Tech Comm Ts

You've seen all those t-shirts with fun slogans for programmers, scientists, chemists and virtually every other profession. So why not have a range of fun t-shirts for Technical Communicators?

We've decided to solve that shortage in the market by setting up an online store called Tech Comm Tech T-Shirts.

To start with each design will only be available for a month.

Kicking things off, and available till the end of February is the "I CAN SPELL XML" shirt.




You can get yours at the online store.

Look for more designs over the coming months.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #10

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

10. What sort of controls will I need, if any?
It can be argued that the first rule of wikis is that there isn’t any rules. It is true that wikis function best when they are driven by the community that uses them, but you need to think about a few basics of control before you start. Do you need logins, if so who will authorize those. Will you have some sort of initial structure? What about giving users a ‘sandbox’ area to learn the wiki in? Who can see, read and edit what pages? Who will monitor recent changes and do any necessary roll backs? What’s the philosophy for rolling back content, incorporating comments? You will find that these answers change and evolve along with the wiki, but it is good practice to at least set a baseline.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #9

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

9. Which type of wiki should I use?
There are many different types of wiki in the marketplace, don’t just decide to use one type because it’s the only one you’ve heard of, go and do some research. Talk to people who have used wikis for similar implementations that you have in mind, find out what they used, and why. Find out what they rejected and why. Develop a short list of at least three wikis to prototype and test.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #8

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

8. Where will the wiki be hosted?

The location and hosting of a wiki can be a contentious issue and it is one that needs addressing early. In large organizations the IT group may want to host it (or they may actively be against the idea), in certain circumstances it may be better hosted at a departmental or project team level (and trends seem to indicate that these sort of bottom-up wiki implementations are usually the most successful ones), or even by a third party wiki hosting company outside the firewall.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #7

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

7. Who will own the wiki?

Every wiki needs a wiki maven to maintain it, but it also needs someone with a sense of ownership. Be aware of inherent ‘not my idea’ resistance in championing a wiki implementation, and be prepared that even though it may have been your idea, you may have to give up ownership in order to ensure implementation

How a Great Story Can Help Your Brand

Yesterday evening I spent a couple of hours interacting with other local business people and entrepreneurs at this month's Network In Austin event. As usual it was an excellent opportunity to meet and learn about a whole new bunch of local businesses.

In the space of two hours I must have heard about at least a dozen new businesses, what they did, and what they were called. That's a lot of information to take in in a short time.

As I drove home I did a quick mental review to see if I could recall the salient points from each conversation. I managed to recall something about everyone, but what struck me was that the first two businesses that came to mind were the two that had stories attached, and one in particular that had a story attached to the brand name.

The lady who ran the company had told a fun short story of how the company name came from an expression her father used to use a lot.

Brand names with a story behind them stick.

Several years ago I used to write a regular marketing newsletter that included the stories and histories behind some of the most well known brand names. That section was always the most popular part of the newsletter. It gave me the idea of maybe writing a book on the subject - but then I found out that someone had already done it...


And Evan Morris' fun book "From Altoids to Zima" is now one of the most thumbed books on my marketing bookshelf.

There is a story behind most company and brand names. I've worked for companies named after bags of chips, science fiction villains, a historical event, and even one that got it's name from a typo.

Discover your story - work it in to your pitch, put it on the website, and people will remember it, and they will remember you.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #6

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

6. Who will use the wiki in the future?
Of course one of the great things about wikis, and the central theme of this book, is that they foster growth and further collaboration. There are numerous examples of cross pollination of wikis inside organizations as one team sees the benefits that another gain from using a wiki. Before you start even the first wiki, spend some time thinking about areas of potential growth and possible future cross functional collaboration. Make sure you make plans for scalable growth and allow easy access for anyone who may need to contribute, or observe, not just on the initial projects, but on potential future ones as well.

The Week in Wikis - Week #5

Here's the list of wiki related articles that caught my attention over the last week.

- DoD ‘Wiki’ Increases Technical Collaboration
- Geo-Wiki - Combining wiki with Google Earth
- Wiki technology fuels collaboration, at Ohio State
- The Internet Engineering Task Force has set up a wiki to document which of its standards were successful and why.
- NASA + Wikipedia = OpenLuna - an open source, wiki-based attempt to design a leaner, meaner, public driven moon mission.

As always the full list of all Wiki Week links can be found at http://delicious.com/wikiweek/

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #5

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

5. Who will use the wiki initially?
While you may be implementing a wiki to meet one particular business need, think about every area of the company, or community, that could benefit or contribute to solving that problem. Try to move beyond functional boundaries and think about the skill sets and the knowledge base of all who would benefit. In some cases this may even be people located outside the organization.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #4

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

4. Where is the content going to come from?
Meaningful content is the key to any successful wiki, but you need to think about where it is going to come from. While you will most likely be looking for the community to contribute, you will most likely want to seed the wiki. Where is this initial content going to come from, will you need to invest time in creating new content, or will you import existing legacy content from other systems, such as technical documentation, training, policies and procedures or marketing materials?

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #3

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

3. What’s the expected return on investment?

One of the first questions asked for any new system is usually a financial return on investment (ROI). With wikis the software could be as low as zero and as high as several thousand dollars for an enterprise solution. The highest cost will be a resource one, so think about your answers to the previous question. The ROI may not be one directly attributable to the wiki itself, but may come from a change in collaboration methodologies and operational
improvements.

Getting over the barriers to wiki adoption

My latest article on wikis is now up at the Conde Nast Digital ars technica website.

Here's a taster...

As I continue to research and write my upcoming book on wikis, I keep hearing one word over and over again. That word is "BUT" (complete with all-caps), as in, "I would like to use a wiki, BUT…" or "We tried using a wiki, BUT…"

What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn't a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word "excuse" deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn't to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.

The true business benefits of collaborative knowledge sharing, such as improved productivity, greater efficiencies, removing cross-functional boundaries, enabling customer feedback etc., are often lost to a perceived, and understandable, fear. In the modern workplace, we have traditionally been defined, both in terms of success and hierarchy, based on what we know.

The old saying that knowledge is power has been a true axiom for a very long time, but the first few years of the new century have changed that. Internet culture, especially the social networking phenomenon of the last few years, has made knowledge-sharing the accepted norm outside of the work environment. Today, anyone who has access to an Internet connection has immediate access to a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips, to an extent literally unparalleled at any other time in human history. We expect to be able to use that information, and we expect to be able to contribute to it.

Yet there remains a reluctance to transfer this social behavior into the work environment. The knowledge base is clearly moving away from a select number of individuals towards the community; and companies that embrace the idea of community are becoming the biggest success story of recent years.

You can read the full article HERE.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #2

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

2. How will you measure its success?

The business issue will impact how you measure success, these could be along the lines of percentage of community contributing, number of people registered, number of new articles or comments. Or it could be asking did the wiki reduce the time taken for a particular process; or even analyzing its impact on other systems, such as the reduction in email traffic, or a reduction in number of meetings

Marking Up The Fab Four: Just Imagine What XML Could Do For Your Books

Just posted over at THE CONTENT WRANGLER is my first article in what is planned to be a series examining how the traditional book industry could benefit from adopting XML.

Here's an extract from the first post ...

When I look at my book (Before They Were Beatles) on the Kindle, or on my iPhone, I am frankly disappointed in it. The reason? eBooks and eBook readers today are little more than simple electronic page turners.

But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think what they could be like. My book references lots of early recordings of various incarnations of the group that would become The Beatles – wouldn’t it be great to click on a link and actually hear those recordings, or even compare early versions with later versions recorded at the height of their fame. How about when I mention their encounters with other musicians? It would be cool to be able to click on a name and get a snapshot biography, links to books about them and access their music catalog. How about accessing photographs of 1950s Liverpool street scenes, or being able to tour the Fab Four’s childhood homes?

And it’s not only non-fiction where I see these sort of enhancements, imagine reading your favorite novelist, and when a character mentions a location being able to click through to the Google street view, or when they eat at a nice restaurant being able to access the recipe. Ever wanted to know exactly how to make the type of vodka martini that is best served shaken, not stirred? It could be just a click away.

There is no technical reason why this sort of interactive book couldn’t be done today.

You can read the full article here.

10 Questions You Must Ask Before Implementing a Wiki #1

Ask yourself and your team the following questions before you start to implement a wiki, and be truthful with the answers.

Think about the issue you are trying to solve, and then see how a wiki might be applied, but remember don’t just focus on the positive, think about the potential down sides too.

1. What business issue is the wiki being used to resolve?

For any technology implementation to succeed, there needs to be a problem that it is trying to solve, or an operational efficiency to be gained. Think about why you are considering a wiki, do you have examples of wikis being used to address similar issues? Did they work? If so, why?