Rahul Prabhakar, editor of the TechCraft newsletter, which accompanies the Technical Writers of India listserv, published an interview with me in the latest issue (June 2008).

You can read it here: Techcraft e-Newsletter Volume 38 June 2008. It’s in the “Spotlight” section near the end.

(You can also log into Yahoo and read it here by going to the June 2008 folder, but Rahul gave me permission to post the PDF directly.)

Tech Writers of India (TWI) is one of the most popular listservs in India, with exactly 2,753 members as of this post.

What’s the interview all about? Me, of course. First we discuss my childhood, then my teenage years, I explain all the places I’ve lived …. Just kidding. It’s an interview about how I fell into technical writing, blogging, and other online mischief, like WriterRiver.com and podcasting.

By the way, I met Rahul at the STC Summit in Philadelphia last month. He’s a genuinely nice guy who was excited by the Philadelphia scene.

You can read more about the Technical Writers of India listserv here. If you’re a reader from the TWI listserv who landed on my blog, consider subscribing to my RSS feed (see the Subscription options in the upper-left).

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Duration: 20 min.

In this podcast, rich media specialist Todd O’Neill explains how to add video to your training and documentation deliverables. Many technical writers are intimidated by the learning curve, equipment costs, and software they think they need to create video, but actually you can create engaging videos with minimal equipment (e.g., $150 for a Flip video camera) and using software you probably already have (e.g, Windows Movie Maker or iMovie).

In this podcast, Todd lays out the basics for those who know nothing about video. He explains the equipment you need, techniques for minimizing editing time, ways to publish the video online, filming techniques to focus on, and creative ways to package your video for your users.

For more information, see Todd O’Neill’s blog at http://doingmedia.net.

Note: I recorded this podcast at Doc Train 2008 in Vancouver, Canada.

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Duration: 10 min.

With all the buzz about web 2.0 deliverables, it’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy and think we need to quickly create blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasts, videos, and other new media for our users. Actually, we have to step back and analyze our users and their needs before creating any help deliverables at all.

In this podcast, Nicky Bleiel says we should talk to as many users as we can — conducting on-site visits, sending surveys, gathering information from Marketing, Support, and other departments — so we can have a better understanding of our users’ needs and the formats and mediums that will work best for them. After completing this audience and needs analysis, we can then go out and create the deliverables that will best serve our users.

She also recommends the book Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Burnoff, to get a better understanding of how to measure web 2.0 success.

Nicky Bleiel is an STC director at large and works for ComponentOne, which makes the Doc-to-Help authoring software. For more information on Nicky Bleiel, see her bio page and visit her new blog.

Note: I recorded this podcast at Doc Train West 2008 in Vancouver, Canada.

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Duration: 15 min.

In this podcast, Joe Sokohl explains how to create user-centered documentation by contacting, observing, and interviewing users to gather information about what types of information they use and the help deliverables they actually want.

In his experience, Joe found that almost no one used the user manual, but instead wanted quick information for specific tasks. The users hated stand-up training with PowerPoint slides (what the execs thought users needed), and instead wanted hands-on experience with the real system.

Creating user-centered documention requires technical writers to to break the standard (and ridiculous) rule of not contacting the user, to get out of their shells and interact and interview others, and to often challenge standards and assumptions from executives. It may be hard, but doing so is essential, because if you end up creating the wrong deliverables, all your efforts to create help may be irrelevant and useless.

In the podcast, Joe recommends a number of books:

• About Face, by Alan Cooper (cooperdesign.com)
• The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
• Emotional Design, by Don Norman
• Observing the User Experience, by Mike Kuniavsky
• Communicating Design, by Dan Brown 
• Blueprints for Information Architecture, christina Wodtke
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld

For more information on Joe Sokohl, see his blog here. Also, I blogged about this presentation earlier here.

You can either listen to this post as a mini-podcast or just read it. They’re mostly the same, but not entirely.

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Duration: 7 min.

I listened to a couple of podcasts back to back tonight that, taken alone, might not have had as strong an impact on me as they did together. The first was Mark in Canada’s “Musings of a Tech Writer — Episode 21,” in which he lists the top 10 most annoying things podcasters do. Then I listened to Scott Nesbitt’s interview of Theresa Mulvihill Talbot about XML. Both are excellent podcasts, but I realized that I’m more drawn by the personal podcast, even if it’s not as informative.

This caused me to seriously reflect because almost all of my podcasts are interview-driven podcasts. I pick someone knowledgeable about a suject I’m interested in, think of a handful of questions, and then call them up and interview them.

This approach works fairly well to generate content easily and quickly, without requiring much preparation on my part. However, it’s not as powerful as the personal podcast, nor even as engaging as the cohost podcast. Given my affinity for personal essays, I want to move in the direction of the personal podcast as well, only I think I’ll either try to read my essays in a non-reading voice, or use them as an outline, or something, I’m not sure — I want to bring my audio endeavors more back to my own writing.

Mark’s number 2 thing that drives him crazy about podcasts is as follows:

Podcasters who take their show and themselves very seriously.

This is another point that made me stop and think. People have been telling me I take things too seriously all my life. In fact, on the very first date with my wife, nearly 10 years ago, she said something similar, like, “Tom, do you really take things so seriously?” At the time, we were English majors reading and talking about people like Whitman and Chaucer, and it was easy to talk about the books we were reading as if they were the sine qua non of a well-lived life.

At least my career in technical writing has taught me to lighten up a bit, since a technical manual isn’t nearly as important as Leaves of Grass.

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Duration: 15 min.

IT project teams often need to increase collaboration and communication, but they’re hampered by the cubicle walls and other physical silos they set up in the workplace. These physical obstacles force teams to have frequent meetings — which can be long and inefficient — just to keep each other updated.

In this podcast, Emma Hamer talks about both physical and virtual workspaces that project teams need to increase their performance. She also outlines the rationale for teams to gather better feedback from users, project members, and others who aren’t domain experts.

For more information, see Emma’s website at http://hamer-associates.ca.

Note: I interviewed Emma at the Doc Train 2008 conference in Vancouver. You can also listen my previous interview with Emma on performance and collaboration here.

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Duration: 27 min.

Many content management projects fail because organizations are either too focused on tools before properly researching their needs and processes, or because they underestimate the difficulty of migrating and restructuring their content to fit the new content management system.

In this podcast, Rahel Bailie explains these pitfalls and what companies can do to avoid them, as well as how companies can climb out of problems they’re currently in. Rahel also talks about how technical communicators can influence business executives and other key stakeholders to make better decisions about content management.

For more information, see Rahel’s website at intentionaldesign.ca. Rahel is also organizing the next Content, Convergence Conference, & Integration Conference in Vancouver, which is scheduled for September 2009.

Note: I interviewed Rahel at the Doc Train 2008 conference in Vancouver.

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Duration: 15 min.

XML, a way of tagging and structuring your content, can help solve a number of problems, including storing, mining, reusing, and sharing content. XML helps enable the interoperability of information between systems, allowing you to export and import your content from one application to another.

XML is behind much of the collaboration and information sharing Web 2.0 technologies, such as RSS (really simple syndication) and blogs. By storing content in XML, technical writers can ensure greater flexibility among technologies for authoring and publishing their content.

Joe Gollner’s company, Stilo International, is based in the United Kingdom and has development teams in Ottawa, Canada. Their main focus is content processing, with the goal of enabling high performance, high proficiency automation.

For more information, see http://www.stilo.com. You can also access white papers from Joe’s personal site, see http://gollner.ca/.

Note: I interviewed Joe for this podcast at the Doc Train 2008 conference in Vancouver, Canada.

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Duration: 15 min.

In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe talks about XSL, Flash, and live blogging. XSL (extensible stylesheet language) is a programming language that transforms XML content into a specific format, such as HTML. She explains what you can do with XSL, why it’s unique, and how the output is created.

Sarah also presented on Flash. Flash comes easier for people who are visual thinkers, she says. She recommends people learn Adobe Illustrator first, because many of the concepts transfer to Flash. Flash is basically Illustrator with a timeline — a collection of images that combine to form a motion. Flash can be good for animating conceptual topics you’re trying to clarify.

Sarah recently used Flash in a white paper she wrote titled “Friend of Foe: Web 2.0 in Technical Communication.” She embedded Flash videos in the PDF to illustrate concepts and engage readers (although some readers didn’t realize they were supposed to click the Play button).

Finally, Sarah talks about live blogging — the process of posting notes and writeups in almost real time from sessions you attend. Why live blog? She says it’s fun, keeps your attention, and helps you focus on the main point of the presentation.

She also relates some unexpected experiences of presenters who read her live blogs and confronted her about some of her observations.

Sara’s blog is at Palimpsest: http://scriptorium.com/palimpsest/. Her company is called Scriptorium.

Here are a few of Sarah’s latest posts from Doc Train:

• A Quarky new approach?
• In.Vision Xpress Author for Microsoft Word
• Document Engineering in User Experience Design
• Social Media 101 / Now Everyone’s a Technical Writer

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Duration: 15 min.

In this podcast, Dr. Robert Glushko, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, explains the concept of Document Engineering — the process of developing document models to make information sharing, reuse, or syndication more efficient.

Glushko gives several examples of document engineering, such as creating a calendar event model that allows an event to by shared across numerous calendars. Or a syllabus document model, which allows students to pull specific data from syllabi across the university in unique ways.

The document models Glushko and his students create help people embrace best practices, rather than merely encoding bad habits. Even the founders of Youtube.com learned principles of information organization and retrieval from Berkeley’s School of Information.

In this podcast Glushko also talks about the notion of the transaction. He says the user experience isn’t based on how easy a website is to use, or how clear certain labels are. What matters most is the transaction — whether the merchant fulfilled a promise to the customer, and how smooth and efficient the fulfillment was.

Good transactions are enabled by a plethora of document choreography going on in the background. Information designers make the information fit together well and contribute to successful transaction experiences.

For more information on Robert Glushko, document engineering, the the School of Information at Berkeley, see Robert Glushko’s home page. You can also read Dr. Glushko’s book on Document Engineering, or follow his blog, Doc or Die.

Here’s a related post from Robert’s blog about his keynote at Doc Train.

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Duration: 15 min.

In this podcast, Noz Urbina talks about how Web 2.0 is changing the role of the technical communicator into one who drives product R&D and interaction design. My discussion with Noz was a light-bulb moment for me at the Doc Train West conference.

Podcast topics include the following:

• How the role of the technical communicator has evolved into a diversity of roles
• How awareness of user needs and requirements allows technical communicators to get involved in product R&D and user interaction design
• How implementing a backwards flow of data from hundreds of internal and external users changes the role of a technical writer to one who aggregates, synthesizes, and ensures quality rather than one who merely writes
• How the technical communicator becomes the keyholder on the pipeline of customer data, which in turn allows the technical communicator to direct and define the product
• How to encourage a culture of participation through surveys and other user interviews

Noz is a business development manager for Mekon. He’s also heavily involved in X-pubs.com, a nonprofit conference and information resource that produces seminars, online events, white papers, and annual conferences.

To contact Noz, send an email to noz.urbina@mekon.com

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Duration: 18 min.

Stewart Mader was one of the coolest people I met at Doc Train West 2008. He is a person driven by his enthusiasm for wikis.

In this podcast, Stewart talks about the following:

• Advantages of using a wiki for your technical documentation
• Why lack of advanced styles in wikis isn’t a major problem
• The relentless focus on simplicity with wikis
• Choosing the right wiki among dozens of wiki engines
• Pitfalls with using an open source wiki (like Mediawiki) for your company
• Why your content (not your format) is the most important element of any wiki
• Techniques for growing wiki use and adoption in your organization
• Why customizing your wiki to look like a professional website isn’t that important
• Managing multiple spaces inside wikis, and integrating with Active Directory
• Why Stewart recommends Atlassian Confluence wikis
• The number one reason why wikis fail

• Stewart Mader’s blog
• Wikipatterns (Stewart’s book on wikis)
• The Wiki Matrix
• Atlassian Confluence wikis (enterprise wiki software)
• 21 Days of Wiki Adoption

Stewart’s PowerPoint on his Grow Your Wiki session is below.