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Tech Writer Voices: Podcasts on Technical Writing
 Technical Communication Blog / Technical Writing Blog
Updated: 20 hours 57 min ago Podcast: Riding the Tide of Technical Communications ConsultingDownload MP3 Lyn Worthen presented to the STC Intermountain chapter tonight on running your own business as a technical communications consultant. She covers almost everything you need to know as a consultant, including rates, billing, contracts, marketing, taxes, business structures, hours, salary, tools, locations, niche services, portfolios, client communications, and more. Here’s her presentation description: Unlike the consistent schedule, workload, and wages of a 9-5 technical writing job, going it on your own as a consultant or contractor is a lot like riding the tide. Sometimes the tide is “in” and you have plenty of work to keep you happily tapping away on your keyboard; the projects are queuing up, the money is flowing, and all’s right with the world. Other times, the tide is “out” and you find yourself walking on a desolate beach, staring out at the horizon, waiting for your ship to come in — and, if you’re lucky, picking up the occasional small job still lurking in a hidden tidal pool; money is scarce, and as the siren song of Corporate America tempts you back into the relative stability of captured employment, you question the wisdom of continuing to go it alone. And then there are the “tsunamis,” those times when you have more work than one person should ever be expected to handle; yet in spite of the fact that you’re barely keeping your head above water, you’re reluctant to say “no” to any of it because you don’t know how high the floodwaters will rise or how long the drought that is sure to follow will last. About Lyn WorthenLyn Worthen’s company is Information Design Co: Technical Communications Consulting, based in Utah and serving local, national, and international clients. Lyn is a member of the STC, the Utah Women Tech Council (WTC), and National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). You can find out more about her through her Linkedin page. To contact Lyn, send her an email at lynw@xmission.com. Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Podcast: The Myth of Single SourcingDownload MP3 In his controversial post, The Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt explains: Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape. In other words, single sourcing your content across the enterprise is an idea that simply doesn’t work. I responded to the post and had a lively exchange in the comments, so I decided to interview Michael for a podcast. In this podcast I talk with Michael about single sourcing, collaborative authoring, mashups, help authoring trends, and other topics. You can follow Michael’s blog at Mashstream.com. (Note: We had a brief Skype issue at the start. The audio gets noticeably better at around the 5 minute mark. It’s actually a great example of the clarity that the double-ender recording technique provides instead of just using Skype to record.) Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Play Chess Online with ChessJamThe other week I visited my brother-in-law Sean in Tampa, Florida. Sean is an interactive web designer who creates everything from flash games for Disney to augmented reality applications for the Adobe marketplace. While I was there, he showed me his latest creation: ChessJam. Usually when I think of chess, I think of two people sitting around a small round table in moments of intense concentration, staring at the chessboard for hours as they contemplate their next sixteen moves. ChessJam really isn’t like that. ChessJam is an online, interactive game designed for community-driven web culture. I made a two-minute screencast showing how ChessJam works. You can watch the screencast at the top of this post or watch it in larger HD size on Youtube You don’t need anyone to play. You can just open ChessJam and see who else is in the virtual courtyard and wants to play. If no one is in the courtyard, you can play a computer bot. When the game opens, the chess board and pieces are in rich 3D graphics, with sounds that play at various times depending on your move. Here are most of the game’s sounds that I’ve compiled together here: ChessJam's 3D chess board and pieces The chess pieces slide smoothly along the board as you make your move. What’s cool is that if you’re a little rusty with chess, the board highlights the potential moves each piece can make. You can also observe other games in session. I know that brilliant chess players mentally calculate their next several moves. And sometimes people can spend hours looking at the chess board. This is where chess can start to feel like a game that never ends. What I like about ChessJam is that you can set time limits on the game. If you only want to play for 5 or 10 minutes, you set the timer and whoever is ahead when the clock ends, that person wins. Rooms to choose from in ChessJam As an application, ChessJam is built on Adobe Air, which means it’s neither an entirely local nor online application. It lives between the two worlds. You download the application and install it, but then the application runs online and pulls data from online. Right now ChessJam is free. You can download it now and start playing. This post was sponsored courtesy of HD Interactive. Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
What I’m Presenting on at the Dallas SummitAt the STC Summit in Dallas this year (May 2-5), I’ll be giving a presentation titled “Developing a Personal Voice in Audio.” I’m moving in the direction of screencasts, focusing on the audio component in this presentation. Here’s the presentation description: Narrated video tutorials — both scripted and spontaneous — are a powerful tool tech writers can employ to help users learn software. But the audio component of a video tutorial can be challenging. Both the audio processing and personal delivery pose challenges for tech writers, whose strength may be the written word rather than audio. Often the voice component of these video tutorials is outsourced to “voice talent.” But what do professionals with voice talent know that regular tech writers don’t? By imagining a situation, adding inflection, learning to breathe and pause, and integrating other voiceover techniques, you can develop a personable, friendly voice that engages users. You can also give your voice a deeper, richer sound by using the right microphone in the right acoustic environment and applying several post-processing techniques. People who attend the session will learn the following:
I’m actually working on about 25 Joomla screencasts at work right now. (Joomla is an amazing CMS, by the way.) Last month I created a guide for web administrators across the globe to build country websites, basically a simple version of LDS.org in their language. About a month after creating the guide, the PM said to me, hey, we’re wondering if you could do some videos too. Why the videos? Wasn’t the guide enough? No, because that’s not how the majority of people learn software. A software application is a visual experience — the buttons, the layout, colors, movement, the functionality. It makes sense that a visual learning mode (e.g., screencasts) would be the most helpful in learning a visual interface. I know that when I’m looking to learn a new program from scratch (not just looking up a specific information for an application I already know), video tutorials appeal to me. When I see, I understand. And videos are exploding all over the web — because videos appeal to others as well. We are visual learners, for the most part. There’s a lot to learn about screencasting. You could be a full-fledged sound engineer, videographer, voiceover artist, and interactive multimedia producer before you feel completely comfortable. Screencasts combine all of these elements into one experience. For the Dallas presentation, I’ve narrowed the scope considerably to focus only on voice. Even a dull screen can come alive with an engaging, warm, interesting voice. If you have any tips, tricks, resources, or other insight in developing a personal voice in audio, let me know. Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Embedding Videos into Madcap FlareOne of Flare’s shortcomings is the inability to easily embed video files. However, if you use the Camtasia Studio’s Express Show format as your video format (and you choose the SWF option), you can insert the video into Flare by inserting the video as if it were a picture. Here’s a two-minute screencast showing the processing for inserting a video into Flare. You can also put the video in a drop-down hotspot.
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Podcast about the Podcast PollDownload MP3 In this brief podcast, I discuss the results of the podcast poll that I published on my site earlier this week. I mostly wanted an opportunity to try out my new Behringer mixer/preamp, and the results of the poll served as perfect fodder for a podcast. In this 15 minutes of audio, I explain the direction that I plan to take my podcast based on the votes and feedback. Polls, surveys, and feedback are always a good thing. They help me understand not only what my audience values, but what I value too. Thanks for participating. A podcast about my podcast … Blog Sponsors Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Combining Cinema with ScreencastingHarry Miller is a multimedia enthusiast who brings his expertise with film and audio to the screencasting world at his job at Microsoft. The following three videos are some of the most creative, mesmerizing video tutorials on Visio I’ve ever seen.
These video tutorials don’t just teach you how to create various charts in Visio. They make you want to be as cool as Harrison Clarity is with Visio. More about Harry MillerBlog Sponsors Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Quick Poll on My Podcast TopicI’m rethinking the focus of my podcast, and I’d like to get your feedback. With each of the following poll questions, you can see the results immediately. If you have responses that don’t fit the yes or no answers, please use the comments field below the post. Thanks for the feedback. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Why Is It Important for Video Tutorials to Be User-Led?I recently spent 10 days in Florida visiting my family and giving a couple of presentations to the STC-Suncoast and STC-Orlando chapters on blogging. You can hardly take a family of kids to Florida without going to Disneyworld and Seaworld, so we did that as well. In case you’re unaware of the cost of theme parks, prices are enough to bring on a cold sweat and tremor. (Thanks to some friends, one park was free.) After we completed our four day theme park immersion (Seaworld x 2, Disneyworld, and Busch Gardens), we took life a little more slowly and went to the Fort DeSoto beach. While my kids were digging in sand and collecting seashells, I dared to ask whether they would rather spend a day at the beach or a day at Disneyworld. Their answer? Unanimously, they said the beach. I even asked them multiple times on different occasions. Always the same answer: the beach, Dad. We would rather go to the beach and collect seashells. The interesting question is why. Why do kids prefer the beach to Disneyworld? I think the answer is wrapped up in the phrase “child-led.” What child-led meansMy sister is a proponent of child-led parenting. I was first introduced to the idea when we went on a walk along a trail near Timpanogos Cave in Utah. Rather than pull her kids along or push them in a stroller, my sister preferred to follow her children, allowing them to explore what they wanted and go at their own pace. Given that she has a one and three year old, we moved at about .01 miles per hour. She later added that child-led parenting doesn’t mean you let your children do whatever they want without rules. Instead, her model of child-led parenting is to allow the children to make decisions and determine their course of action by themselves (to some extent). Some examples of non-child-led activities might be letting your children watch TV or parading them around rides at a theme park. In both cases, the child is floored by the external stimuli, not making decisions on his or her own but rather sitting back and letting someone else drive the input and thought. In contrast, on the beach, the activity is much more child-led. The child drives the activity all the way, deciding where to dig in the sand, how deep, whether to build a castle or not. The child decides whether to wade deep or shallow in the water, to run from waves or into waves, whether to dance around or stand still. The child decides what seashells to collect, how many to put in his or her bucket, how to arrange them, which ones to keep, and so on. In child-led activities, the child makes a ton of decisions about how he or she wants to do an activity. The activity doesn’t drive the child. The child’s choices drive the activity. If child-led activities are more engaging to children than other types of activities, is there such a thing as user-led documentation? Most written documentation is more or less user-led, because the user must decide which topic to read, how long to read it, and how to navigate the content. But when it comes to video tutorials, long narrations quickly tire the audience. Why is that? The same reason my kids prefer the beach over Disneyworld: most videos are not user-led. Should cinema be the focus?I recently read a good post by Brooks Andrus on combining cinematography with video tutorials. He mentioned incorporating a variety of cinematic techniques to keep the audience’s attention. Brooks writes, How can we make screencasts more engaging? What can we learn from the masters of visual literacy, cinematographers, about pacing, depth, emotion and visual narrative? These sorts of questions are important to explore if we want people to engage with, learn from and, dare I say, enjoy our screencasts. That’s the mindset I think we need to establish for screencasting. We’re not just recording the screen, we’re telling a story and there is a well established historical record of the art and science behind motion picture narratives. I agree with Brooks on the importance of story. And I certainly welcome the integration of cinema with screencasting. But no matter how good you make the video — even if you make the video as cool as a Disneyworld ride — your viewer is still going to be bored if the video is not user-led. The direction we should take with video, then, is not so much moving into the domain of cinema. It should be to make the videos a user-led experience. Some concrete ideasExactly how does one make a user-led video? Here are a few ideas that come to mind.
User-led is a concept that I’m going to be thinking more about in the upcoming months as I create videos for my documentation projects. If you have any tips or thoughts on creating more of a user-led experience, please let me know. Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
Podcast on the Seven Deadly Sins of BloggingDownload MP3 Over the last month, you’ve been seeing various posts on my site about the seven deadly sins of blogging (being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive). I mentioned at the beginning of my seven deadly sins series that I was preparing for some upcoming presentations on blogging. I first presented on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging at WebWorks Roundup 2009. I gave a similar presentation to the STC-Suncoast chapter (in Tampa, Florida) last night. The latter one I recorded. While the content of both presentations was supposed to be the same, that’s not how it worked out. The presentation to Suncoast kind of veers off in different directions half way through. I also decided to bookend this podcast with a few thoughts before and after the presentation while driving (hence the length). Categories: Interesting and Relevant Sites
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