Six reasons why your wiki isn’t working

Wikis are a great way to create and publish documentation online, but there are many wikis that haven’t worked. They comprise just a few pages of incomplete, out of date information. Why is that? Why do some wikis work and others just fail? Here are six key reasons why: 1. The wiki isn’t managed A… Read more »

Moving technical authors from institutional thinking to network thinking

In this video clip, Ecademy’s Thomas Power talks about how business leaders will have to switch between “institutional thinking” (closed, selective and controlling) and “network thinking” (open, random and supportive). There’s a similar challenge for technical communicators – between traditional “closed” user documents and collaborative, conversational, “open” online user assistance.  Thomas claims: You have to be very… Read more »

Find, Follow, Finesse, Feed: The future for technical authors?

A number of commentators have suggested that, in the near future, content curation will play a key role in technical communication. As more content is generated by users, there needs to be someone who manage this content and ensure users will be able to find the right information. Techcrunch has just reported on how YouTube is dealing with… Read more »

Did technical documentation play a role in the White House’s decision to move to Drupal?

The reasons for the White House’s decision to run its Web site, whitehouse.gov, on the open source content management system Drupal are being discussed on various Web sites. Alongside Drupal’s functionality, flexibility and openness, some are suggesting that Drupal’s documentation was also a key factor for deciding to use this system.  One commenter said:  For a big project… Read more »

Why are there so few UK technical authors on Twitter?

At a rough guess, there no more than 20 UK  technical authors using Twitter on a regular basis. Given the Social Web is going to play an increasing role in User Assistance and Customer Support, that’s a surprise. What’s stopping them, I wonder? It may be they don’t understand how to use Twitter, they might… Read more »