Here are my notes from Darren Barefoot’s talk, a self-described recovering technical writer.
He leads with what defines social media? Create your own definition around these concepts:
Conversation - comments on large media sites allow ayone to speak to the media person keeping on the pedestal
Collaboration - 7 million people collaborating on wikipedia, likely the largest collaboration in human history
Sharing - some sort of microbroadcasting is built into every type of website
Scope - there are no longer 42-minute hours on televisions. Your buckets of stuff and time are sliced and diced. Ebooks can be 10 pages to 1000 pages.
Community - constructing affinity groups is easy, accessible
Transparency - blogging encourages transparency - medium is the message
Authenticity - example of knowing it’s fake is fakeSteveJobs.com, Lonelygirl15 is an example of outed fakery
42% of Chinese internet users have a blog
“The people formerly known as the audience”
Survey of 1200 bloggers - why do you create content, do social media? Talk to friends and family first, Keep personal history, Emote top three. But make money bottom response.
An excellent, engaging talk, with the conclusion being, there’s no way to relinquish control, it is already too late.
Here are the takeaways he left us with:
Relinquish control - realize that the best documentation for your product is already not on your website.
Users will help each other - put screenshots in Flickr to make it easy for your users to grab them and use them in their own doc
Empower your most passionate users - for example, the Red Room Chronicles created by a Marriot business traveller. He must be the most passionate hotel user known. Offer those users previews, invite them to focus groups, make them feel special.
Think outside the page - Twitter troubleshooting tips, and of course, remember video and photos.
Go where your users are - find their community spaces, be present as needed.
Here are my notes from the morning keynote with Joe Gollner.
This session was a wonderful kickoff for the conference. For the first time, someone was able to connect for me that XML enabled Web 2.0 connectivity. The social web is a direct result of XML allowing for easy combinations and the participatory web. He had many nice diagrams throughout history proving his point, and I really appreciated him making that connection.
He began with a description of Saint Jerome, calling him the patron saint of content management, er, librarians. Saint Jerome was a monk librarian.
A funny game that Joe played with an XML group was, “Who came to XML from the most unusual background?” This game came after Joe showed a picture of his car with an XML license plate, humorously proving he had “arrived” in XML. The third place winner was probably Joe, who has been part of the Canadian artillery. The second place winner was a former prison guard, and the first place prize was a former surfer pottery maker.
During this session, I was reminded of the Washington Post article that John Hunt pointed out at the March DITA User Group meeting, Re-Created Library Speaks Volumes about Jefferson. Jefferson did mashups of books by tearing them apart, even different language books, and then would bind them into new books – reassembly of content 200 years ahead of his time. In 1815, in order to protect his collection after a fire, Jefferson sold his library to Congress for $24,000, the price that Congress felt was reasonable. It became the Library of Congress, a U.S. establishment that as one library says in the article, “These are the books that made America.”Jefferson had created his own taxonomy, using the terms memory, reason, or imagination. Wow, are there parallels to reference, concept, and task? Well… task may be from a stretch of the imagination for some products but hopefully they are ground in fact.
Bob Glushko blogs at docordie.blogspot.com, great blog name and a fascinating presentation. I liked that he shared and described his semi-retirement as verbalizing his desire to be a beach bum to his wife, but his wife said, I still like my job and I want to work, so go get a job! He has been teaching at UC Berkley ever since.
Building information supply chains - example of the E. Coli scare in lettuce in March 2007. Basically had to figure out how to track heads of lettuce, similar to tracking heads of people to avoid long lines at security in the airport. With enough data tracking - input and retrievability - you can make informed decisions.
Common themes of new information services - document exchange, patterns, similar to supply chains and distribution channels. There are hidden documents in business processes.
His “ah-ha” moment? he had always focused on the document, but with ordering on the web, his user experience is what really matters - did the business process work? Did the lobsters arrive dead or alive? Did his shipment get to him in time and was it the right order? You have to know the back-end, the time difference, the travel distance, the choreography and design of the pattern determines success and a happy user experience.
I’m reminded of the fact that there are 39 time zones in the world, and for collaboration across the world, we have to figure out the time zone difference relative to the person you want to collaborate with.
Bob offers an excellent analogy for wiki-based, community-collaborative content - a restaurant’s lines of visibility. At McDonalds, you have backstage production lines for food prep, at Benihana you have food prep as part of the entertainment right at your table (remeber that onion volcano so expertly prepared?) We should try to strategically determine where to draw our lines of visibility - what point of view do we wish to present to our users?
Ah, now he’s talking about a cooking school where the kitchen is the front stage for the cooks, and the back stage for the customers. A restaurant’s dining room is the front stage for the customers, but the back stage for the cooks. I’m reminded of a webpage I read where people proved that writing on a wiki actually helps you learn more about the tasks because you have to figure out your conceptual understanding of the task to write about it. If you allow more writing to happen next to the backstage when it’s the cooks in the kitchen, or the expert writers in the wiki, more beginners can learn by not observing or reading but by actually participating in the writing itself.
While you may have identified more with either the front end or back end design issues, you can choreograph the information experience for the user.
Here are Bob’s slides, also found on slideshare.net.
Anne is a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International. Read 
