Hyperviews Online

by Matthew Arnold Stern

Editor’s note: Matt was an Online SIG volunteer at the STC Annual Conference, May 7 to 10, in Las Vegas. He posted entries on his blog during the conference, and provided the information to the Online SIG for our report on the conference.

Day 1: Vive Las Vegas!

If you can walk from Paris to New York and pass Monte Carlo, it must be Las Vegas. I’m here for the STC Conference that will be held at the adjoining Paris and Bally hotels.

The conference shows that the economy and technical writing field has recovered from the post-dot bomb and 9/11 gloom. The most obvious indicator: trade show swag. Once again, booths have nice pens and other toys to give away, and they’re having drawings for iPods. Also vendors are getting serious about producing tools to serve the technical writing community. Adobe is reviving RoboHelp and updating FrameMaker. MadCap is coming out with a full product line of technical writing products. Of course, there are translation services galore. (more…)

Announcement by Heather Hedden

The joint international conference of the American Society of Indexers and the Indexing and Abstracting Society of Canada, to be held in Toronto June 15-17, has a number of sessions and workshops that would be of interest to those in the field of online content, especially those who would like to know more about creating online indexes.

Below is just a sampling of the program: (more…)

OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, announced that the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology Standardization has approved the OpenDocument Standard for release as ISO/IEC 26300. The press release was posted today, May 8 2006.

The OpenDocument standard defines an open XML file format for office applications, so users of office suites can freely exchange text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases. OpenDocument was ratified as an OASIS standard in May 2005.

Our Online SIG web services team, Lou Quillio and Destry Wion, keep us up-to-date on news of the Web and publish educational articles frequently too.

Destry has an online journal with an RSS feed. Subscribe to receive frequent reminders of timely articles on topics related to open source web development and technical communication.

Lou posts news and articles on the STC Forum. Frequently these have instructions for key activities like incorporating an RSS feed in a website or installing a personal wiki.

The Online SIG is very fortunate to have volunteers who are so generous in sharing their knowledge and providing services to other members. Thank you, Destry and Lou, for your work this past year and for continuing in the new STC year.

Please welcome our 113 new members who joined the Online SIG in April.

As of April 30 the Online SIG has 1671 members, with 13,370 in STC. At the beginning of the membership year (March 31, 2005), the Online SIG had 1591 members. The SIG experienced modest growth this year, and retained 65% of its members. STC retains a steady 72% of members, compared to the common benchmark of 69%.

If you haven’t renewed yet, please do today. You can renew online all through May. When you renew, please choose the Online SIG.

Recent news includes “Web 2.0 and the enterprise,” reporting on uses of wikis and blogs for collaboration in business and on trends in marketing software to businesses. In particular IBM recently announced QED wiki, quick and easily done wiki, to allow people to aggregate information from the web for use in analysis of business situations. The concept is building custom web applications very quickly.

The older issues of “Hyperviews Online” occasionally addressed electronic performance support, and scanning through them shows that the STC Annual Conference has had presentations on this topic over the years. STC members can search past conference proceedings. Session materials from past conferences are also available. Search for “session materials” on the STC website. Other useful resources include:

“Key concepts in electronic performance support” on ESSS Central. Also, archive site. Links current August 2005.

“Make Way for Interactive Assistance” by Craig Marion. Published May 1, 2000. Link current May 2005.

We have a resource list on the subject of embedded help, and are moving it from our old website to this one to make it more visible. The list follows and includes one article by the Online SIG. (more…)

STC Online SIG member Scott Abel is our Content Management Lead. You can follow news of Content Management on Scott’s website, http://www.thecontentwrangler.com/. Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay abreast of developments in Content Management and technical communication.