From the STC President
Hi! 
As I reach the halfway point of my tenure as STC President, I am reminded of the following quote from the American scholar William Lyon Phelps: “A well-ordered life is like climbing a tower; the view halfway up is better than the view from the base, and it steadily becomes finer as the horizon expands.” My first six months as president have been nothing like I had envisioned. I have learned a lot about myself, my colleagues, and the Society, and although the reality has not been like the vision, it’s been satisfying and productive. And it’s true that the further along I get, the more of the horizon I can see and the more confident I feel about my role. If the next six months moves forward as this past six months has, I will be happy with the year and will enjoy moving into a more advisory position as immediate past president. Sincerely, Linda Oestreich
President, STC Board of Directors
STC News
Board Updates for November
By Linda Oestreich
President, STC Board of Directors The Board is discussing adopting a new code of business conduct for Society members. Adopting, publishing, and asking members to adhere to such a code have the potential to increase the value of STC membership to employers. It is a way for STC to emphasize ethical responsibilities while also signaling to employers that they should hire STC members because of their adherence to the code. However, a decision about how to enforce the code would be necessary if we were to truly show employers that STC does not tolerate unethical practices. The Board is considering possibilities, including preparing a code that is more than the recommended best practices we currently post as Ethical Principles (www.stc.org/pFiles/pdf/EthicalPrinciples.pdf). Susan Burton, our Executive Director, has cautioned that enforcing a Code of Ethics is a delicate balance because of legal concerns, and is not something that we will enter into haphazardly. Other professions make adherence to ethics guidelines part of a certification or license through the use of a trademarked title or logo—members who violate the guidelines retain their membership but lose those impressive initials after their names or the use of the trademark as a professional designation (and since we do not have a certification in place, this solution isn’t one we can yet use). No decisions have yet been made, but the discussions around the possibilities are interesting!
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Instructional Design and Learning SIG to Present Web Seminar
Rob Brown will present a live Web seminar, "Ware in the World..." from 12PM to 1 PM Eastern Time (17:00 to 18:00 GMT) on Friday, November 30, 2007. The seminar, produced by the Instructional Design and Learning (IDL) SIG, will provide an overview of virtual training environments and demonstrate how they can be used to dramatically reduce training costs, save student setup time, and improve course reliability. For more information or to register, please visit www.stcidlsig.org.
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Check Out the Summary Edition of the Salary Database
Which ten U.S. cities have the most technical writers? Which have the fewest? In which cities do technical writers earn the highest and lowest salaries? These are some of the questions answered by the Summary Edition of the Salary Database for technical writers, which republishes data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The Summary Edition presents data by state, combined statistical area, and industry, as well answers to the questions above. To see the Summary Edition, visit www.stc.org/stcmembers/salarydatabase01.asp (login required). On December 5, STC presents a live Web seminar titled "Upgrade Your Career Using STC's Salary Database." In this seminar, economist Rick O'Sullivan will walk participants through the different ways the BLS data can be used to assist in job searches, create budget projections for technical communication managers, evaluate the competitiveness of different regions for facility location, and provide estimates for technical consulting for different regional and industry clients. The seminar comes with a PDF containing the full BLS data. For more information, please visit www.stc.org/webinars/webinars.aspx.
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Attention Workaholics!
What do comedian Jeff Foxworthy and Japan’s former prime minister Keizo Obuchi have in common? They're both mentioned in the latest installment of Doug Davis's online column "The Business of Technical Communication." According to Doug, one of them is a workaholic; Doug provides a checklist to help you determine if you are too, and offers advice for workaholics on where to get help. Read "Hello, My Name is Doug and I’m a Workaholic" at www.stc.org/pubs/onlinePubs01.asp.
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Introducing iMIS
STC has recently begun using a new account management software, iMIS. iMIS is incorporated into stc.org, allowing members to manage their contact and profile information. Changes to contact information will appear in real time, and members also have the option of selecting a new username and password (no more remembering your STC membership number!). To create a new username and password, visit access.stc.org/imispublic and select “My Account” from the options at the top of the screen. This username and password can be used to access members-only content throughout the STC Web site. iMIS is also powering STC’s renewal campaign. Go to https://access.stc.org/JoinSTC/Renewal.aspx today to renew your membership.
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Industry News
Web CMS Trends for 2008
CMS Watch (10/23/07) Thomas, Kasman
The Web CMS Report 2008 outlines several trends expected in the coming year, starting with a return to coupled production and delivery. Customers are more willing to look at and use Web content management systems that couple content production and delivery, or couple content management with Web site management, and vendors are more willing to provide such systems. Businesses feel pressure to customize and optimize consumption experience in close to real time, and Web 2.0 demands create even more pressure due to higher user expectations in immediacy and responsiveness. Second, there is an increasing interest in REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as a basis for services-over-HTTP, and few customers are using the Web Services APIs offered by vendors, leading to a general apathy toward Web Services. Third, XML support will continue to grow, but content reuse will dwindle. The ability to compose a new document out of small pieces still cannot be easily done with most WCM systems, and demand for the ability to take a document and use it in multiple places or send it to a mobile device will continue to grow. Fourth, the Add-On Module will make a return as vendors continue to find it profitable and easy to sell customers additional modules as an addition or a replacement for core product upgrades. Fifth, AJAX features will continue to be delayed, possibly because AJAX applications are difficult to test and debug and because the technology changes with some regularity. Sixth, there will continue to be a general indifference toward Java Content Repository compliance. Vendors say that customers are not yet demanding JCR support.
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How Do You Say...
Wall Street Journal (10/22/07) P. R5; Loftus, Peter
The Internet has made physical distance a non-issue for businesses, but language barriers remain a significant obstacle. However, translation software is making it easier to do business in other languages. Computer translation is not perfect, as human input is often needed to ensure accuracy, but the most recent programs are faster and more accurate than previous versions, making it easier for businesses to translate foreign language-based Web pages, news reports, documents, and company communications for employees and customers. Ford Motor Co. uses translation software to translate vehicle-assembly instructions written in English into Spanish, German, Portuguese, Turkish, and Dutch. New assembly instructions are needed every time Ford introduces a new model as well as for changes to the manufacturing process for existing models. Vehicle assembly instructions can change three to four times during each model year. Instructions are usually written in English and then entered into Ford's translation system and workers in foreign plants can see the new instructions the next day. Ford technical specialist in artificial intelligence Nestor Rychtyckyj says machine translation has improved substantially over the years and makes the translation process more efficient than using human translators alone. Industry experts say that translation software can also be used for publicly available material, but the human contribution becomes more important in preventing mistakes that could embarrass the company. Others doubt the human element will ever be completely removed when dealing with publishable content. Some translation software providers offer a technology called translation memory, which stores manually translated words, phrases, and sentences so that they do not have to be manually translated every time they appear.
Web Link - May Require Paid Subscription
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DITA Redux
EContent (11/07) Vol. 30, No. 9, P. 41; Doyle, Bob
Since the Darwin Information Typing Architecture Standard 1.0 was officially approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, it has become the most expedient route for organizations to deliver content as reusable XML content components, writes CMS Labs director Bob Doyle. DITA was originally designed by IBM for online documentation, and DocBook's loss of market share to DITA is likely to speed up with DITA 1.1's introduction of a Bookmap specialization of the DITA Map that supports long books and contains numerous metadata elements for Front Matter and Back Matter. Chair of the OASIS DocBook technical committee Norman Walsh says specialization based on the DITA architecture's object orientation and inheritance properties represented DITA's greatest single advantage over DocBook, and it is perhaps inevitable that DITA 1.1's major specialization directly competes with DocBook. DITA 1.1 also automates the alphabetization of structures such as indexes and glossaries into multiple languages. In its current iteration, DITA can deliver XML content to Web sites on demand, personalized, and localized without the significant cost and sizable time investment of DTD and XSLT development. In addition, DITA's singular content reference mechanism checks the reused component for validation against the schema.
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Q&A: Bruce Tognazzini on Human-Computer Interaction
E-Consultancy.com (11/06/07) Maven, Richard
Nielsen Norman Group principal Bruce Tognazzini, who founded Apple's Human Interface team and developed the company's first usability guidelines, notes that there are more user-unfriendly than user-friendly Web sites on the Internet, and the worst single gaffe they make is discarding the user's work. He cites 27-year-old guidelines on human interface design whose validity still holds up, and these guidelines call for an intuitive interface that anticipates user needs as much as possible and is designed with the end user in mind, simple screens that eliminate unneeded verbiage and superfluous graphics, and tolerant and forgiving inputs. Tognazzini says that most companies have still failed to grasp even the most rudimentary concepts of human-computer interaction, and he says that "such ignorance and laziness ensures full employment for HCI designers for the foreseeable future, and also ensures that the original promise of the Web, with its sweeping aside of 'bricks and mortar stores,' will continue unfulfilled." Tognazzini remarks that video ad formats offer a terrible user experience, but this situation will not change as long as users tolerate it. Tognazzini projects that a lot of iPhone knockoffs will come out, but hopefully a gestural interface will take root and promote a new form of power and simplicity across many devices besides phones. In his opinion, phones, faxes, and computers offer the most irritation in terms of use, because "powerful applications have outstripped the capabilities of all three," while the devices' interfaces are uniformly lousy.
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Former OpenDocument Advocates Bolt for W3C Standard
CNet (10/30/07) LaMonica, Martin
Some OpenDocument (ODF) supporters have moved to embrace the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Formats (CDF) standard instead, largely due to ODF's technical limitations for sharing files with Microsoft Office applications. CDF is considered better suited for handling Web-born documents and Web 2.0 applications. "We can't meet our market requirements with OpenDocument," says Gary Edwards, founder of the OpenDocument Foundation. "The truth is OpenDocument was never designed to meet market requirements." Edwards started the foundation and a project to build a plug-in that would convert documents between Microsoft Office formats and ODF less than a year ago, but efforts to develop the plug-in resulted in numerous technical problems. Consequently, Edwards and his team have shifted focus to developing a converter between Office and CDF documents. Edwards' switch to CDF reflects Microsoft's long-standing opinion that ODF is specific to OpenOffice, an open-source desktop application backed by Microsoft rivals. "OpenDocument is not an Internet-ready file format," Edwards says. "To me, we've been fighting to bring OpenDocument to the Internet and it means changing the basic charter. With CDF, it can be done but it's got to have the big vendors supporting it."
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7 Challenges of Implementing a Content Management System
CMS Wire (10/23/07) Conroy, John
Author-it Software CEO Paul Trotter says the problem with enterprise content management systems is that while potential "efficiency" benefits are almost incalculable, the challenges caused by implementing such a system are so daunting and potentially complex that bad decisions during the early stages of implementation can drastically reduce those advantages, making the initial stages of establishing a content management system absolutely vital. A white paper written by Trotter on the implementation challenges presented by content management systems breaks the implementation challenges into seven categories. The first section, control and management, outlines how CMS can act as a revolution for content, which has never had a major overhaul the same way financial data has. The second section addresses the challenges involved in the migration of old content from sterile formats to more useful CMS formats, which, if improperly managed, can be extremely difficult due to improper formatting in old documents. The next section looks at getting the go-ahead from managers and executives to switch to a CMS, followed by the resistance often encountered when employees are asked to switch formats and systems. Employees might also be openly hostile due to a fear of becoming obsolete. Employees may also have difficulty switching to a collaborative format where multiple people contribute to the same document. Finally, Trotter examines how IT departments often react to the implementation of CMS, and suggests including the IT department in the procurement phase so they can be a part of the decision process.
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Growing Pains
InformationWeek (10/29/07) No. 1160, P. 42; Dornan, Andy
Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, mashups, and social networking are increasingly becoming a greater part of tech-savvy business plans. The various technologies, products, and sites that are associated with Web 2.0 are all based on improving interactivity, and the concept of Web 2.0 as a whole is designed for two-way communications. Web 2.0 features replace static HTML with JavaScript applications that continually send and receive small pieces of XML or text, creating sites that allow people to communicate instead of simply reading or shopping. The theories behind Web 2.0 should make it ideal for businesses, but industry is actually lagging far behind consumers in Web 2.0 adoption. Corporate interest in blogs, wikis, and mashups has actually decreased in 2007, according to an InformationWeek online pool. Part of the reason is businesses already have access to sophisticated versions of the same technology. Blogging is simply publishing, a wiki is a content management system, and AJAX is a more standardized way of accomplishing what many businesses do with ActiveX or Java. However, the lower cost of Web 2.0 technologies indicates that they will eventually replace traditional methods, although analysts say they will need to be adapted to fit businesses' accepted practices. Aaron Hathaway, CIO at investment bank Prager, Sealy & Co., says he sees wikis having greater use within enterprises than other Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs. He says the major attraction of Web 2.0 technologies is that they are almost always free.
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Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy
Useit.com (11/12/07) Nielsen, Jakob
Finding the proper balance between providing a lot of information in a long but unreadable article and too little information in a short and easily digested article is key to creating an effective online article. While longer articles may contain more information, if they take too long to read users will give up on the Web site in favor of shorter, easier content elsewhere. A cost/benefit ratio can be used to find the best length for an article. Cost is simply the length of time it takes to read an article, while benefits are the amount and quality of information the user would obtain from reading the article. Information foraging can be used to calculate an article's costs and benefits and formally model user trade-offs when deciding how much to read. When analyzing content, remember that a good editor should be able to eliminate 40 percent of unnecessary material while retaining at least 70 percent of valuable information, creating a significantly shorter, but comparably valuable article. A good compromise that involves mixing short and long articles can be used to appeal to readers who want short, informative pieces for general interest and readers who are seeking more in-depth information. It is also important to remember that reading benefits vary depending on the reader's circumstances and interest level, but for the most part short articles contain more value per word.
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Musings on Writing Regulatory Documents
Le Quebecois Libre (11/04/07) Sepulchre, Etienne H.
Etienne H. Sepulchre, a drafter/editor for Canadian public institutions for about 20 years, discusses the struggle between conciseness and precision in regulatory documents. "If conciseness and precision cannot co-exist in the same regulatory document, I do believe that legislated rules should be kept to a minimum and their details worked out in explanatory documents," writes Sepulchre in his blog. A balancing act needs to be found between exact descriptions of rules and regulations and creating a readable and understandable document. Rules regulating safety requirements cannot be limited to simply stating that devices must be designed, manufactured, and maintained in a way that makes them safe for their intended use, as specific regulations need to be established, but at the same time running through every aspect of the industry is excessive. Sepulchre says there are numerous situations where it is suitable to generalize regulations with terms such as "generally accepted practices," most often in industries or activities that have sufficiently matured over time and have long-standing regulations. One must also consider any government involvement in the industry, or lack there of, when drafting regulatory papers, as well as any possible complications brought on by insurance, public image, potential loss of market share, and the possibility of industry or governmental supervision.
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Wikis, Docs, and the Reuse Proposition
Cool Stuff (11/04/07) Armstrong, Eric
Online document editing can be simplified by wiki systems, but Eric Armstrong notes that existing wiki formats do not support the type of reuse that the Darwin Information Typing Architecture document format was designed for. However, he reasons that some of DITA's best features could perhaps be deployed by combining JavaScript, CSS, and an extensive wiki, and he thinks that the simplest way to do this is through the use of a Ruby-based wiki called MediaCloth. Armstrong believes clever coding could enable MediaCloth to allow modular reuse along with easy online editing. When run in JRuby, MediaCloth's advantages include ease of installation, performance scalability, native threads, extensive class libraries and documentation, and Ruby's extensibility. Armstrong writes that a Ruby-based solution is preferable because it offers ease of extensibility, and extensions will be necessary in a number of areas mainly to generate reuse potential. These areas include WYSIWYG editing, transclusions, conditional text, variables and steps, and composition. Conditional text can be potentially implemented as basic and hierarchical categories, but DITA does not currently support hierarchies. "Although I don't currently see exactly how to do so, I feel sure that it would be feasible to implement more robust hierarchical semantics in a (J)Ruby-based implementation," Armstrong writes.
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How to Organize the Web
Technology Review (11/02/07) Naone, Erica
Microsoft's Live Labs is developing Listas, a new Internet tool designed to offer a way of organizing online content. Listas is based on creating lists, either by typing in original content, taking clippings from Web pages, or reading and editing public lists. The lists can include almost any type of content, including images and videos, can be public or private, and can be tagged to make searching easier. Listas also allows users to acknowledge each other as "friends." Lists made by a user, that user's friends, and public lists the user links to are all collected on a single page. Downloading and installing the optional Listas toolbar, which works with Internet Explorer, makes it easier to select items from Web pages such as text, URLs, blog posts, or product listings and add them to a list. "Lists are a fundamental data type across the Web," says Live Labs product manager Alex Daley. "A great deal of the information we produce and consume across the Web is in this structure." Daley says Listas' greatest virtue is its generality, which allows users to organize data however they see fit. Live Labs director Gary Flake says Listas was created because he had a feeling that his online information was spread out everywhere and no longer under his control, noting that the more involved a person is in online communities, the more severe the problem can become.
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Employers Tapping RSS Tolls to Tame Info Overload
IDG News Service (10/31/07) Perez, Juan Carlos
Organizations are starting to deploy RSS tools to help control the flow of information among employees. At Union Bank of California, about 80 departments and groups, including public relations, marketing, sales, product management, and operations, are using RSS to cut back on the number of e-mails, voice mails, intranet postings, and printed documents. Union Bank's James Penn says the company realized that about half of all communications were not going to the correct people. For example, sales people weighed down by excess communications were unable to give enough attention to information about the company's latest promotions. To solve communication problems, the bank is deploying an RSS system with specific feeds for each target group so workers receive fewer and more relevant messages. Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young says that an RSS system is ideal for delivering what employees need to know about and act on, as long as the employees do not need to know or act immediately. "The first problem we see addressed regularly with enterprise RSS systems is e-mail overload," Young says. "Most knowledge workers these days are just about completely fed up with e-mail." Young says user indifference and ignorance, along with familiarity with e-mail, are common barriers to RSS adoption in workplaces. "While most people have a love-hate relationship with e-mail, it's easy to use and very convenient," Young says.
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Adobe's Platform Changes the Game in Applications
Investor's Business Daily (10/31/07) P. A4; Seitz, Patrick
Adobe's new Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) computing platform is an effort to blur the line between Web and PC applications and give Microsoft's Windows some competition. AIR allows developers to build and distribute rich Internet applications on the desktop capable of running online or offline on Windows, Macs, and Linux PCs. AIR runs outside of the Web browser, so it is not constrained by the browser's design, while combining the speed of desktop computing with the data capabilities of Web applications. AIR can be used to design consumer and business applications and is expected to be released early next year. Yahoo, eBay, FedEx, and SAP reportedly already have AIR applications in development. At a Web developers conference, Adobe demonstrated some of AIR's applications, primarily consumer-focused, including a digital catalog by a clothing chain, a tool for Walt Disney travel agents, an aid for eBay users, and Adobe Media Player. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen says applications that bridge the gap between the Web and desktop will make current Web sites seem old-fashioned. "Three, four, five years from now, how you view information on the Web and how you interact with information on the Web is going to be completely different than what we all experience today," Chizen says. "The who paradigm is going to change."
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DITA Support in Adobe Technical Communication Suite
Technical Communication (11/04/07) Jain, Vivek
FrameMaker 8, included in Adobe Technical Communication Suite, extends the structured authoring functionality of FrameMaker to enable authors to work efficiently with DITA. Captivate and Acrobat 3D allow Flash demo files and 3D models to be added to FrameMaker 8, while FrameMaker can be used to build a book from a DITA map to generate PDFs and online help. The FrameMaker book can then be added to as live links, which will be reflected in Help output. DITA has become a core part of the product strategy, and as customers adopt DITA and standards evolve, enhanced support for DITA is expected to be available throughout Adobe Technical Communication Suite. The DITA functionality in FrameMaker 8 is provided by a series of application features combined with a set of structured applications, which are combined to provide core tools for DITA authoring and publishing. The import/export processing features allow for authoring in FrameMaker with translation to DITA-conformant XML, ensuring interoperability with other systems. FrameMaker also offers a structured application for creating and editing DITA maps, as well as managing relationship tables. FrameMaker can also be used to build a FrameMaker book from a DITA map, and resolves conrefs and displays referenced content as a text inset in the open document. FrameMaker DITA features are customizable using the DITA Options dialog box or by editing the ditafm.ini file.
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Reading the Future
University of Victoria (11/01/07) Cador, Jennifer
University of Victoria English professor Ray Siemens believes that within one generation the majority of reading will be done online, including full-length books. Siemens is leading a multidisciplinary group of researchers dedicated to developing a new way of reading, essentially striving toward the electronic book. Siemens says the electronic book would simply be an extension of existing trends because so much reading already takes place online. Online reading has not yet included books, however, largely because of the computer's lack of portability and because reading from a computer screen is harder on the eyes than reading from a book. While laptops are highly portable, they are not convenient for reading on a bus or at the beach. Additionally, many people like the experience of reading a book. Siemens and his research group are considering all of these factors as part of their effort to develop online books. Creating new technology such as gentler monitors and e-book readers will address part of the problem, while cultural expectations will likely change as technology advances. Siemens believes that electronic reading will make reading a far more active experience. "What the future looks like is not a single book in isolation, but a book integrated with everything else on the Internet," he says. "The key is figuring out how to present it in a form we're all comfortable with."
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