STC Spring Event highlights Technical Communicator's issues

Yesterday I attended the STC (Society for Technical Communication http://www.stc.org) spring event, where I was invited to give a talk on uses of Wikis and Blogs in industry. There was a great deal of interest in the way wikis can help enable collaborative authoring, especially in reducing the length of the revision cycle, and in engaging SMEs in the writing process.

I shared the platform with Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf who was speaking about the impact of Web 2.0 on technical communicators; not a small subject, it emerges. Ellis drew a lot of examples of new and existing sites that either claim, or actually do, implement Web 2-ness. Ellis had an interesting way of breaking down Web 2 so that it is more comprehensible to the layman. He breaks down the degree to which sites/technologies contribute to Web 2 on the basis of three criteria:

• Collaboration
  • the degree to which the site/technology enables multiple parties to work together
• Conversation
  • whether the site/technology enables an exchange of views between users
• Aggregation
  • whether the site/technology enables new ways of collecting/mining other data

One interesting observation was the way that many products are now being independently documented on the web, as users, frustrated with the availability or quality of information, write and share their own.

Amusingly enough both Ellis and I had incorporated the KCU The Machine is Us/ing Us video in our presentations. Watch it, it's really good.

Altogether a very enjoyable day.