Stories from SXSWi 2008 – Creating Findable Rich Media Content

Here are my notes for the Creating findable rich media content session at SXSW Interactive. Listen to the podcast for yourself if my haphazard notes are difficult to follow.

• Navigation typically not followable for Flash, etc. Text is embedded, not retrievable by spiders, key text is not prominent or differentiated (even XML).
• Lack of a unique URL hurts your linkage and Google ranking subsequently.
• If content is not coded or tagged correctly you’re not as findable.
• Disney example – their entire site is Flash. You can make Flash search-friendly, navigation is key – just make sure spiders can get through.
• Javascript function detects non-Flash capable browsers, so viewers get primary content (text, anything you can add to an HTML page).

Samsung example – Flex and AJAX for 20,000 SKUs of different tv models, used XML site maps to get all the deep links (which were previously unfindable).
Economist has a video site – 1 page for each video linked from master.
Tubemogul lets you upload videos in bulk with good tags, good titles.Not always rich media that’s the problem, but the execution, making sure you think about search and findability early on in the project, and tag early.

Sometimes content goes up only for a month and then comes back down, so search is irrelevant. Plus, if you want a rich experience, then you don’t worry about search – you actually want fewer people to have that rich experience.

Creating a findable strategy – or make your content find your users. (Now that is an interesting concept to ponder for technical writing.)

Fiat website – Flash-based
Layered approach – CMS backend with XML that transforms either to HTML or to have Flash consume the content. This approach could be mistaken for a form of cloaking, make sure intent is legit and alternative is a faithful representative of Flash content.

Other SEO suggestions – break up container, create deep links from blogs to specific content allowing inbound links.

Other findable strategies
Never ending friending report 2007
Asked people ages 14-29, if you had 15 minutes of spare time, what are your top two choices for using that time? Social networking or talking on cell phone were the top answers.

Target example (Adweek article) -Back to College campaign on Facebook
2-3 months lifespan, so this is an example of not worrying about findability, but rather ensuring that your content finds your users. How does Target create a dialogue with college students; one that would inspire and support their transition into college life?
Give freedom to kids to discuss produts, within their own community.
Personalized checklists sent to mobile.

Funny side note – I think this Target campaign was a nominee of one of the “Suxors” as one of the worst social media campaigns in 2007.

Consider everyone’s accessibility – mobile phones, text to speech, and so on.

Google webmaster tools – google.com/webmaster – these are relatively new.

Q: What is the biggest challenge coming up?
A: Something should be invented to work in the authoring stage to give info to the search engines.
Q: What about exclusionary methods? They don’t understand the ping pong effect something that’s cool will come around everywhere? His clients don’t want to pay for the bandwidth and so on.
A: I don’t think they actually answered this other than to say viral is always good.

Q: What about microformats?
A: The Google panelist said it needs to get more standard and have more attached to the content. He did point to http://www.google.com/experimental/.

Upcoming wiki talks in the central Texas area

Next week I’m presenting at the Alamo STC Chapter, giving a talk titled “A Technical Writer’s Role in Web 2.0 — Wiki-fy Your Doc Set.” It’s at the Igo Library in northwest San Antonio and you’ll want to refer to their website for directions. It’s Tuesday February 12th with the presentation starting at 7:00.

I plan to update the presentation from the last time I gave the presentation at the Austin STC chapter and I’ll post the slides to slideshare when they’re ready. I’ll take it out of Google Presentation format and go with PowerPoint since the 800 x 600 display was pretty dismal using Google Presentations. It’s too bad because sharing that presentation was so easy.

The week after next on Wednesday February 20th, the Central Texas DITA User’s Group is continuing the wiki panel discussion we started in January with three more speakers talking about their wiki experiences, including one wiki that uses DITA as source. Here are the presenters:

• Lisa Dyer, Lombardi Software
• Michele Guthrie, Cisco
• Alan J. Porter, Quadralay Webworks

The networking starts at 7:00 with the panel starting at 7:30. It’s at the Freescale campus on Parmer and directions are available on the DITA wiki. I’m looking forward to this presentation as an audience member as well to learn about more wiki best practices and DITA conversions to wikitext.

Specialized information hoarding

I get the greatest blog ideas from my lunch companions lately. This week it was a few former BMC writers. At BMC, the writers have an annual book exchange around the holiday time, and it was so popular we sometimes repeat it mid-year.

At our book exchange, everyone would bring a wrapped book, place it in a pile, then draw a number out of the hat. The person who drew the lowest number would chose from the pile, unwrap the book, read the description, and then the person with the next number would choose to either “steal” the already unwrapped book or take from the pile. The person who drew the highest number would have many unwrapped book titles to choose from.

For a few exchanges in a row, Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell appeared in the book exchange pile, so all four of us at this lunch had read and enjoyed the book very much.

Could you hoard all the information on a topic if you wanted to?

Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell is a wonderful fantastical story about the return of magic to England due to the two people in the title (well, and due to other forces). There are humourous parts, and the fun of the book is that each magician has a very different approach to learning magic again. One hoards all the books about magic. ALL the books. This aspect of information hoarding was especially interesting to us writers at our lunch discussion. Could you even do that in modern day – collect all the books about a certain topic (albeit a narrow focus?) No way.

Another observation is that the cautious one is the one who hoards all the information and only very reluctantly shares it with his reckless pupil. I’m working on a panel discussion on collaboration and I can’t help but remember this book and how fruitless and unsuccessful it was for Mr Norrell to attempt to keep all the books on magic in a single library. The similarity I would draw is how difficult and unhelpful it is to try to write all the information and hoard your topics, never to be remixed into other deliverables.

If the information is hoarded, how is it released to the wild?

Another story that came up in the same week of lunchtime conversations was one from Don Day. He has had a certain camera since he was in high school, and never knew that much about it. He has taken it apart numerous times, and looked for books about the camera, searched on the web with all the identifying text he could find inside the camera, and tried to find any additional information about it, but never found out more.

But! This past year, when someone (I believe the book’s author) uploaded several chapters from a book about specialized vintage cameras to the Internet and it became indexed by Google, Don learned that his old camera that he couldn’t previously identify is worth a couple thousand dollars! It was like the TV show, Antiques Roadshow, had delivered an appraiser to Don through the Internet.

Don’s love of cameras comes full circle in the information sharing sense. Don maintains a wiki about cameras called “Light of Day” and has wonderful photos there. I like this quote from Don’s bio in a wiki entry about the Central Texas DITA User’s Group meeting for October. “I work in high tech, but I love simple things, which is why I feel that an early camera, made of leather and wood, but fitted with a precisely-polished lens, is such a great complement to my own life experience.”

With these two tales of information collection, I hope you see the beauty of share and share alike. Any one else have a great story of information suddenly revealing itself? Or a tale of an information hoarder who met with trouble?

Nifty tools

Open a DOS command prompt from Windows Explorer – how have I been missing out on this tool? And the Google Docs & Spreadsheets tool is a great idea.

Not long ago, I was tipped off to a handy add-on tool for Windows XP that lets you right click and open a DOS command window in the context of a folder you right-click in Windows Explorer. It’s called, simply, “Open Command Window Here” and you can download it from Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows XP page.

Here’s a screenshot showing the context menu.

For working on batch files, testing Ant scripts, FTPing files, or just about anything that requires a command prompt this is a great shortcut. And check out the other PowerToys like the Alt-Tab replacement which gives you a thumbnail view of the application window when you press Alt-Tab. Nifty!

Now after reading Steve Carl’s Google Office Beta post and Writely and Friends post, I’ve got some more tools to play with some more! I have been working with Google Spreadsheets and find them great with only one more feature I want — I want that drag-and-fill feature that Excel has where your formulas are calculated all the way down a row. I’ve got a shared spreadsheet for doing mortgage qualification calculations. I think anyone can have access to it which is a very cool feature, I think. Google Spreadsheets had all the financial formulas I needed to re-create an Excel spreadsheet I made and since I’ve shared it with friends and family often, it seemed like the perfect candidate for sticking into Google Spreadsheets. So there you go, a practical application of a collaborative tool.

Supplementing product documentation with Google searches and blogs

Today I found a counter argument to the previous post about how good product documentation makes the product worthwhile

Earlier this week I posted about how good product documentation can sell a product, but today I came across “Manuals, conversations, and RSS” by CTO Sean McGrath, where he talks about playing “a well known IT adventure game known as “catch the randomly recurring problem in the mission critical system”.” I’m sure many of you IT adventurers have played this game as well.

He estimates that his information seeking time is being spent in these areas:
10% Reading vendor manuals
20% Googling, then reading
70% Reading developer blogs, user mailing lists etc. Of this 70%, he further breaks it down as:
RSS feeds: 20%
RSS-only search engines: 20%
Blog surfing: 30%

Connecting to conversations, that’s what it’s all about. What an interesting look at two different approaches to getting the info you need to solve a problem. Perhaps debugging requires more detailed information than setup and administration as the previous post talks about? Still, it helps me realize that product doc doesn’t always provide for every user’s needs.

That said, we should constantly strive for some good combinations of deliverables and delivery methods that can work for a broad range of needs. For example, the concept of a DITA/wiki combination offers structure to an editable web site that both the product developers and end users could edit and add to in a structured way. We’d need an authoring tool that’s like a webform that can validate XML against a DTD, and a wiki that can accept the DITA XML topics and display them as navigable, editable wiki pages.

Another neat combination that’s already out there is user-supplemented help, as described on the Usable Help blog, where the help itself can contain comments and conversations occur through those comments. As Gordon Meyer says, it “allows end-users to communicate directly with the developer, and more importantly, with each other about the quality of the documentation and the features of the software.” Well put.

While I can’t always retrace the exact steps I take to a certain article, I like to explain how I find some of these links, and in this case, I found it as a link from “Exploring Agile Methods for Web Design in a post titled ” Why QA professionals throw away manuals and blog instead.”

I won’t ignore the fact that the blogs at talk.bmc.com are also the opportunity for conversation with our end users. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on documentation, our products, BSM, ITIL, you name it, and we’ll talk about it. Think about ways that you can open conversations with your end users when you roll out new IT applications. What are some of your ideas?

EMC Adds Google Desktop to EMC Documentum Federated Search Environment

An excellent combination, Google search for your enterprise content

Yep, yet another Google-related post. I guess I can’t get away from Google lately. Documentum is the storage location for much of BMC Software’s technical documentation, and this press release announces that EMC has chosen to integrate Documentum ECI Services with Google Desktop for Enterprise. It’s based on version 5.3 and offers full-text search capability across all types of documents stored in Documentum.

I also learned from this ComputerWorld article that Documentum already supported Google Web site search and the Google Search Appliance. This announcement touts the ability to use the Google Desktop search index.

The article also says that one target for this type of search is the call center employee whose job success depends on finding answers fast. I think many of us know how helpful it is to find answers fast regardless of job description. But certainly this is a tool for keeping your help desk and service desk fast and responsive.

Google Desktop to the rescue

Wherein I admit to a completely foolish overwrite of a white paper in progress, but also tell you how Google Desktop saved my text and made my day

I was working in Word 2003 this morning on a white paper and wanted to create an outline. I deleted the body text between headings and THOUGHT I had saved the file as a new file. To my horror, I realized that I had saved over the original file. I frantically searched for .tmp files, backup files, the clipboard text in case I had copied some text, but the sinking feeling in my gut was the realization that I had truly written over the file with no hope for recovery. (I didn’t have the magical Save AutoRecover info every option (on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab) selected as I learned on this Microsoft KnowledgeBase article.)

I’m not the first to sing the praises of Google Desktop here on talk.bmc.com, but today I discovered a great new use of the tool! In looking for pieces of my text using Google Desktop, I found that Google Desktop had cached versions of the Word file stored about every 10 minutes! So I clicked the Cached link with fingers crossed, and lo and behold, there was the text of my document. I quickly copied and pasted it into a new Word doc and heaved a sigh of relief (or was it a shout of victory? Ask my hallmates.)

Nothing left to say but WHEW.

A smart Google search to locate specifics in BMC’s tech docs

Here’s a method for searching BMC’s repository of technical documentation using Google

You can use Google’s site: search feature to look for technical documentation that’s stored on the www.bmc.com web site. Just add site:bmc.com/supportu/documents to any search string that you enter in Google, and the results that are returned are only from the BMC web site in the directory where technical documentation is stored. It’s even doing full text-search within the PDF files, so it’s quite useful. Here’s a sample search string. Just enter it in the Google Search field.

smtp site:bmc.com/supportu/documents

Any other favorite Google search tips and tricks? My favorite collection of them is on the O’Reilly site, related to the Google Hacks book. My most used feature that Google offers has to be the automatic spelling correction it does on search strings. How about you? Any favorite Google features you’ve discovered?

Best practices for document management systems

Complex, to be sure, document management systems are helpful to IT departments and tech pubs alike

I recently received a question about best practices for electronic document management systems using Word 2003. While I use Word 2003, I have only used it in combination with Sharepoint as a document management system, and the docs I write in Word are usually short, internal documents, not external technical manuals. Coincidentally, I’ve heard that IT departments are using document management systems in concert with their CMDB. Text-based documents, drawings, architecture designs, all these documents are important to an IT department and any business organization. It makes sense that the CMDB would be related to a document management system, although I won’t get into any discussion about whether each document is a Configuration Item (CI) or not.

My experience with document management is Documentum with FrameMaker, and we don’t currently do much co-authoring with people in the rest of the company. So I’ll admit first off, this request for information is outside my personal knowledge. But, I do like a good research question and I gathered together some reading items.

Here’s a summary of what’s found in this article about putting together a document management system using Microsoft tools. Your environment may vary widely from an accounting-type environment, though, but I thought these were decent overarching goals for managing documents, and I expanded on a few of them based on my experience with document management systems in general.

1. Determine what documents get the “document management treatment.” Create limits on what is stored and maintained in your system so that you know what’s in there and what’s not, and you also limit maintenance and a bulging file system. Will you scan and store images of paper copies?
2. Classify or group your documents together. Some EDMSes do this for you using document type, but you might also want other criteria for easy search and retrieval later. This approach also allows you to assign more than one classification to a document.
3. Store the files efficiently to make retrieval easy. Your EDMS might do this on its own with little input from you.
4. Retrieve as needed, using versioning if desired, which leads to the next step. Realize that indexing and keyword searching are crucial tasks for retrieval. Be sure to train users to properly tag documents for fast and efficient retrieval. You may have to create a taxonomy using standard terms for the system.
5. Managing and tracking documents allows for the type of collaboration where one person can check out a document to make revisions. Other collaborative activities might include activities such as participating in active discussion groups, tracking issues associated with customer engagements, maintaining common contact information for subject matter experts on a particular document, and even assigning tasks related to a particular document. Tracking and versioning also allows for storage and retrieval of documents from a point in time which may be helpful historically.

For research like this question, one place I like to do searches is answer.google.com. There was one relevant Answer for someone who was looking for an analysis of document management software. It’s long but comprehensive. I realize you might be well past the evaluation stage for a DMS, but you might get a look at what features are offered. You can also use blogsearch.google.com to search only for blog entries on a given topic, although that particular search method did not offer much on this particular topic.

Going beyond Google, I did a search using www.bloglines.com to search for blogs about “document management systems,” and the best I’ve found so far is www.docuvantage.com/blog. Another site that offers a wide range of case studies and white papers is The Gilbane Report at http://www.gilbane.com/.

There are also lessons learned from the doc management trenches at Hewlett-Packard. It appears the author is Susan Charles, an Information Research Analyst at Hewlett-Packard. She describes the implementation of an internal document management project at HP. She discusses the challenges of the project, and what she sees as the lessons learned.

In addition, here’s a case study from a university setting. I haven’t read through it completely but it might offer some advice.

As with many best practices in technology, you want to analyze first and implement second. Spending more of your time in the up front planning and definitions will pay off when you go to populate your system with documents.

Anyone else have some advice to offer? Feel free to post a comment, or use the trackback URL to write about it in your own blog and refer to this entry.

How do you evaluate software?

Discussing one evaluator’s perspective and looking for other evaluation methods

I use Google Answers for research questions on occasion, by typing in some keywords and then browsing through already-asked or already-answered questions. I believe you could look for business trends by browsing through the Business and Money section of Google Answers periodically. It’s a definite time-suck if you go off on some of the sections like the questions in Family and Home. (Just how many times does a toddler hear No? Try 400 times a day.) Or even just sort by price to see what information is worth $200. For example, what if you need to buy 1 million Nokia cell phones? But I digress.

In Google Answers, while researching a white paper, I stumbled across an interesting account of how a system administrator might go about evaluating software. This is only a view into one person’s mind set when buying software, but it offers a glimpse and a perspective I hadn’t seen before. I think it also caught my eye because his third priority when evaluation software revolves around documentation and learning curve. His words: “The third qualification I look for is: existing documentation and training availability. I want to know this not only for my team’s learning curve, but also, to see how much the industry accepts the package as something worth writing about.”

As a technical writer I definitely like to hear that documentation helps put a product over the top. But also worry a little because each person’s evaluation of a piece of documentation is different. Plus, as I learned at the Best Practices in Tech Pubs session a few weeks ago, sometimes what a user perceives as product documentation didn’t come from a tech pubs group. Also, his perspective has to do with what others have written about the software, not necessarily the manual that’s shipped with the product. So, in my mind, there has to be something written other than the online help or printed guide to help him qualify and evaluate the software.

His first and second qualifications have to do with exit strategy. “How do I get away from this thing if I need too?” and “Can I access the data from another tool, outside this one, such as Perl?” For someone who makes software, that registers as “Yikes.” Yet in my own evaluations of document publishing or HTML editing software packages, I can see his point. If all my documents were in Word Perfect still, I’d be looking for a more common information architecture to go to for that content. (Reminisce: remember Word Perfect’s code view in the early 90s?)

So. What are your top three evaluation criteria when looking at a software package? Does the doc factor in at all?