, to blended training approaches. She emphasizes that any approach should focus on transferring learner knowledge, supporting job performance, closely aligning business goals and delivering measurable results. She explains more about this approach in Blended Learning Solutions: Strategies for Success, just one of the many resources available from her website.

It’s not surprising that Michaels also approaches team management from a similar angle. Her emphasis is not on tools and tradition, but on effectiveness and efficiencies, though managing a virtual team in a Web 2.0 environment does require some technology. However, choosing the right technology does affect productivity, and their choice, implementation, and ongoing use can have an impact on team dynamics. Michaels shares her perspectives on managing virtual teams and ensuring their productivity at Documentation and Training West.

Alan Porter believes in the power of wikis for producing user documentation. He doesn’t only talk about his belief, however; he has put wikis to use at work. Porter’s organization, Quadralay, has content written and sourced in DITA, with wikitext in mind as an output. Some seven knowledge workers populate four wikis with content that support various business processes - everything from task tickets, to contract and bid processes, to user support documentation.

For those associate wikis with unstructured content, wikis and DITA are not incompatible concepts. The Quadralay content comes from sources as varied as FrameMaker, DITA-XML, and Microsoft Word, and is output as wiki text.

Porter’s presentation to the Central Texas DITA User Group is posted on slideshare, but to get the live experience, attend his session on wikis at Documentation and Training West.

Sarah O’Keefe doesn’t seem too obsessive about structure. After all, when DocTrain caught up with her at a conference, she was relaxed and handing out Lindt and Toblerone chocolates to passers-by. But don’t let that chocolate haze distract you from the glint in her eye as she explains why DITA is not the holy grail of content management. “Here, have some chocolate,” she says and reels you in.

Sarah contends a constrained set of tags, like DITA, is much easier for a software vendor to support than the infinite possibilities of XML. So vendors promote DITA solutions, seducing unsuspecting technical communicators with cool technology. Today, much of the discussion around XML software vendors revolves around who has the best support for DITA.

But Sarah believes that this is the wrong question. Before arguing about the finer points of conref implementation and map file creation, you might want to determine whether DITA is in fact the right solution for your organization’s content.
She also points out that “it’s really cool” does not make a good business case. And, while she knows that it’s really about costs, benefits, and return on investment, she’s likely to start her interrogation with a soft touch - “How about some chocolate?”

A white paper, Is DITA Right for You?, is available from the Scriptorium website.

When it comes to the adoption of XML, what a difference a few short years makes. In 2003, database administrators were sounding the alarms about the dangers of XML. “DBAs” You Should Fear XML!”, “An XML Hero Reconsiders?”, and “the fear of x” are some of the most popular warnings of the day. Today, XML is a given, with organizations asking questions about how to tweak how they’re using XML to get more out of their business objectives.

If anyone is nervous about using XML now, the fear has moved down the line to the staff who are being asked to change their processes and work routines, and move out of their comfort zones. The trepidation is understandable - the stress of change deep-rooted, day-long routines is on par with changing one’s residence or fear of public speaking. And we know that surveys show those fears are up there with fear of death.

Enter Heidi Sandler. Not only is she a technical writer for Siemens Building Technologies, and a public speaker of Distinguished Toastmaster status, but an early adopter of XML. She’ll share the experiences of her writing team during her presentation at Documentation and Training West entitled The Single Sourcing House: Building, Expanding, Maintaining, and Living in the Single Sourcing House, using her life experiences as a metaphor.

When Robert Pfremmer looks at the world, he sees the entire globe. In other words, when he thinks of production, distribution, or marketing, he sees globalization as just another business process. After all, to integrate domestic and global business, organizations need to implement processes and technologies to support global markets and deliver benefits to end users. Doing this outside of the home region or language simply means building processes and technologies that support successful output to the language and location. Simple shouldn’t be confused with easy.

The technical side has certainly become easier, though he admits the change management and human performance issues continue to derail the most technically sound projects. Pfremmer points to the recent strides made in globalization capabilities, and credits standards such as LISA’s OSCAR with easing large-scale implementations.

The localization industry has to deal with a number of standards, many of which are not directly translation-related but can affect the success of the project - for example, SCORM for learning objects, AICC for the aviation industry, and the EU’s IVD directive for medical devices. Despite this additional layer of complexity, Pfremmer sees standards as a necessary aspect of content structuring content for deriving the business value needed. Pfremmer’s LISA article, Standards: Signposts Along the Way, elaborates on these issues.

At Documentation and Training West, Pfremmer will present Velocity Translation Portal: On-Demand Localization Marketplace for a Global Community.

Todd O’Neill may be a media consultant, but he is the first person to say that the end goal is not about media, it’s about communication. The media is only the means that makes the end possible. However, just as documentation folks have their “let’s produce a brochure!” stories, media folks have their “let’s produce a video!” stories. O’Neill allows his business analyst side to kick in and analyze the need, the end, and then determine how - including the medium - to span the gap.

Though O’Neill currently consults and teaches, he has done his share of hands-on work in the past, including video and multimedia production. He shares resources such as a Shoot Checklist on his Doing Media website.

For an insightful look into decisions around the production of training videos, attend his session at Documentation and Training West.

The debate between DocBook and DITA heated up shortly after DITA became an OASIS standard. Until then, there had been some reluctance by companies, with significant investment costs and potential risk, to adopt a markup language that was not in the public domain. Once DITA became a standard, the standards war started in earnest.

Not that the architects of either standard is claiming standard supremacy. Norman Walsh, the main man behind DocBook, admits that while Docbook can do everything that DITA can do, there are some things that DocBook is much better suited for, and things that DocBook could be turned into a pretzel to do, but is more suited to DITA. Michael Priestley, the main man behind DITA, has similar things to say about DITA: it can do everything that DocBook can, but in some cases, DocBook would do the trick quite neatly.

Teresa Mulvihill has strong opinions in the XML debate, as well. In her decade of creating XML documentation for clients around the world, she has had to make the critical choice of XML standard to ensure that the documentation is created in a way that will benefit the organization in the best way, in the long run. Mulvihill offers a complimentary documentation assessment for companies considering a document conversion to XML.

For those wanting to understand more about the standards and the differences between them, Mulvihill’s presentation at DocTrain West on DocBook vs. DITA: Will The Real Standard Please Stand Up? will be an illuminating session.

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader may love the technology of wikis, but what he really loves is the productivity that the technology can bring about when properly implemented. The idea that wikis help organizations share information may be the primary reason that they want to adopt a wiki, but the side benefits—reduction in email and meetings, development of planned and spontaneous communities, and idea hatcheries—can be teased out when the implementation is done with due thought and care.
In addition to Mader’s wiki consulting blog, where he provides a wealth of information on the topic of enterprise wikis, check out these resources:

• 21 days of wiki adoption (text format)
• 21 days of wiki adoption (Flash format)
• 25 Tips for a better Wiki Deployment

Ann Gentle says she had an “ah ha” moment at the SXSW conference when listening to a social media metrics presenter discuss three types of measurable conversations: Public Relations, Marketing (Sales), and Customer Support.

So what turns the production of a content deliverable into a conversation? Gentle sees the future of technical communication being less about doing primary product research and creating help, and more about moderating support forums, separating the useful content from the chaff, and using blogs as a documentation platform.

The value of documentation in blog format is the ability to have a dynamic conversation with customers, current and potential, to address ongoing technical issues, and to show organizational interest in their customers. Gentle realizes that the shift from a dry, minimalist technical writing style to a more conversational blogging style takes some courage and getting used to. For a thoughtful discussion on the topic, visit her Just Write Click blog.

An integral part of the identity of a technical communicator is to be a user advocate. There is a necessary tension between the product development team and the writer that defines the difference between the desire to describe features and the desire to assist users. Aaron Davis understands this distinction in more ways than one.

As a technical communication consultant, Davis resists the temptation to simply document a software package’s bells and whistles, and instead creates documents that help users solve problems. As a professional focusing on usability, he understands that usability is a compelling differentiator. So reading that a study stating that 70% of respondents cited user adoption as the most important factor for value realization while only 1% of respondents thought that software features and functionality were the main value driver in a software deployment was a satisfying confirmation.

Davis says the study reinforces what technical communicators have long known, that users care more about software’s capacity to efficiently solve a problem than having a wealth of great features that may never be used.

Read more insights from Aaron Davis on the DMN Communication blog.

Michael Boses loves the idea of structured authoring. He has a deep understanding of the business benefits of having content that is portable, interchangeable between systems, and highly adaptive to new business requirements. He also understands the motivation of users. He understand that they like to be productive, and to be productive is to think about what they’re producing and not about how to use their software - and certainly not about working around awkwardly-designed software.

Boses makes it his business to listens closely to both business executives and end users, and to bring together the two sets of needs into a single, elegant solution. In some circles, he would be called a marriage broker; at In.vision Research, he’s called a Chief Technology Officer. One of the most successful matches Boses made was in marrying structured authoring with the world’s most widely-used authoring tool, Microsoft Word. The chances of getting a myriad of Word uses to give up their familiar software and work routines to adopt a complex structured authoring tool was, frankly, highly unlikely. So Boses did the next best thing - he brought the structured authoring to Word.

The users were able to keep their familiar tools and the bulk of their processes, and the businesses were able to reap the benefits derived from the processing of structured content. The idea brought together the best of both worlds - a match, as the saying goes, made in heaven.

Read more about DITA for Enterprise Business Documents in this standards proposal by Michael Boses and Ann Rockley.

Just as nature abhors as vacuum, so does the Web. Enterprising entrepreneurs step in to fill service gaps every day. Sometimes they do this to help themselves or a family member - eBay and Flickr come to mind as “sure, honey” ventures gone wild, sometimes as a way to help non-profits get going on the Web, such as Charity Village or GiftTool, and sometimes simply as a business.

So when Scott Abel launched a community section on The Content Wrangler website, he filled a vacuum in the natural world of content producers. Based on a FaceBook model, but without the annoyances of distractions of dubious quality, content professionals can congregate and connect based on any commonality they choose, whether by practice area, geographic area, topic, software type, technical standard - whatever participants find useful.

What Scott understood is the need for participants to be self-determining, and move away from the gatekeeper model used by organizations before the Web 2.0 model became widely adopted. By allowing the professionals to shape their own communities, and choose to join (or leave) at will, the dynamic nature of conversation matches today’s pace of life. An added benefit is the cross-pollination of ideas that takes place when communities of practice spring up that attract topic-based specialists from multiple areas. While these people may belong to their respective professional associations, they come together in the communities as a way to talk to each other, outside of the gated walls created by their associations. In these cross-disciplinary communities, they can get wider exposure to their practice areas.
Scott Abel will share his perspectives on blogs and technical communication at Documentation and Training West.

What goes into designing the user experience (UX) of a product is a complex set of factors that are comprised of architecture—product architecture for physical goods; information architecture for interfaces—human factors, ergonomics, interaction design, and usability. All of these aspects work together in a way that ensure the user has enough signals and information about a product’s status, situation, and progress; these must be readily and easily discernible enough that the user is able to use a product, complete a task, ascertain danger—possibly do all of the aforementioned tasks simultaneously—without the risk of interruption or failure. UX is part art, part science, and critical to proper use.

UX Matters magazine is a valuable resource for those who want to further their understanding of the user experience field. The topics cover interaction design, industrial design, information architecture, visual design, brand experience, and UX for new technologies. DocTrain Life Sciences speaker, Joe Sokohl, demonstrates the interplay of the various aspects of user experience in the January issue of UX Matters. Read his article, Motorcycle UX: Riding in the Fast Lane for an interesting view of the usability of motorcycle dashboards and controls.

Knowing how to enumerate the benefits of modular content and knowing how to go about implementing a single-sourcing project are two very different kettle of fish. As with any project that involves a technology component, there are multiple ways to handle each aspect. Each organization has different needs, and so will want to derive different benefits from single-sourcing their content. There are different methods of single-sourcing content, which will require different technologies.

Understanding the technologies and their implications is critical, as the pitfalls of going down the wrong path may prevent an organization from deriving the very benefits they set out to achieve.

Learn more about single sourcing implementations, and get the skinny on how-to tips and cautions in this podcast interview with trainer and consultant Neil Perlin.

Scott Nesbitt likes to write. In addition to writing the technical stuff that many of us do for a living, he also likes to turn his hand to other types of writing. He writes technology articles for publication—what better way to capitalize on all those high-tech toys—as well as marketing copy, journalistic writing, and travel articles. So it comes as no surprise when he describes himself as a bit of a digital bedouin.

The idea of traveling between coffee shops, setting up a laptop, and tapping into the free wifi is an acquired taste, but it suits his lifestyle. Balancing work and family, Scott finds his down time—if you can call extra writing time “down time”—where he can. He has even been known to crack open his laptop in a certain pub he likes to frequent, run by a bloke from New Zealand.

What are Scott’s rules for the life of digital roaming? Only a few, it seems. First, there must be free wireless nearby—if not in the immediate coffee shop, then at the establishment next door. Second, stay within the three-beverage rule. Buying beverages is essentially your way of renting a space, so don’t monopolize the table. Give the coffee shop a chance to fill the table and make some money. And third, don’t succumb when you’re with family—even when your Blackberry pings. Living the digital bedouin lifestyle makes it harder to keep work separate from family life, so it’s important to make that effort.

Given Scott’s portability, it’s no wonder that his preference is for online tools, such as Basecamp for project management. After all, could a digital bedouin endorse anything else?

Ever since the Cluetrain Manifesto set out new ground rules for corporate relations with their customers, Tom Johnson has been watching the results play out in the public spaces of corporate websites. Since the publication of Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Ways Businesses Talk with Customers, which advocates that organizations should strip away the layers of marketing-speak that consumers find irritating and phony, and lay their feelings bare between themselves and their customers, Tom has been waiting for companies to peel down and get some full frontal conversations going.

Tom does his own rounds—a type of organizational voyeurism through the blogosphere where he looks for honest conversations between corporate America and their constituencies. He points out the various types of blogging personalities that he’s come across so far.

First, there’s the pseudo-nude; that’s the product manager claiming to have a naked conversation, but in reality, they’re wearing a flesh-colored body stocking of sales chat that covers them from neck to knees. They also rarely respond to questions in blog comments because their blog is actually a pseudo-conversation meant to push out product information.

Then, there’s the streaker; that’s the blogger who talks about everything and anything in three-sentence posts. They produce a lot of posts about nothing in particular, so you see their naked conversations for about three seconds at a time, and then they’re gone. They’re entertaining, but don’t necessarily add a lot of value.

Finally, there’s the naturalist; they’re not only “naked conversationalists,” they own the campground! That’s the blogger who would connect to you in person the same way they connect on their blog: with sincerity and integrity. The idea of being honest and open isn’t frightening, and the idea of being human, with all our foibles, is refreshing. There is a certain thoughtful elegance to that stance, a kind of Michelangelo’s David - and of course, that’s a sculpture that would never have worked had David been wearing a suit.

If Maxwell Hoffmann were to be given a tagline, it would be, “I’ve seen the future, and we’ve already been there.” The trends are iterative - amplified, but definitely repetitive. Don’t misunderstand him - Maxwell thinks it’s an exciting time to be alive. In fact, he is excited about life in general. He’s a man with a vision, and listening to him connect the dots is akin to releasing the ball in a pinball machine and watching it ricochet back and forth, speeding between topics.

When DocTrain caught up with Maxwell at Welocalize, he talked about how far technology had come since the 1980s, when he stumbled into enterprise and desktop publishing from digital typesetting. After all, in the 1980s, Unicode hadn’t even been invented. Who ever thought they would be doing business with Russia or China, let alone have team members in India? Who would have anticipated the complexities of delivering multilingual content for global consumption, in multiple channels, in multiple media?  Many years with ISO-9001 certified, translation vendors have given Maxwell a front line perspective on successful localization and communication in our global economy.

Now, Maxwell feels that technology isn’t changing fast enough to keep up with ever accelerating globalization. Part of that, he feels, is product drag due to slow adoption by a reluctant market, a market managed by a generation slowing down when it comes to accepting inevitable “set-up” costs. Maxwell recognizes that he may not be the norm for his generation, and has had to “reinvent” himself to bring new perspectives to the executive suite.

When pressed for an example, Maxwell points to uncovering instances of Product Abuse. Much as substance abuse happens when one or two glasses of wine at dinner turn to eight or nine, Product Abuse happens when the amount of information being processed exceeds the limits of a product’s design. For instance, office productivity word processing gets pushed to unreasonable limits for, say, long technical documents and online help. Instead of dealing with the core problem and adopting the appropriate technology, product abusers hang onto their comfort product for dear life and abuse the heck out of it. They refuse to give up that product until a project crash-and-burn—an intervention of sorts—finally makes them see that there is a better way.

Unfortunately, such misguided product abuse can lead to a significant amount of unnecessary billables in localization projects. Having split his professional career evenly between working for software vendors and being an actual customer in production, Maxwell feels unbiased in recommending the right tool or process to match a customer’s needs in the multilingual arena. And the choices are many.

If you’re interested in global product delivery, make sure to attend Maxwell’s presentation Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody: How To Create and Manage Content Assets for a Global Audience at Documentation and Training West.

Joe Gollner likes solving puzzles. In fact, he often draws on his passion for history and philosophy to help him with the paradigms for modern-day conundrums. “That’s probably why I work so much,” admits Joe, “though it doesn’t feel like work to me. I love to figure out things that initially baffle me.”

And baffling situations seem to be thrown Joe’s way on a regular basis. The latest puzzle he’s trying to solve is how to support authors who work in complex authoring environments. How do you raise their success rates when they have to use complex publication standards, such as S1000D?

For example, an author could be faced with a situation where they are merrily authoring a topic and need to choose some attributes. Technically, they could choose that attribute from a thousand valid attributes. Well, except that the editing “tool du jour” would probably crash, just trying to display all those attributes. And except that in any given situation, probably 997 of that thousand attributes wouldn’t make any sense to choose. So the puzzle becomes: how do you build in the logic to show only the applicable attributes to the author? How do you get the attributes to show only when they are applicable for that topic?

That became Joe’s latest conundrum. How does one describe very sophisticated, very exacting rules in a way that can be applied? And how does one share the rules with authors so that they can implement it correctly? Joe is pleased to report that he and his colleagues at Stilo have broken the code, so to speak, and are launching a product that serves up, on the fly, the portion of the prohibitive number of rules and regulations that govern the actions an author can - or cannot - take. Rather than thumb through hundreds of pages of authoring regulations, authors can have the appropriate regulations served up as just-in-time support material.

Joe’s pleasure at solving this dilemma is apparent, even over the telephone. His interest, though, isn’t satisfying because of the technological solution; it’s because it solves a user experience problem and a business problem. “Content is so important that we can no longer afford to treat it like a cottage industry,” says Joe. “Corporations are starting to realize that we need to apply the same care and discipline to them as we do with the rest of our database assets.”

Other successful puzzles that Joe has solved involve the careful dismantling of entrenched systems in order to replace them with newer, nimbler ones. In organizations that had sound authoring and editing practices in place, their inertia actually helped them leapfrog over an entire era of desktop publishing and land squarely in the content management space, allowing them to capitalize on their existing practices.

In one memorable case, a military client was taken from stone age to space age in a single shot, as mountains of old data was converted into sophisticated XML content and poured into a content management system. Ironically, the old Wang word processors - used until last year for word processing - were so heavy that the organization could not justify the cost of moving them out of the building, so they were converted, as well, into rather unattractive but solid plant stands.

A case study of Implementing Content Technologies on an Enterprise Scale can be found online, as can his provocative presentation slides on Web 2.0 and the End of DITA made earlier in 2008 in Vancouver.

Don’t miss Joe’s half-day workshop, Content Engineering, and his keynote presentations XML in the Wilderness at Documentation and Training West.

What makes Berry Braster tick is language, although he wouldn’t quite say it that way. Berry would probably point out that, as a lover of language, the word “tick” is a great word to use amongst friends, but really shouldn’t be used in an article for international consumption. In fact, he would probably add that the term shouldn’t used about a fellow who makes his living from making certain that language is clear to audiences around the world.

Nevertheless, every topic Berry opens will somehow discuss the use of language because, after all, language is everywhere. Berry’s fascination with it stems from a childhood filled with many languages. In his native Holland, and particularly from the center of Holland where he grew up, he points out that traveling two hours in any direction lands you in a different country: Belgium, France, Germany, or the UK. That environment makes for a culture where multilingualism is the norm, to be able to converse with those around you, participate in entertainment, and to understand the simple things such as signage.

It’s very different than where Berry currently lives in Texas, where he can drive for eight hours and still be in Texas. Yet even then, Berry finds delight in the regional dialects, pointing to language differences such as one his favorites: “fixing to do something.” For him, cultural slang is what brings a language alive. He and his Irish-American friends play a language game that compares cultural sayings. For example, the Dutch “storm in a water glass” is the Irish “storm in a teacup” which is the American “tempest in a teacup.”

But Berry also recognizes that combining the increase in cultural slang with an increase in global business could put us on a cultural collision course. As business discourse becomes peppered with sports metaphors such as “can you ballpark it for me,” or “throw numbers at the wall,” or “let’s knock it out of the park,” the risk of confusing or, worse, alienating the person on the other end of the conversation increases. As certain phenomena go global, phrases such as “go google it” may transcend cultures, but those examples continue to be relatively rare.

Does Berry turn off of his language monitor when he leaves the office? No, and admits that he doesn’t want to. For all that frustrates Berry about sloppy use of language, there is far more out there that fascinates and amuses him about it, enough to last him a lifetime.

Berry offers free booklets demonstrating how to simultaneously improve the quality of documentation and save costs, which can be ordered from the Tedopres website.

Alan Houser doesn’t believe in magic—at least not when it comes to XML. He thinks the fact that airplanes can stay up in the air is magic, but what makes XML an effective technology for structuring content has more to do with foresight, planning, and execution than sleight-of-hand. However, Alan does make his living helping organizations to improve their publishing processes, and much of his work involves XML. He cautions companies to not get caught up in the XML hoopla—XML is only a tool, and just as you shouldn’t hammer a nail with a screwdriver, you shouldn’t try to implement an XML solution unless it actually meets a company’s publishing
requirements.

The enticing image of XML as a magical solution to every company’s publishing needs is a bubble Alan frequently has to burst as an electronic publishing consultant. He notes that while most companies are trying to achieve similar goals, such as improving publishing flexibility, and efficiency, the tools and processes with which companies can achieve these goals varies widely.

Alan enjoys the challenge of the range of business problems that customers present to him. Equally challenging is implementing solutions in different corporate cultures with different resources, constraints, and business requirements. Alan eschews “magical” solutions to real-world publishing challenges, nonetheless, his customers have come to rely upon his technical wizardry. His wizardry is actually just plain hard work, but there is no need to burst that bubble.

Alan is teaching two half-day workshops—Making DITA Work For Your Data and DITA Authoring and Publishing With XMetaL—and one 60 minute presentation, Using DITA for Online help at Documentation and Training West.

If you’re interested in learning about the Adobe Technical Communication Suite (Acrobat, FrameMaker, RoboHelp and Captivate), check out these video tutorials, narrated by RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist, Adobe Systems:

• Part One - Getting Started with the Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Part Two - Getting Started with the Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Part Three - Getting Started with the Adobe Technical Communication Suite

RJ will be presenting the opening keynote session, Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication on May 7 at the Documentation and Training West Conference in Vancouver, BC. 

Whether it’s flamenco dancing, fine food, or content management, when Pamela Kostur gets passionate about something, it’s readily apparent. In addition to being an accomplished chef, Pamela is also an avid flamenco dancer, studying and performing with the Arte Flamenco school in Toronto.
Pamela’s passion is clear in her work, as well. After all, she muses, how did the “content” in content management get left out of the loop? If the purpose is to manage content, why do so many projects focus on the technology around the content, and not on the content itself? Anyone who has heard Pamela speak is very clear on where she stands on that issue, and her white paper, Whose Content Is It Anyways?: An Argument for Modular Writing articulates her views with eloquence.

She absolutely loves working with content, particularly when content is being restructured as part of a content management implementation. She loves cleaning it up, rewriting it, re-structuring it, and creating guidelines so that others can continue to write the content consistently. Pamela always begins with analysis and finds that in most cases, similar types of documents and information products are written inconsistently. The first task is to bring structure to the general chaos, defining structures for similar types of documents and information products, and defining writing guidelines to support those structures. Kostur explains that structure still doesn’t tell authors how to write the content that goes into the structure. That’s where the writing guidelines come in. Whether starting from scratch or working with existing content, defining the structure - and how to write to the structure - are critical. It’s a lot like choreography, she says. She’s getting the content ready to dance on the stage of the World Wide Web, or wherever else it may be asked to perform.

Don’t miss Pamela’s presentation, Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models, and her half-day workshop, Writing For Reuse: Learning to Write Modular Content for Reuse at Documentation and Training West 2008. 

After the acquisition of Idiom by SDL, across Systems, a leading provider of corporate translation management solutions, remains the only translation technology provider whose core business is software development. across offers an independent technology without translation and localization services, making it the best choice for corporations of all sizes, the company says, as well as for language service providers.

The across Language Server is a central platform for corporate language resources and translation processes. Besides offering translation memory and a terminology system, it also includes powerful project management and workflow controls. Its distinguishing feature is its ability to enable customers, agencies and translators to seamlessly work with the same data. Open interfaces enable the seamless integration of corresponding systems such as Content Management Systems (CMS) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions.

As globalization has grown, so has the demand for multilingual content. This has spurred the development of an industry of language services and translation technologies. The acquisition of Idiom by SDL further signals the trend of big service providers trying to retain their customers by means of a proprietary technology.

across, which is a spin-off of renowned Nero AG with more than 240 million users worldwide, has taken a different approach by offering an independent, highly integrated, industry-demand-oriented solution. With its Language Server across introduced the linguistic supply chain technology, which unites all the work steps, internal and external team members and corresponding systems along the translation process in a single working environment.

Niko Henschen, CEO of across, says, “International business has become too important to allow the industry to make it dependent on a single service provider. We have acquired significant market share in a very short time with our independent technology. For example we have more than 20 percent of the market in Europe, and have experienced significant growth in North America with the same strategy. The acquisition of Idiom by SDL will further accelerate our worldwide growth.”

Quark Announces Dynamic Publishing Solution: Fills Much Needed Gaps in End-to-End Publishing Void

Quark, widely known for its desktop publishing tools, announced a major change of direction for the firm and its products. It’s a most exciting announcement, the first that attempts to tackle all of the various challenges organizations face as they attempt to create, manage, publish and deliver dynamic content.

What Did Quark Announce, Exactly?
It’s called the Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution, “publishing software that combines flexible layout with automated publishing to deliver accurate, relevant, and attractive communications across multiple types of media, including print, the Web, and mobile and electronic devices.” The solution includes content creation, management, and delivery tools from both Quark and its new partners: In.vision Research Xpress Author for Microsoft Word (to provide content creators with an easy-to-use XML authoring environment) and Alfresco CMS (open source enterprise content management solution). Negotiations are in the works with an email delivery service, among others.

Out of the gates the company will target two target audiences, each with a big need for dynamic publishing: marketing communication and professional publishing firms.

Most content management solutions aim to solve the “management” problems associated with content. Seldom do they tackle challenges associated with authoring (some add a WYSIWYG XML editor, but seldom are these tools adequate for all content creators in an enterprise, especially non-technical writers and creators of creative materials for marketing and sales) nor content delivery (most don’t even connect to an email service provider, despite email being the number one content delivery mechanism today). And, they usually avoid the messy issues associated with process improvements altogether. The Quark Dynamic Publishing Solutions aims to change all that. And, they’re on to something.

Use Case: Marketing
Marketing professionals are one of the first target audiences for the new Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution. As most content professionals are aware, marketing communication challenges are often the same as most others in an enterprise: getting the right information to the right people at the right time in the right format and and in the right language. But, most generic processes and tools fail to address the actual needs of marketing. They are often slow and inefficient and create unnecessary go-to-market delays. Quark does a good job of explaining the challenges faced by marketers and how their new solution addresses those issues. There’s a whitepaper and an article on return on investment available for those interested in learning even more.

The partnership with In.vision Research (makers of Xpress Author for Microsoft Word) is a smart move because it doesn’t try to force everyone in the world to create content using a Quark authoring tool. Instead, it acknowledges, much like the Irish Government did, that when you want to get people to create XML content, it’s best to provide them with a familiar authoring environment and minimize the negative impacts changing authoring tools can introduce.

Learn more about dynamic publishing.

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Content consistency is long been the brass ring of quality for technical communication departments, and is starting to be recognized as an important part of an overall content strategy throughout the enterprise. Because so much content is customer facing, or translated and distributed in multiple languages, re-used in ways that could change meaning in critical ways, or affect the organization’s brand, the value of quality and consistency needs to be measured.

Now it can be measured. acrolinx has developed acrocheck, the only product of its kind using meaning-based, natural language processing software to provide quality assurance support by checking terminology, style, and grammar for consistency. By searching large bodies of content, from website content to technical manuals to translation memories to software UI strings, acrocheck generally discovers 15% to 25% redundancy, often times more. For companies translating into multiple languages, this means a large impact on translation dollars.

In late 2007, acrolinx launched the beta of a module that supports intelligent re-use of content through a micro-clustering process developed to wring even more efficiency and consistency out of an organization’s content. The software analyzes content at the phrase and sentence levels to look for similar content, then clusters the content together and generates a report showing the clusters, to allow a human to make the final decision about what content variants should be considered redundant and which need to stay.

During the three months of the beta period, the results have ranged from a mere two ways of expressing a concept to over 200 ways. The software uncovered, in one case, that the simple phrase “Turn the switch to the Run position” had many variations within the same organization, from “Turn switch to Run” to “Switch to the Run position” - and 127 other variations! In another example, analyzing GUI strings from a suite of enterprise software found 30 variations on “see your system administrator” and the error message “enter an end date that is later than the start date.” Given that the text was translated into several languages, the company soon realized how much could be gained by standardizing their vocabulary.

An important aspect of the process is that the software is the support system for the user, who never loses control of the content. Once of the content has been clustered and analyzed for best fit - this is done by comparing the style, terminology, and grammatical rules to other content in the style guide - the user is presented with correction options. Once the initial pass is done, the software can continue supporting users on a regular basis, presenting them with options as they create text. Rather than the writer going to the company style guide to look up the official term, phrase, or product name, the style guide comes to the writer.

Kent Taylor, the General Manager of acrolinx North America, notes with interest that the market for acrocheck started with companies wanting to improve efficiencies around translation costs for technical publications by cleaning up the source content. While that continues to be a strong part of their business, Taylor sees an interesting shift to terminology management and re-use. Companies with large volumes of content are starting to see the value of consistency in corporate image: how does their marketing material describe the company, how to enforce standard presentation of logos, tag lines, brand promotion, and so on. Having style guides and trademark rules are fine, but with a fast-paced, geographically-dispersed team, organizations are looking for any reinforcements they can get. Not only does acrocheck provide assisted authoring, it also produces quality control metrics to show where the problems are and where to concentrate quality improvement efforts, easing the management overhead to discover and calculate this.

Learn more about Acrolinx and its flagship product, acrocheck, in the Exhibition Hall at DocTrain West.

Kent Taylor will also present on the topic of Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse.

ITtoolbox has introduced its new Vendor Research Directory. This interactive online directory for the information technology industry is the first resource of its kind to marry user-generated content with information from technology vendors to create a comprehensive and objective tool for evaluating IT purchasing decisions.

Test drive it today!

In this interview with The Content Wrangler, Noz Urbina, Mekon Ltd., talks about the current state of technical communication in the UK, the types of projects he and his co-workers find themselves leading, and issues impacting successful tech comm projects.

“I spend a lot of time telling people what they can’t actually achieve within their budget,” Urbina says, “despite what a software vendor might have told them, and keeping their enthusiasm up for all the great things that they can still accomplish if they’re organized, pick their battles wisely, and scope their phases properly. Failing to set up and to communicate the right scope and project outline are the things I’ve seen kill the most projects over the years.”

Read the interview

Is your company going global? Already global? Are the costs of translating required documents and website content going ballistic? You’re not alone—the accelerating pace of globalization and the high (and often unbudgeted) cost of translation impacts more companies and their information development operations every day.

In Investment in Quality Pays Huge Dividends (PDF), Kent Taylor of acrolinx explores how investments in content quality management can help organizations improve their content and make it less expensive to produce.

Don’t miss Kent’s presentation, Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assited Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse, May 7 at Documentation and Training West, Vancouver, BC.

By Tom Johnson, I’d Rather Be Writing

Interviewing experts is one of the easiest and most practical ways to generate material for your podcast. Although many people think the difficult part of interview podcasting is the audio setup and production, actually pulling off a good interview requires more art and skill. I know I’m not the best interviewer, but I’ve learned at least 10 tips from the 60+ interviews I’ve conducted for my Tech Writer Voices podcast.

1. Do research beforehand—Research is the single most important preparation you can do for an interview. If you’re familiar with the subject, you’ll be able to naturally follow up the interviewee’s answers with relevant questions. You’ll have an informed starting point that will lead to a more natural exchange about the topic.

Neal Conan, host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, spoke to the Poynter Institute on interviewing. He said:

“The most important preparation [for interviewing] I’ve found is to read all the time. We need to be information sharks; either we’re moving and feeding, or we’re dying.”

2. Ask questions based on the interviewee’s responses—The best interviews resemble natural conversations. If you watch Jay Leno interview his guests, it doesn’t appear as if he has prepared a script of questions or practiced with the interviewee. In fact, it doesn’t even look like an interview — it looks like a spontaneous and natural conversation.

Jim Short, a seasoned reporter, stresses the importance of this type of free-form interview:

“If there is an ‘art’ to the interview, mine is free-form. I can’t remember how often, in more than 30 years of reporting, I’ve gone into an interview with one idea or plan in mind, only to come away with something entirely different — and usually more entertaining.

That’s probably my number one rule. Let the interview write the story instead of doing the interview to support your own theory or viewpoint. Obviously, it’s necessary to have a story idea as a jumping-off point, but that shouldn’t be so restrictive that the finished story has an unwarranted slant or offers an inadequate picture of the subject.

One way to create a free-form interview is to ask questions based on the interviewee’s responses. Exchanges built from answers usually lead to more natural conversations. This will help you move in a direction of discovery rather than proceeding through a list of pre-written questions (which can be stiff).

Joe Hamlin, another journalist, also stresses the same free-form technique when interviewing. He says,

“Unless you have an agenda, have three to four questions prepared to get things rolling. Then follow where the subject wants to take you.”

Think of the list of questions you’ve prepared as one possible route through a city. It may not be the best route to take, and there are dozens of different roads to get to your destination. Take the route that attracts you the most. If you get lost, fall back on your original map.

3. Find people who have something to say—I learned a lot when I interviewed 20 people at the STC Conference in Minneapolis last year: people who don’t have much to say don’t say much. An amazing revelation, I know. But I’ve always held the idea that everyone is interesting, everyone has a story to tell — you just have to find out what it is.

Well, sort of. Everyone may have an interesting story inside, but can you dig it out in 5 minutes? Will they tell it (assuming they know what it is)? I’m still pursuing that ideal, but in the meantime, I look for people who are experts on a topic. Usually they’ve written an article, or presented, or are forum moderators, or hold some leadership position. When you ask them questions, they have something to say. It makes the interview go a lot easier.

I’ve noticed that in Anna Farmery’s The Engaging Brand podcast, she almost invariably finds interviewees who are book authors. And she reads their books prior to interviewing them.

Anna will pick out interesting quotes her and use them as prompts to initiate conversation. She’s an informed interviewer, but her guests are also informed experts on the topics. With that combination, good content flows naturally.

4. Pick topics you’re interested in learning about—I’m selfish when it comes to topics for my podcast. At least every week someone recommends a topic for the podcast, but if I’m not interested in the subject, I never get around to scheduling it. I use the podcast to learn and interact, and I’m assuming others are like me.

Some topics just don’t excite me —project management, networking, e-learning content management systems. Ouch, you say. Well, those are all interesting topics I’m sure, but right now I’m not focused on any of those things, so I’d rather not go through the hassle of scheduling someone to interview, and then the tedium of processing the audio recording.

I don’t try to find podcasts that are interesting to my audience — I’m trying to find podcasts that are interesting to me. My audience will naturally follow. That’s the cool thing about podcasts — you can tap into a niche audience because the globe is your soundboard.

Doug Kaye, founder of IT Conversations, explains that all content is valuable to someone, even a podcast on the school board of Kuala Lumpur. Whatever your topic, you’ll attract an audience of listeners somewhere.

5. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions—Although I shouldn’t, sometimes I refrain from asking a certain question because it might make the person feel uncomfortable. I suspect he or she will regret coming on the podcast. This stems from some kind of indoctrinated politeness. However, it’s bad interviewing practice.

You’ll notice that my interview with RJ was pretty tame. I left out some of the big questions. Part of the reason was that the podcast was sponsored by Adobe. But I’ve found that when I listen to podcasts, I want the interviewer to ask the hard questions.

Ask the questions you want to ask. Your listeners want to hear them, you do too, and most likely the interviewee has the best responses for them. One interview where I did ask the hard questions was with Anne Gentle on wikis. To my surprise, she didn’t choke or stumble on the answers.

If you do have tough questions, save them for the second half of the interview.

6. Let the interviewee speak most of the time—Even if you have a lot of theories and ideas about the topic, remember that you’re interviewing someone. As I mentioned previously, I come to the interview to learn, to absorb the other’s knowledge. If I’m constantly explaining my own viewpoint and perspective, I might as well deliver a monologue instead. A good rule of thumb is to let the interviewee speak at least 75% of the time.

Actually, when I find myself commenting a lot in the interview, I get the impression that the interviewee has absolutely no interest in what I’m saying. I’m stealing his or her spotlight. I hear a silent voice in my head projected from the interviewee — “Why’d you invite me on the podcast if you just wanted to lecture me.” This shuts me up.

7. Give the interviewee 10 questions to prepare, but don’t limit yourself to those questions, nor the order—I find that people are more agreeable to a podcast if you give them a list of 10 questions to get started. It’s easy for me because I can think of 10 questions about almost every subject. And it’s easy for the interviewee because they have a starting point to prepare. In fact, giving them questions often piques their interest in doing the podcast.

Based on the person’s answers, you may decide to ask follow-up questions that aren’t on the list (the free-form method described in tip 2 above), or you may ask the questions in the order most relevant to their answers.

The 10 question trick also doesn’t intimidate the interviewee. If you were to give someone 25 hard-to-answer questions for the podcast, they may back out before the interview or continually postpone it.

8. Avoid commenting on their answers—After the interviewee finishes responding, avoid making empty comments on their responses. Don’t say things like “That’s great,” or “Exactly, so true” or “That’s nice.” Although this may sound innocent in writing, in an interview it can sound stiff. You don’t have to follow up their responses with anything, actually. Just move on to the next question. Or move into your next question using a segue from their response.

9. If interviewing in person, don’t let the interviewee hold the microphone—Rookie mistake: never let the interviewee hold the microphone. They’ll move it around as they gesticulate. If you listened to my last podcast with Paul Pehrson, You’ll notice I made two mistakes. First, I held the mic closer to my mouth than his. The Shure SM58 creates a great deep sound when you speak into it one inch away from your mouth. No interviewee lets you do that, unfortunately. Most people have a one-foot safe space with the microphone. Violate it and they move back. The trick is to match the same one-foot distance when you speak into the mic as well — otherwise the audio will be unbalanced.

Second, hold the microphone really still. Don’t try to inch it closer to the interviewee, hoping to get better sound. The mic hears every miniscule sound your moving hand makes, and embeds it permanently within the audio recording.

I have a lot of post-production tricks that I do to level and balance the sound, but I’ll save that for another post.

10. Keep everything informal—As a final note, I hear of some people requiring interviewees to sign contracts related to copyright of their material. For example, Joseph Humbert from the East Bay STC chapter wrote an article in the Dec 07 issue of Tieline describing the need for a written contract:

Besides the hardware and software needed to produce a podcast, we knew we needed a written agreement or contract for both parties—the chapter and the speaker—to sign. Initially, we set a time limit of one year and provided that no money was to be exchanged for the podcast rights.

I think that’s ridiculous. I do everything on a virtual handshake. There’s no money involved, and if the person ever wants me to retract a podcast, I’d simply do it.

I have edited out parts of a podcast before (insignificant sections based on people’s obsession with sounding right about things). If you whip out a legal contract, it will probably frighten people away. I have more than 80 podcasts on my site and I’ve never had anyone complain about copyright or legal matters.

Conclusion
I’m interested to hear your tips. Am I doing anything radically different from you? Do you have any advice for me? Let me know.

On a closing note, if you’re nervous about the interview, remember that it’s fun to be interviewed. Sure people may feel jittery at first, and postpone or reschedule the date, but if you’ve ever been interviewed before, it’s an exhilarating feeling. It makes you feel important, an expert. It makes you feel like the whole world is listening to you. It’s an experience people never forget. (Except Thom Haller, who I interviewed once for 45 min, met him at a conference several months later, and learned he had no recollection of me.)

Additional Resources
If you want to learn more about interviewing, I recommend that you read the Neal Conan essay, The Art of the Interview, which I quoted earlier. It’s an excellent read from a veteran interviewer.

Tom Johnson at Documentation and Training West 2008
Tom joins moderator Anne Gentle for Meet the Bloggers: Not Nearly as Disasterously Funny as the Movie, a lively panel discussion with some of the technical communication industry’s most influential and outspoken bloggers.

If you’ve ever been writing in a coffee shop or collaborating in a meeting with subject matter experts, chances are you’ve needed your beloved Chicago Manual of Style (or other style guide) and found yourself without it. Most likely because it was sitting on the shelf back in your office. Many a technical communications professional has felt the cool sweat of anxiety upon this realization. Nine hundred and fifty-six hard-bound pages aren’t exactly portable, after all. Well, take a few nice deep breaths and relax. Scriptorium Publishing has a handy on-line style guide you can log on to from anywhere.

Your company may have its own guide, in which case you should be using it, but many shops haven’t yet had the time or resources to develop one. No worries, this one can help you in a pinch when you need to know how to use affect versus effect on those brain fade days that everyone has. Or you can adopt this guide as your own to assure everyone at your company is using a consistent style.

The guide is divided into two sections:

• Mechanics and Usage--useful for solving those annoying en dash/em dash dilemmas
• Word Usage--for those times when you aren’t sure if you should use fewer or less.

The guide uses the “rules” outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style, so be cautioned, your colleagues who went to journalism school will want to argue the use of serial commas presented here, but you can always remind them that no one charges for typesetting by the character these days.

Scriptorium is a Silver Sponsor of DocTrain West .

About Scriptorium

Scriptorium Publishing provides support for publishing professionals: technical writers and other content creators. We develop complex publishing systems and provide hands-on training for XML, FrameMaker, XSL, InDesign, Photoshop, and more.

By Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler.com

Note: In the Spring of 2007 I was invited to Dublin to learn how the government uses technology to create its laws and regulations, and to see, up-close-and-personal, how government ministers were able to move 6,500 civil servants from traditional document creation processes to structured XML authoring, something many of the most advanced technical publications