What Web 3.0 is really about for technical authors

On Monday I had a good chat with John Fintan Galvin, who is a true expert in Web technologies and SEO, about Web 3.0.

According to Fintan:

"Web 3.0 is all about the automation of connections between resources in a context-sensitive way. These connections can be made between anything defined as a resource, e.g. people, content, systems etc.

For example

Now - You go to Google, you type in a search phrase, you find a few companies and based on your internal model you establish a relationship and you do business.

Web 3.0 - You type in your search query and the system does the rest based on what you have told it previously and what it can learn externally.

If I search for an item that is:

* below £5 in value
* something I have purchased before
* available from the company I made the purchase from last time
* whom I was happy with them
* and they're in the first 3 results
* and I have an account

then place the order.

In simple terms, everything will have much clearer definitions on what they are and what they provide. This allows for the creation of automatic relationships between resources for specific tasks or functions within given contexts. Underlying all of this will be a system of trust that allows for the programmatic decision making…

The primary issue is to get people to understand that it's not just a sound bite, but an actual structural change in the way business will be done and that they have to prepare for it."

How does this relate to technical communication?

Today, online Help (user assistance) is developed in a way where information is provided through manually created links (tables of content and indexes), rather than purely by automated (Google-type search) links. If semantic intelligence can be built into linking and search results, then technical authors should take advantage of this.

In a technical writing context, the example could change.
If I search for an item that:

* is written in British English
* has been optimised to be viewed on a mobile phone
* is available from a site I trust
* is for advanced users

then show me that page.

The concepts are similar to “information types”, a concept Microsoft considered and dropped in the 1990s as part of HTML Help. Information types promised the ability to present different views of the information based on the type of user, content etc. Where it differs, almost ten years on, is the whole concept can be extended much, much further. Web 3.0 promises are more flexible, more automated system with the capability of information being aggregated from a range of disparate, trusted sources.

It would require well-defined rules of engagement with other businesses or data sources. If information is being drawn in from outside your domain, then it needs to be from a trusted source and in a trustworthy form. In such an environment, technical authors would need to do much more statistical analysis of what users want and how they behave – both modelling scenarios and analysing behaviours.

Geek Corner

It could be that the Open-ID standard is extended to include information on how a users prefers to receive user assistance – their level of expertise, preferred learning style etc.

Fintan stated:

”The technologies that count are RDF, OWL, HTTP and SPARQL. I would also add SVG but then again I am obsessed with it. Ensure that you have first class knowledge of relevant ontology / taxonomies related to your industry and general movements towards standards in inter-industry areas.”

Disclosure

Fintan’s company, IO1, and Cherryleaf are both shareholders in a joint venture, ECS Ltd.

Six ways to add Web 2.0 functionality to your manuals

This is an end of a long day post, so forgive me if I miss anything obvious. Here are some suggested actions and ideas for creating Web 2.0 technical documentation:

1. Put your documents on the Web, as Web pages.
2. Create a link to the Web version on folksonomy/tagging sites such as Digg, Technorati and del.icio.us. Describe your content on these sites (using tags).
3. Consider aggregating/incorporating content from other sources into the online version. This could be content from other departments, such as support, or external content. You can use RSS feeds to acquire this content.
4. Create a RSS feed for your content. This can help users be aware when content has changed, and help them re-use the content elsewhere. You could use Feedburner to do this.
5. Create a Twitter account and link your RSS feed to this account. This means users who are also Twitter users can receive your updates through Twitter. You can use Twitterfeed to do this.
6. Consider enabling users to add comments to your content. Some Help authoring tools allow you to add this functionality. Others allow you to embed this functionality from elsewhere. Another potential way to do this could be by using the Adobe Air viewer.

What about wikis? Wikis can be a good idea, particularly if you want to use content from development staff. However, you need to consider how you control and approve content and how you create printable manuals.

What is Web 2.0?

We 2.0 is name for a collection of Web technologies that can be summarised enabling conversation, aggregation and collaboration.

Why add Web 2.0 functionality?

That's a whole conversation in itself, but the benefits include establishing a better relationship with your clients and prospects and getting others to write some of the content.

Have I missed anything out?
Should you take this advice?

Is this video on advertising-customer break up also true for technical communication?

Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley, has posted a blog on the need for organisations to listen directly to the needs of the customer.

Solis states:

"You can’t manage a relationship, you need to be a part of it, fully engaged...

...If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen?

The customer comes first, and if we fuse sociology, social media, customer service, relationship marketing, experiential marketing, and traditional marketing, we’re creating a new formula for outbound influence and fueling a new generation of brand ambassadors and loyalists."

Is this also true for technical communication?

How will the Semantic Web affect user documentation?

Tim Berners-Lee said, in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Today, the Semantic Web means that data may be re-used in ways unexpected by the original publisher.

What does this mean to technical communicators?
Is the Semantic Web "a good thing" for technical communicators?

Issuu - A Web-based pdf viewer for technical authors?

Issuu is a Web site that allows you to upload magazines or newsletters and then view them as interactive, magazine-style online publications in your Web browser. It's a free service and has been described as a YouTube for magazines. There are a few manuals on it already.

The Issuu document is presented in a way that looks similar to a magazine. You can easily flip through it, using the arrow buttons, page numbers, the 'dock' below it, or the index.

Readers can comment on the documents, bookmark them, add authors to favourites or subscribe to them in a RSS newsreader.

Although it is geared towards glossy magazines, it could have uses for technical communicators. My initial thoughts are where you want readers to look and comment on a document, but you don't want them to download it, or where you want your document to look striking visually. The navigation isn't perfect, however.

New how-to/instructional video sites

Another how-to/instructional video site has been launched - Howcast. The video player on the site lets you jump to different chapters or steps, lets you zoom in for a better look, and provides the transcript as well. Viewers can add comments in the form of tips, warnings and facts to each video.

Howcast joins Expert Village, 5min, WonderHowTo, techtutor.tv and Instructables .

Web 2.0 style guides

We recieved an email asking:

"I have just started at this software company, and one of my tasks is to work on the writing style guide. I have been looking around on the Internet for a style guide that covers writing style for web applications (or interfaces), and am wondering if you could point me in the right direction. I am looking for a style guide, preferrably in the public domain, that recommends how web-based user interface items should be written in software manuals.

I've looked at a number of company style guides including Microsoft, Sun, and IBM. However, with traditional interface tools like buttons and menu items evolving with the emergence of more sleeker web-based interfaces (rather than the standard dialog boxes that have been around for some time), I was wondering if any software company (or group), besides the ones mentioned, have come up with more up-to-date descriptions of some of these items in their style guide. I would be very happy if you could offer some advice here."

It's a good question. Does anyone know the answer?

Can technical authors be "part of the conversation"?

I was reading a post by an acquaintance of mine, William Buist, on how advertising will need to change in the future.

He wrote:

"At a recent conference Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old boss of Facebook was talking to 250 or so “middle aged” advertising executives about the news ways that Facebook envisaged advertising developing. His thoughts are indeed interesting. “For the last 100 years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation”. That phrase - 'Part of the conversation’ caught my eye. What does it mean to you?"

Surely technical communicators will face a similar challenge - to be part of "the conversation" in the connected Web 2.0 world that's emerging.

William posed some questions for advertisers that can be also posed to the technical authoring community:

- If we are going to be part of the conversation, will we be let in?
- What would make people do that?
- Once we are in the conversation how can we best add value to that conversation?

Other questions arise:

- Will engaging with a community in a social networking environment create a new and better way of providing user assistance?
- Will social networks create an opportunity for technical communicators to eavesdrop a conversation as well as take part of it?
- Will the rise of streaming websites both for audio and video such as YouTube enable technical communicators to be more viral in their efforts to provide effective user assistance?
- Will technical communicators see snippets of their technical information embedded in other people's Web pages?
- Might the lines between technical support and technical authors start to cross over?

Where do this all go?

William concludes:

"The advertisers who get this right, who deliver to us the right products or service at the right price at the time we need will clean up. The ones who get it wrong could considerably destroy the brands behind the advertising. One thing is certain, the face of advertising is changing. The need for more contextual advertising is clear and the willingness of brands and businesses to engage at the conversation in a social networking environment is becoming more paramount."

If you substitute "technical communicators" for "advertiser", then we could probably say the same thing.

Making interactive "How To" videos

Hypertext functionality comes to videos.

Asterpix is an interesting Web site that enables technical communicators and trainers to create interactive videos.

This brings Captivate-type functionality to TV/YouTube videos.

You can add hotspots and hyperlinks to areas of the video, allowing viewers to get more information on objects of interest during video playback.

Viewers can also navigate directly to specific scenes that contain objects of interest without having to watch the entire video.

This may address some of the disadvantages with video based instruction: having to sit through the whole video; no interactivity; poor search and skip; and no drill down, "minimal manual" capabilities.

(Thanks to Laura Jaffrey).

Zeitgeist

Two new Web 2.0 words:

Crowdsourcing - getting your network involved in development.
Unbreakable branding - branding" via a network/referrals versus a corporately created brand.

Technical Authors and the right to remix

One feature of Web 2.0 is the idea of the "right to remix". This means giving people the ability to remix your information and services.

This could impact the documentation department in two ways:

1. Your organisation decides to allow others to remix and "mashup" its application or service. As part of this, the documentation needs to available to third parties to help support their (and now your) users.

2. Your organisation develops software as it has always done, but you still want to enable others to modify and remix your documentation.

So what would be the implications of giving others the right to change and republish your user documents? A few questions spring to mind:

- If your document were to be combined with other information (say training material from a third party) would users have a better product?
- How do you ensure all the safety information and legal disclaimers and retained and referenced in the right places?
- Can the document be remixed? Does it need to be modularised?
- Would/could somebody do a better job at presenting the user information than you?
- What would the impact be on support call reduction and product perception?
- Would they add or remove information?

This is an area where some technical authors and documentation managers will need to establish a policy in the future. If you want to encourage remixing, you'll probably need to amend your license and copyright agreements to enable people to do this legally. You'll also need to establish some publishing rules and standards too.

Create User Documentation - Is this really what we're doing?

One of our business partners, Dr Alan Rae, has written an excellent report on Web 2.0 early adopter research.

In partnership with Brunel University, Alan's company has been talking to some early adopters about how they have been using Web 2.0 techniques to punch above their weight.

Again, it raises issues that relate to how technical authors might use Web 2.0 technologies to engage (or not) with their audience.

Here are some quotations from Alan's article. My comments are in brackets:

"They (early adopters) learned to start with on-line conversations, develop trust, build collaborative partnerships which spread the costs of customer acquisition and use the tools of Web 2.0 to build and deploy an on-line knowledge base of testimonials and examples of their work to build credibility and attract interest and referrals...

But the most interesting thing of all is how individuals - often in their second or third careers and often one man bands - use the collaboration implicit in web 2.0 to rapidly develop their own knowledge of how to exploit these tools - a knowledge denied to their corporate counterparts by the IT department and the rigours of having to compete with each other...

Contrast this with the situation in the corporate and public sector ghettos where the worker bees huddle behind their firewalls drinking skinny latte and answering emails...

Because this is the other difference. In the "official" world the role of the IT department is to keep everything locked down in the interests of security...

If a sufficiently large section of the population gets its information and does its business in an informal and creative way, how does the corporate marketer (or technical communicator), ensconced behind his firewall communicate with them?

This seems to be a key fault-line in many areas of life at present. There is a discrepancy between the official world of security, audit, tick-box and prescription on the one hand and the behaviour patterns for learning, communication and doing business that people adopt when they are able to drop the bureaucracy and behave honestly, immediately and creatively."

His project will produce a workbook and workshops based on the case studies later in the year. Our report on applying Web 2.0 to technical communication is here.

The problem of finding people with expertise

We're currently working, as part of a consortium, on a proposal for a project to make finding people with expertise easier. Finding expertise inside and outside (i.e. people you might want to hire) an organisation is a huge and interesting challenge.

Let me illustrate. Nowadays, information on a person's expertise isn't in just one place. Typically, it's distributed in different places across the Internet:

- Different versions of their CV may be posted on job boards and portals. What's more, each version of the CV might emphasise different aspects of their expertise and experience, and some versions could be out of date.
- Their personal Web site may contain detailed descriptions of current work and research interests.
- Their publications and presentations may be published on-line.
- Social networks may define their relationships within a professional, social, special interest or research community.
- Contributions to sites such as Blogs, online forums and mailing lists may mark them as a a person actively engaged in the latest developments in their discipline.

It's equally as bad within an organisation. Indeed, many organisations still rely on "word of mouth" systems to find internal experts.

The problem of searching for and describing people with expertise is likely to grow in the future.

The problem is hard to solve:

- Experience and capability has many sides.
- You need to describe the skill areas and topics in a way that works internationally.
- Valuable information about expertise is often hidden in social interactions (such as participation in online communities).

The proposed solution looks good: people-focused, scaleable and conforming to open standards.

The expense of failed knowledge transfer

Microsoft's Rod Caron has posted an interesting article on building online communities "to facilitate Knowledge Transfer". It includes the great quotes: "shipping the knowledge is just as important as shipping the product", "a product without knowledge is support waiting to happen" and "It's very much a case of 'pay now, or pay more later' when it comes to product and technology knowledge transfer."

Link to article "Community Facilitates Knowledge Transfer" http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2007/03/27/1970039.aspx

Link to article "Facilitate Knowledge Transfer in Online Communities"

http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2007/03/22/facilitate-knowledge-transfer-in-online-communities.aspx

As we posted earlier in the week, Cherryleaf is involved in setting up a European Community-funded project aimed at improving small and medium sized enterprise involvement in Life Science projects.

Web 2.0 features in upcoming MadCap Flare products

MadCap Software has announced more details on its upcoming "MadCap Feedback Server". In addition to feedback reports on how your readers are using your Help, it includes some of the Web 2.0 features we have been promoting.

These include:

- Web 2.0 community capabilities, allowing readers to add their own comments to existing documentation
- The ability to allow readers to rank the quality of the topics and content

This will make the incorporation of these Web 2.0 capabilities into Help files much easier to implement.

MadCap will also be offering the option of a MadCap Feedback Server hosted service.

They claim "Now you can get feedback on how your audience uses your Help content, allowing you to maximize the effectiveness of your documentation."

Web 2.0 research

We've been contacted by a team that is doing a research project with the business school at one of the London Universities. They are looking to do in-depth interviews with people who as "early adopters" use the tools of web 2.0 to market their business. They'll be interviewing us about this and about our business IT systems.