This morning, I was among the many who received an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. He was responding to criticisms that Netflix “lacked respect and humility in the way [the company] announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes.”
Originally published in tcworld e-magazine, July 2011
In Europe before the 1450s, books were precious, rare objects and were usually copied by hand over a period of months or years. Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press changed the economics of information distribution.
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the results of Scriptorium’s 2011 survey on structured authoring. Topics include adoption rates, tools, implementation costs, lessons learned, and much more.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides an XML architecture for technical communication. Although implementing DITA is likely to be faster and easier than building your own XML architecture from the ground up, DITA is not suitable for everyone.
Scriptorium hosts Tristan Bishop of Symantec as he discusses what technical writers need to do to keep up with transforming communication methods and rapid advances in global, mobile, and social dialog.
Technical communication and technical support should be allies. After all, tech support needs the information that tech comm produces. Tech comm often has only limited customer contact; tech support has oodles of daily customer contact.
And yet, there is a common organizational pattern where tech comm and tech support are in conflict.
Social media has transformed the work of technical communicators, but we’re far from alone in feeling its impact:
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how to calculate the return on investment of an XML/DITA implementation for technical content.
If you are considering XML and DITA, but are trying to figure out whether you can justify the cost and effort, this session is for you.
Over the weekend, I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen since the mid-term elections here in the US. While hashing out what the election results meant, my friend said that he felt that history would be kinder to the accomplishments of Congress than the electorate was.
Let me qualify (heavily): this is, seriously, a rant.
I started at Scriptorium in June (2010), and since then I’ve learned more than I did in my entire time in the tech comm MS program I was enrolled in. And what’s more, the knowledge I’ve gained here has been useful.
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium offers an overview of content strategy analysis with an eye toward the implications and business case for your organization.
In this webcast, Simon Bate leads viewers through the key steps in using XSL (extensible stylesheet language) to perform XML-to-XML conversions, a process that differs from more traditional XML-to-PDF and XML-to-HTML conversions.
This article was originally published in STC Intercom in September/October of 2010.
“Anyone can write.” How many times have you heard that tired cliché? And how did it ascend to a cliché? It’s pretty clear to me that most people are terrible writers. When someone says, “Anyone can write,” they actually mean, “Our writing standards are so low that anyone can meet them.”
Last month marked my 20th year working in technical communication. (Please send all congratulatory pastries and chocolates to Scriptorium’s offices. Thank you!)
By default, managers and executives see technical communication as a cost center, similar to a QA department or a Human Resources group.
“Necessary evil” is not where you want to be for great career success.
Anne Gentle, in the post Writing Engaging Technical Documentation, says this:
I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.”
“She’s stupid.”
That’s what a shopper recently said about a coworker’s daughter, who is working a part-time retail job.
Scriptorium hosts Tristan Bishop of Symantec as he muses on technical communicators’ evolving roles.
Content is like food. At its best, it’s a carefully choreographed experience, like dining at a fine restaurant.
My life in technical communication would be much easier if we all subscribed to these rules:
When you’re considering an overhaul of your publishing workflow, you may find yourself becoming a metaphorical version of Van Helsing, the vampire-hunting character from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and the many, many movies based on the Dracula story). You need to find all the efficiency-draining aspects of your current process and eliminate them.
In early 2009, Scriptorium Publishing conducted a survey to measure how and why technical communicators are adopting structured authoring.
Here’s a movie montage I found on YouTube featuring scenes of characters either offering or reading procedures:
Enjoy!
