Well hello there! Apologies for the lack of updates recently, suffice to say there is a lot of ‘stuff’ going on at the moment and, inevitably, things like this blog are the first to suffer (which is, of course, perfectly correct).

For the next couple of weeks you are probably better keeping an eye on my Twitter account as I’m still pinging useful links and comments there. Never fear though, I will return as I’ve got a list of blog posts to complete (see below).

See you on Twitter

Quite a lot going on at the moment, but don’t worry dear blog reader I’ve not forgotten about you, I’ve still got plenty of things to post here just not really finding the time (or requisite brain power) to focus on them and think them through properly.

Here are some of the things I’ve started to write about but not yet posted.

In other words, “here are the posts languishing in DRAFT”.

• Content from the ISTC and STC publications, why isn’t it all free?
• Social Media Models, where I try and outline what I think are the models that we, as technical communicators can get the most value from adopting
• The evils of presumption
• Embracing user-generated content
• Small social media. If your ‘community’ is very small, what will work for you?
• How to stop thinking about documents

I will hopefully revisit some (all?) of these in the future, but before all that I have an eSeminar to prepare for, more details on that soon.

A new year and a new set of challenges await me both here on this blog, and professionally.

I’ve signed up to Project 52 in the hopes that it will help me maintain at least a regular level of content here. With quite a few side projects on the go this year I’m fearful of my time being sucked elsewhere so hopefully it’ll help keep things trickling along.

Professionally my team and I are keen to move things to a more web-centric output, and I want to get us more hooked into our Developer Community website and try and factor in some social media services as well. I’ve just finished writing an article for a supplement which will be published with the next issue of the ISTC Communicator magazine and it made me realise that it’s time to stop talking and start doing.

From that point of view it should be an interesting year as I truly believe that, for those of us who can, we need to start utilising the benefits of social media and really start to change how our profession is perceived. Social media is driven by information, and without doubt we are the best people to step in and adopt social media practices for the best of reasons.

I have an even greater interest in this area as, in the coming months, I’m going to be planning and creating a community website for the ISTC. I have many ideas already, and I’ll be canvassing ISTC members and all the technical communication professionals who I’m lucky enough to have visit this blog.

All in all it should be a big, busy year. Just as I like it.

Although why I chose to make my New Year Resolution “read more fiction”, I’m still not quite sure.

I have been remiss at writing new content for this blog, and whilst this topic isn’t one that I said I’d post about (those posts are coming, I promise), it’s something I was discussing yesterday and so is at the forefront of my mind.

Like many people I still use pen and paper when taking notes, and regardless of the type of meeting I stick with three basic categories.

1. [] Actions either for me or my team to do. Includes things that need done immediately or things which it would be good to do in the future.
2. ? Questions on things I want to learn more about, which relate to my team. Whilst these may also be actions (typically they involve asking people questions) I differentiate them because, until I’ve asked the question, I don’t know enough to decide on whether there is anything to be done (caveat: if it is a burning issue, I’ll like put this against both categories ? [] ).
3. I Information which covers all sorts of things from useful URLs, to quotes, to product names and so on.

I also “style” my notes, with the appropriate shorthand symbol first, then a gap, then the text for that item. Keeping that consistent makes it very easy to scan down my notes to process them.

[] email report to Fred
[] speak to Tina about next phase of work
? what is the cognitive learning project, who is running it?
[] write a blog post on the Information Strategy Pyramid
I stats for last week 103 open, 74 closed

Processing the notes, again, depends on the type of note.

For actions as, unless they can be done straight away (I think that is a GTD methodology thing? If it takes 1 minute to do it, and 1 minute to write it up and put it in a list, then you are better just doing it), they are transcribed into an online task manager application I use called Remember the Milk. It has a very nice iPhone app which makes it easy to “take my list” with me at all times.

Questions are simply a matter of being asked. That may drive further actions or information which are captured accordingly.

Anything I’ve noted down as information is either processed electronically, if it’s something online I’ll visit it and either bookmark it in my del.icio.us account, add it to my list on Instapaper (again, which has an excellent iPhone app), or grab it and store for later in Evernote (again, a useful iPhone app helps).

Whilst all of that seems like a lot of work, it’s very maintainable, and I spend less than 20 mins a day processing my notes. However it helps me keep on top of several different streams of work, and so far it hasn’t let me down. I’ve been using the shorthand symbols for a long time now, but obviously the electronic processing of these things is new.

So, what about you? How do you take notes? Are you a mindmapper? A random scribbler? Or do you, like one lady who attend a presentation I did a few years ago, do you draw out the subject and the notes in one go?

If you were attending a conference, and specifically attending one of the sessions that was going to be covering “blogging”, what questions would you want answered?

No, I’m not being completely lazy, I already have a good outline of what I want to cover (why, what and how) but it’s always good to get some “pre-emptive feedback” as a colleague of mine once stated.

On the flip side, those of you who already blog, any pearls of wisdom? Any information you wished you’d known before you started?

I’ll be publishing my presentation at the same time as I take to the stage at the Technical Communication conference in September and will update it based on any questions or comments raised during my session.

After all, for me, one of the main reasons I blog, and read blogs, is to exchange ideas and knowledge. The conversation is the power and I’m really looking forward to transferring my thoughts from here (on this blog) to the conference and seeing how a ‘live audience’ reacts.

BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting a 30 minute show on this topic.

Engineer Mark Miodownik presents an instruction manual on how to write an instruction manual, exploring the history and the future of product guides and how they chart our changing relationship with technology.

He looks at how product guides have changed over the centuries, from the very first examples, written by James Watt on his new ‘copying’ machine, to the latest Ikea pictograms.

In the first half of the 20th century, manuals not only described how to use your television, but also how to fix it. Now, the first few pages of any TV manual contain stern health and safety warnings about the dangers of tinkering inside the TV.

Mark travels to Yeovil to visit Mr Haynes, of Haynes car and motorcycle manuals, to ask whether people still need a manual to fix their vehicle. As our products get more sophisticated, is the instruction manual becoming extinct?

One to catch I think, hopefully it’ll be available afterwards online as well.

Taking a break from the Author-it, I’ve been playing with WINK, an open source tutorial and presentation authoring software. It’s quite nice but unfortunately I’ve been having issues getting the recorded presentations rendered into Flash.

So I’ve started to look about for other options, but there are so many options out there that I’m a little befuddled and overwhelmed.

We want to record some presentations that show off the new features in our product. A few of our developers have given a few of these to internal staff, but I want to get them recorded and viewable online in our development community website. Getting the recording software to do what we want is proving the biggest obstacle though, so it’s over to you guys and gals!

Do you record any presentations? If so what software do you use to record them, and how do you make them available online? Ideally we’d like flash as an output format but as long as it’s viewable we aren’t that fussy.

Any suggestions?