One of the reasons DITA has gained so much traction in such a short space of time is that the people behind it are taking advantage of the internet to publicise and drive it forward. With that in mind it’s great to see them open the new DITA Maturity Model out to the community:

This community is designed to bring the DITA Maturity Model to life, applying the “Wisdom of the Crowds” to the evolution and refinement of this approach to DITA adoption. The premise is that none of us is as good as all of us. The DITA MMC is an evolving resource that will grow and change over time with your active participation and contributions.

Definitely a good usage of the social media tools available at the moment.

One thing that struck me, taken from the Content Wrangler coverage, is a simple reason as to why more people are considering a move towards DITA-based content:

Enterprises looking to fast track their content strategy and minimize the risks of a big-bang initiative are choosing DITA–one of the most popular information models to suit today’s content–rich, multi-channel environment.

For some reason I hadn’t quite figured that out, but if you are putting together a business case built around DITA then it’s worth investigating this in more depth. That said, this is definitely one of those “so obvious I hadn’t considered it” moments!

The maturity model also highlights one of the reasons that DITA is proving popular even if it isn’t the best standard to be using for every circumstance. Quite simply, it’s because it’s young, new and (this is the important bit) is being developed in plain view of everyone on the internet. Admittedly I’ve not gone looking for DocBook or SD1000 resources but as they are already fairly mature they seem to be struggling to keep up with the pace of development around DITA. If DITA is the cool kid on the block, DocBook is definitely the wise old sage, stooped on the corner.

Social media on the internet thrives on participation and with DITA still growing up everyone has a chance to get involved and influence things, and that helps generate buy-in, which drives more improvements, which increases community buy-in… and so on.

So, even if you aren’t interested in DITA but are interested in how social media (online communities, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it) might help you and your company, it might be worth while checking out the maturity model and see if the same … erm… model.. can be applied to what you do.

So I’ve updated my bookshelf with a couple of new books, and an old one.

I’ve started The World Is Flat which is utterly fascinating, even if it is slightly outside of the more traditional technical communications area. However anyone with any interest in social media (aka Web 2.0) should give it a look. My personal opinion is that our jobs are going to become increasingly influenced by such things so it’s good to get a bit of perspective on how they are already making an impact.

Conference season is underway, with DocTrain and AODC recently finishing. As such there is a lot of great and interesting blog posts out there, some are catchup style so if, like me, you didn’t attend you can still get some nuggets of information from them. But the type I prefer are the ones which collate the various ideas and pull them together.

So, with that in mind, if you only read one of the posts linked below, make it the first one.

DocTrain Conference thoughts
Tom chats to Noz Urbina from Mekon and starts to pull together some of the varied threads I’ve covered here into a vision of the future which, in my opinion, makes sense. It’s great to see this kind of thing being discussed and it’s the step beyond where I’d gotten with my thinking. Well worth a read.

Some thoughts on writing better error messages
Real-world tales of woe shed some light.

This lack of coordination between error reporting and error origin often leads to incorrect human reasoning about root causes. One simple help to sysadmins (and other users) would be to report errors in context.

Separating content, structure, format and behaviour
One from a session of AODC which helps properly define how and why we should be separating out the various components of information production.

What we’re aiming for:
* Maintainability — you can change one of the above four components without breaking the others.
* Re-usability — you can re-use the same bit of JavaScript, for example, in other documents.
* Separation of skill sets — different people can work on the component they know best and enjoy most.
* Simplified updating of content — content is likely to be the component you update most often.

Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle
Pertinent to anyone working with an application that has any form of social web (web 2.0, community interaction, pick a term) features, or for those of us trying to build an online community around their product

The lifecycle is particularly relevant to web-based software because the product is inextricable from the service. The product is the service. If a person has a question about what your software does, for example, you can literally build that answer into the software itself.

Wiki on a Stick
And finally, a downloadable, zero install, personal Wiki. May be useful if you want an example of how Wikis work. Extra handy for maintaining your own To Do lists or as a way to centralise your notes (or both).

That’s all for now.

I took a few days holiday last week (if you get the chance, go visit Budapest, it’s lovely) so here’s a little bit of catchup from the RSS feeds I monitor. You can download the list over on the right there.

How Corporate RSS Supports Collaboration and Innovation
Dennis McDonald pulls together some good arguments around introducing Web 2.0 ideas to your company, noting that a lot of business cases rely on raw numbers and that, in the case of social networking tools, there is:

… a disadvantage of taking a “beancounter” approach to implementing social media within an organization. While you might be able to quantify the time, effort, and technology associated with impacted processes, you can’t necessarily predict when and where the benefits (such as innovations or new ides) will occur.

Bye Bye GoLive!
Adobe finally realise what most web developers already knew, GoLive can’t compete with DreamWeaver (also now owned by Adobe). However, it’s not all bad news if you are a GoLive user:

the company will continue to support GoLive users with online tutorials and migration assistance created by usage experts. The company has also collaborated with online training service Lynda.com to provide tutorials for GoLive users.

And one more thing
The Hoefler & Frere-Jones blog continues to provide some fascinating information for typographists (?) and writers alike. This time they take a look at the many forms of the ampersand.

As for the word “ampersand,” folk etymologies abound. The likeliest account, offered by the OED, is explained by early alphabet primers in which the symbol was listed after X, Y, Z as “&: per se, and.” Meaning “&: in itself, ‘and’”, and inevitably pronounced as “and per se and”, it’s a quick corruption to “ampersand,” and the rest is history.

The Dawning of the Age of Content - and why Content Convergence Matters to You
For anyone watching the way information is now created, collated and distributed on the world wide web, this article will ring true. We ARE all watching what is going on, aren’t we?

We’re all content producers. And we’re all about to live through interesting times with the dawning of The Age of Content. Industry is discovering content as a commodity, as inventory with value, and the rules are changing fast.

The new rules are not just for high-profit content like movies and music. What was once seen as the lowliest form of commercial content within an enterprise - technical manuals, support documentation, and other business content - is starting to take its place alongside other valued corporate assets.

The 10, 20, 30 Powerpoint rule
An oldie but a goodie, it’s often quoted but it’s worth re-reading (especially as I’ve just pulled together a presentation that has.. eh… 23 slides.. ). It’s not always applicable of course but well worth keeping in mind.

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Summer of Doc, anyone?
Janet has a good idea for getting student technical writers (and hey why limit it?) a little bit of experience.

Now in its fourth year, Google Summer of Code supports students in writing code for participating open-source projects, which provide mentors to help guide the students’ work. Thanks to Google’s sponsorship, the students receive a stipend (making this a summer job), and mentors receive a nominal compensation for their time.
…
If you substitute code/documentation, developers/tech writers, Computer Science/Technical Communication, I think it’s fairly obvious that the same benefits could apply to Tech Comm students writing documentation for open source projects.

And finally a nice quote from the late great Douglas Adams:

” I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. “

Ever get the feeling that no-one reads your documentation? It’s a frequent issue amongst Technical Writers and the general stance reflects the approach many take to make sure that, when someone finally picks up the documentation, they can get to the information they need as quickly as possible.

Given that, there is little worse than to have errors reported in your documentation. After all, if they’ve only just started using it to help them solve a problem and one of the first things they spot is an error then it’s understandable that confidence drops and that they are less likely to go to the documentation in the future.

Of course we all do the very best job we can, yet the fact remains that mistakes happen, errors occur. The reason that this tends to be a bigger issue for information is down to how we process the knowledge we have.

Without getting into too much detail, learning is a continuous process and most of that happens when you are doing things, using the tools at your disposal and figuring out how they work and how they help you achieve what you are trying to complete. By the time you decide to check the documentation, you’ve (usually) got a good bank of knowledge already, and it’s building all the time.

So, when the documentation is wrong (regardless of whether the reader spots the mistake immediately or only realises it after trying out the instructions) it seems to be an obvious mistake. After all, if I can figure out how to do X, why is the documentation wrong for Y, it’s just the same process?

Software applications that have minor errors in them are tolerated because they are the tool and sometimes there isn’t an alternative. You learn how to accomodate those errors in the application and work around them. You can’t do that with documentation, it’s either right or wrong (ambiguous documentation is presumed wrong) so confidence in the rest of the information is linked to those initial few instances of usage.

We all have review procedures that should capture errors in the documentation, we do our best to think about how the user will be interacting with the product and base the structure and content of our documentation on that information, and we all receive that email that says “On page XY of the User Guide, it states that…” and our hearts drop a little.

However I think we should embrace those moments, be positive about them! You have a user who cares enough about the documentation to complain and I think it’s worthwhile thanking them for pointing out the error, tell them that it will get fixed, and encourage them to continue to let you know if they spot anything else.

So next time you get one of those emails, or a bug in the documentation is raised, be sure to follow up with the user and thank them. They are proving that people do RTFM.

Prompted by an excellent article - Subversion for writers - I thought it might be useful to offer a Windows view. Like most software groups, our development team use a version control system to manage multiple versions of the product; we have customers using many previous versions and all are maintained in the same system so we can patch fixes back through multiple versions.

Our team of writers use the same system, although as we are using FrameMaker we lose some of the nicer features but the core reasons for using a version control system remain - files are locked by whoever is working on them, and we have a full version history of changes made, including when, who and why.

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Back from a short break in Hungary (Budapest is a glorious city, if you ever get the chance you must visit it) I find myself wondering what to do next. I was looking forward to the trip and have been building towards it for several weeks now. I had planned my work around it, knowing what I needed to do before I left and with a rough idea of what I need to do when I go back.

It’s a little different here on this blog though.

I’ve just re-read my previous post (the big long one below) and it strikes me that while it may be interesting to some it suggests I may be at a point in my career where I need to practice a little more of what I preach.

In other words, I need to start to try to do all these things I’ve mentioned, rather than theorise and prevaricate over the nuances. But then that’s a bad habit of mine.

Sometimes you just need to put up or shut up.