Comments for Hyperviews Online

Comment on Online employment resources 2006 by Ann L. Wiley

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 02:35:54 +0000

2007 updates are found in the Summer 2007 issue of the Lone Star Community newsletter, intially at http://www.stc-dfw.org/newsletter/current/feature8.html

Additional job sites listed are http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/ and http://jobster.com/ and http://simplyhired.com/

MySpace (http://myspace.com/) and Facebook (http://facebook.com/) are mentioned this year as professional networking resources.

Comment on All about content management systems by rick

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:46:08 +0000

There’s a good discussion of using wikis for end-user documentation here: http://www.keycontent.org//tiki-index.php?page=Wikis+and+Docs

Comment on All about content management systems by Ann L. Wiley

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 02:03:18 +0000

Scott’s comments are an important addition regarding content management to support technical documentation. Other technical communicators have other needs, and recently pointed out the sources mentioned in the post.

In STC we are finding MediaWiki to be very useful for technical documentation, as we are writing the Forum Help on the STC Wiki: http://stc-on.org/wiki/Forum_Help_Project

Ease of collaboration, editing, and distribution make the Wiki very attractive, and the version control capabilities are excellent.

Destry Wion has written about use of MediaWiki for “single sourcing”: http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?pid=3787#p3787

Hyperviews Online appreciates all its Contributors and the comments we receive too.

Comment on All about content management systems by Scott Abel

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:03:18 +0000

Actually, most of the information above is not useful to technical communicators. Instead, technical communicators require content management systems designed to manage and reassemble on demand individual components of content. These Content Component Management systems are being reviewed by Ann Rockley for CMS Watch and will be included in an upcoming report that also examines authoring tools. This content will be available at an as yet unannounced price.

Vendors that you may know that provide component content management systems include:

Astoria Software (Astroria On Demand)
DocZone.com
Vasont
XyEnterprise
and several others

The majority of “so-called” content management systems DO NOT adequately support the content needs of technical communicators.

Hope that helps.

Scott Abel
Executive Director
Content Management Professionals

Comment on STC Newsletter Exchange by Ann L. Wiley

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 05:53:04 +0000

The goal here is to describe the newsletters at a particular point in time, and to describe them all at least once before the year is out. The goal on the STC Forum is to highlight at least one outstanding article in at least one issue of each newsletter.

This post is going to get too long to be effective, so I’ll create a category for the STC Newsletter Exchange and post new descriptions as often as I can.

We can syndicate the RSS feeds from the STC newsletters in the sidebar, and I’ll add that feature too as I find the newsletter feeds.

Comment on STC Newsletter Exchange by rick

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:58:15 +0000

Do any newsletters have RSS feeds? Rather than creating static links here, we could simply syndicate each newsletter’s feed.

For starters, the Carolina Communique (http://newsletter.stc-carolina.org) has an RSS feed: http://stc-carolina.org/newsletter/tiki-wiki_rss.php?ver=2

If we can’t syndicate feeds on this blog, I volunteer to add them to the syndication of STC RSS feeds that I started on the STC Carolina website: http://www.stc-carolina.org/STC+Feeds+Worldwide

Comment on STC Newsletter Exchange by Ann L. Wiley

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:36:01 +0000

The Orange County Chapter newsletter was added on June 11, 2007.

Comment on STC Newsletter Exchange by rick

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:14:18 +0000

The STC Community Data page (http://stc-on.org/wiki/STC_Community_Data) also has links to all chapters and their newsletters.

Comment on Topic types by Marcia Poulsen

Wed, 23 May 2007 01:03:09 +0000

Bob Doyle added this (in the STC Single Sourcing SIG listserv):

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions as to the origin of concept, task, and reference.

The only places I find these three consistently together are in work from IBM, including DITA itself, and in the book Developing Quality Technical Information, by Gretchen Hargis et al, which nowhere mentions DITA.

As Zev mentioned, Information Mapping was the first to define “Information Types” in their methodolgy for Structured Writing. I find the differences between IBM and Information Mapping types to be so great that the IBMers probably did not even know the earlier work. Or if they did, they blatantly ripped off Horn’s terminology without attribution.

Someone from the DITA design team should be able to clarify this history for us.

I think I see in the three information types - concept, task, and reference - a reflection of the three great user manuals of the golden age of software documentation, when some of us still read manuals in order.

In 1984 Apple called them, for example, Learning MacPaint, Using MacPaint and MacPaint Reference.

My first tech docs were the user manuals for my MacPublisher (the first DTP program), which shipped in the year of the Mac, in English, French, German, and Italian.

To this day, many O’Reilly books follow the triad of Learning PHP, Programming PHP, and PHP - the Definitive Reference.

I think the “Learning X” manual has just disappeared. It is now seen as too much theory, overview, and system description. For many software products, you now have only Getting Started and Using X.

John Carroll’s “minimalism” moved the primary documentation focus to the practical “how-to” kind of knowledge we discover by user and task analysis. In his book 1990 Nurnberg Funnel (p.7), Carroll defined minimalism as “allowing learners to start immediately on meaningfullly realistic tasks.” Today’s impatient users are not so interested in learning the theory and overview, they want the instant gratification of problem solutions.

So I see “task” as the primary topic type. It has always been the main type in our Help Authoring Tools. I see concept and reference as supporting task, but only as needed.

This helps me to understand what is expected in the concept and reference topic types.

Comment on Topic types by Alan Bryner

Tue, 22 May 2007 23:39:42 +0000

Perhaps try some references in Ruth Clark’s (www.ClarkTraining.com) book – Developing Technical Training. In this book, she briefly outlines the literature that has led her to the information types she uses for technical training. She essentially uses tasks (procedures), concepts, and reference (facts), as well as two other information types. The authors of interest are essentially Bloom, Gagne, and M. David Merrill. She has also been influenced strongly by Horn and Information Mapping.

It seems that the information types keep coming up over and over. In Hackos’ “Standards for Online Communication,” chapter 4 talks about information types. She has a small bibliography that doesn’t look like it answers Bob’s question, but through the bibliographies in those books he may be able to get on the path to an answer.

Hope this helps,

Alan