Posts Tagged "metadata"

What I Learned About Tech Comm During 2011

This past year I learned a few things. As I approach 2012, I’d like to note what 2011 taught me: Writing documentation in a wiki suits me for the same reasons I enjoy interacting on the web. The web is interactive, alive, dynamic, collaborative, fresh, and unlimited in potential. A wiki, being online, allows me (Read more...)

Using Tags to Increase Findability

I recently read Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (2008), by Gene Smith. Smith dives into tagging as a method for adding metadata to resources, which in turn increases the organization and findability of the resources. Traditional help authoring tools categorize resources through folders (a carryover from Windows folders), whereas web platforms typically use tags. Tags (Read more...)

Where Topic-Based Authoring Fails: End-to-End Scenarios

After my Summit presentation about breaking out of topic-based hierarchies, a lady named Ursula came up to me and said she was tired of topic-based authoring. I asked her what the alternative was. She said she’s often more interested in seeing an end-to-end process rather than a specific task. This reminded me of a tutorial (Read more...)

Topic Chunking and The Broken Alarm Clock

It’s been about 9 days since my last post, and yesterday my colleague leaned over and asked why I hadn’t been posting — was something wrong? He himself has been working on a novel, so he hasn’t posted anything for a month. No, nothing is wrong. I always chuckle when I see blog posts in (Read more...)

Podcast: Content Strategy and Agility, with Noz Urbina

Download MP3 Length: 40 min. I recently spoke with Noz Urbina, consultant from Mekon Ltd, about his upcoming conference, Congility, and about content strategy. Based in Valencia, Spain, Noz is one of the industry’s thought leaders on XML, DITA, component content management, and content strategy. This year he and Mekon are running a conference called (Read more...)