A Techie Tech Writer Blog

Even though I've written here about why I hate the term "content", I'm quite enthusiastic about the emerging discipline known as "content strategy".

The first time I encountered the term "content strategy" was at a UX Intensive workshop run by Adaptive Path in December 2008. Another participant at my table described herself as a "content strategist". When I asked "What's that?", she replied, "It's like a cross between a web designer and a copywriter." At the time, it sounded like title inflation, but I've since learned that content strategy encompasses a great deal more than that.

The field of content strategy emerged as a sub-discipline of web design, when some practitioners realized that the "stuff" in the boxes of a web design deserved at least as much attention as the layout and styling of the boxes themselves. Many credit Rachel Lovinger for first giving voice to this discipline in a March 2007 article in Boxes and Arrows. She described the goal of content strategy as using "words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences". The notions of content management and content management systems have been around for a long time. They deal with the life cycle of creating, modifying, approving, publishing, and retiring content, (or, ahem, information assets). Content strategy, as its name implies, takes a strategic view of those assets, examining how the goals of the organization are served by the information assets it produces. Many content strategists are primarily concerned with web-based information. However, as technical communicators will immediately recognize, not all of the information that an organization produces is web-based. Therefore, the terms "enterprise content strategy" or "unified content strategy" are sometimes used to refer to applying the content strategy lens to all the externally-facing information of an organization:

A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customers’ needs. — Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy

On a certain level, my reaction to these ideas is "Well, duh. Of course you want to do that." But as an individual technical writer, it's usually easier to complain about how those folks over in Marketing never coordinate with us over here in Tech Pubs than it is to step up to solving content-related problems at an organizational level. Taking the big-picture view is easier said than put into actual practice. On the other hand, I believe that taking the big-picture view is essential for providing long-term value to the organization. Tech writers who focus on just writing the docs will find that their jobs can be done more cheaply in other parts of the world, while those who help ensure that all of the organization's information needs are identified and addressed effectively will continue to find employment.

Content strategy is getting increasing attention from technical communicators, for whom there is a natural progression from managing technical information to managing broader sets of information. The Society for Technical Communication 2010 Summit (getting under way in Dallas this weekend), has a number of items on the program related to content strategy.

• The Content Strategy Institute is a series of four program sessions on content strategy


• The Content Strategy Progression on Tuesday afternoon offers a discussion-oriented format, where attendees pick topics of interest and migrate to their chosen speakers' tables for 20-minute chunks with each one.


• The STC Content Strategy SIG hosts a networking breakfast on Wednesday, and will have a presence at the Welcome Reception on Sunday and Communities Reception on Monday. These events provide opportunities to meet like-minded folks and discuss content strategy issues in a relaxed setting.

I'll be presenting a topic at the Content Strategy progression on building consensus with other content strategy stakeholders. I'll be giving a presentation on Monday entitled Building an Empire from the Grassroots Up, on helping other groups in your organization see the value of content management and content strategy.

I hope to see you in Dallas. If you're not attending the Summit, you can follow attendees' on Twitter with the hashtag #stc10; or you can follow me specifically, @jmswisher.

Ivan Walsh is a technical writer currently living in China, who blogs at I Heart Tech Docs. Several weeks ago, I was honored to be included in his list of Top 50 Technical Writers on the Web. He also asked me to do an email interview. That interview is now posted on his blog.

P.S. Thanks also to Scott and Aaron at DMN for including me in their list of Top Open Source technical writers on the Web.

Wired has a review of the Fitbit fitness and sleep tracker, which looks like a nifty device. More than just a pedometer, it can detect the intensity of your activity, and when worn while you are asleep, can detect the quality of your sleep from your body movements. The purchase price includes a lifetime membership in the Fitbit website for tracking all your data, including calories consumed.

However, it currently lacks a manual:

But in order to learn how to tell your Fitbit you are going to sleep, you have to hunt around on the website because there is no manual. The only instructions that come with the packaging are: To start using your Fitbit, go to fitbit.com/start. We assumed the dearth of information meant that Fitbit was so easy and self-explanatory, a manual wouldn't be needed. This is almost true, which is impressive and frustrating at the same time. We hear a manual is in the works, however.

On the Fitbit website, the "manual" is a single page with five bullet points. There is also an FAQ, which is a mix of questions about features, services, and how-tos.

There's just no excuse for this. Either do enough design and usability testing iterations to ensure that your product truly doesn't need a manual (good luck with that), or provide a manual. Hint: the number of products that are so intuitive to all users that no users need a manual is, to a first approximation, zero. Even iPods come with manuals. When I got my first iPod, I had to look in the manual to figure out how to change the volume — the famously "intuitive" interface was not obvious to me.

It's fine if the manual is all online, if the product's use is consistent with connecting to the internet. I'm just skeptical that five bullet points is all a user needs to understand the product.

As attracted as I am to Fitbit's combination of fitness and geekery, I won't be adding it to any wishlists until I hear about an actual manual.

I'm leaving Sunday for the 2009 "Summit" of the Society for Technical Communication. I'll be co-presenting two sessions:

• Documentation with Blogs, Wikis, and Online Communities with Anne Gentle. In this session, Anne will talk generally about how Web 2.0 approaches can help technical communicators converse with end-users, and I'll highlight FLOSS Manuals book sprints as a specific example of bringing together online communities to create documentation.
• Understanding User-Generated Documentation: FLOSS Manuals with Scott Abel. I'll be helping Scott by giving a demo of the FLOSS Manuals site. In this session, FLOSS Manuals is cited as an example of user-generated content as a social and technological phenomenon: users not only can but do generate pretty good documentation.

Some events I'm planning or at least hoping to attend:

• Lone Writers SIG dinner on Sunday evening
• Usability and User Experience SIG breakfast on Monday
• Summit Tweetup Monday night
• Lone Writers SIG breakfast on Wednesday

Finally, I'm now on Twitter, so I'll be microblogging and monitoring the #stc09 stream. If you just can't get enough of hearing what's on my mind, my Twitter ID is jmswisher.

Reflections on David Esrati's keynote at DocTrain West last week, The Content Providers Crystal Ball: What Everybody Missed During the Digital Revolution have been bouncing around in my head, though perhaps not in ways that he intended. This stuff is probably old hat to the pundits whose job it is to pontificate on "Web 2.0". That's not my job, so it's still interesting to me. This post is a somewhat rambling dump of those thoughts.

Esrati is in advertising, and his presentation oddly resembled the beer commercials he derided in his talk — it was highly entertaining, yet poorly targeted for the actual audience. Did an audience of technical communicators really need a history of mass media advertising since the dawn of radio? No matter, slides featuring "I Love Lucy" are bound to be fun.

Esrati does have a point that's relevant to technical communicators, though he could have made it in 15 minutes instead of 45, and it's clearer to me from rereading his presentation abstract than it was from the actual presentation. The rules of how mass media content gets paid for have shifted, and Google, YouTube, and Twitter "get it", while newspapers, record companies, and broadcasters are dying, fighting, or just floundering. (Looks like my former employer, Trilogy Software, is looking to create Newspaper 2.0. They were known for incubating some crazy and crazy-smart start-ups in the dot-com boom era. It'll be interesting to see which category this falls into.)

What Google deeply understands is that the way to make money on the Internet is to deliver laser-targeted advertising that is actually relevant to the people who see it and is shown to them at times when they are interested in just that sort of information. The opportunity for professional communicators, says Esrati, is in creating the content for ads to be shown alongside of. Yay, us.

I've been hearing that "information wants to be free" for a quarter of a century. But Esrati's presentation included a fuller version of that seminal quote from Stewart Brand:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ... That tension will not go away.

That led me to the original quote from Brand:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Of course, information doesn't want anything at all. People do the wanting. Receivers (let's not call them "consumers") of information want it to be free, because they want to get it easily and share it with their friends. Producers of information have a motivation to make it expensive, because they see how it can change someone's life, and they think that should be worth something. (They don't always act on this motivation; knowing that information can change people's lives can also motivate giving it away out of altruism.)

Ease of distribution is driving the cost of content to zero. So where is the money coming from that is making Google so successful? It comes from advertisers, and what they are paying for is a kind of information that has historically been extremely expensive to obtain: information about who you are, and what you want, right now.

You give it away, and advertisers pay Google big bucks to deliver it to them. It's the most valuable thing on the Internet. Are you getting a fair trade?

The Botanicalls Kit is one of the coolest new products around: a circuit board and components that, when properly assembled, plugged into AC and ethernet, and sunk into plant soil, can send tweets or text messages about your plant's water needs.



Since this is a DIY kit, the assembly instructions are essential to customer success with the product. I haven't actually tried to follow them (because I haven't shelled out $99 for a kit), but they appear clear and thorough, with lots of step-by-step photos.

But apparently, there are a few pieces of information missing that would be useful, indicated by a posting on the user forums entitled Things I wish you said in your docs .... This kind of feedback is absolutely golden. Rarely do customers express so clearly and explicitly (and in technical detail, in this case) when they need that you haven't given them.

This particular posting has been up for a week with no response from Botanicalls staff, as of this writing. That's a shame. The appropriate response to this kind of feedback is an immediate big fat "Thank you!", along with an explanation of what you're going to do with the feedback. It may or may not be appropriate to include the requested information in the documentation, but the feedback should not go unanswered.

Sarah Maddox has a fun post about the "Handbook for the Recently Deceased" in the movie Beetlejuice, and asks:

Does anyone know of any other technical writers or technical writing in literature and film?

There is a movie entitled The Technical Writer, which I've not bothered to see due to its mediocre reviews. The main character is an agoraphobe who works as a technical writer because he can do it completely remotely. And apparently without interacting with anyone.

Some instances of technical writing playing a role in movies that I've noted over the years:

• In Apollo 13, once the engineers on the ground figure out emergency repair procedures, the procedures must be documented before being sent to the crew in the spacecraft.


• In 2001: A Space Odyssey, there is a very long procedure posted outside the zero-gravity toilet in the shuttle between the space station and the moon.


• In Kill Bill Vol. 2, (I'll make this vague to avoid spoilers) the instructions on a consumer product are used under very stressful circumstances.

Any others?

I rarely actually buy anything from iTunes. I usually download free podcasts and the occasional free single-of-the-week. Today, when I clicked "Get Song" on They Say by Scars on Broadway, iTunes interrupted with "Our Terms and Conditions have changed". It displayed a pane containing pages and pages of legalese, and a checkbox labeled "I have read and agreed to the Terms and Conditions".

This is absurd (in multiple ways). Even credit card companies have the decency to tell me "Your interest rate is changing from 'usurious' to 'astronomical' on such-and-such date." So why can't iTunes tell me how their terms have changed? Even if the lawyers make them display the entire document, so I can "agree" to the entirety, why not use change bars to flag the bits that are different?

Apple receives a lot of praise for their focus on user experience, much of it well-deserved. But this is clearly a case where the lawyers are driving the bus, not the UX folks.

Oh, and that checkbox really should be labeled "I accept whatever is in the Terms and Conditions, which I haven't bothered to read." Of course nobody reads those things. The next principle after Don't make me think should be "Don't make me lie".

Update 17 May 09: iTunes' latest Terms and Conditions has a section labeled "Summary of Changes" at the top. That's good. But they still make me lie, because the check box is still labeled "I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions".

I've added a link in the side bar for the RSS feed for this blog, for those who want to subscribe. Thanks very much for your interest.

When Aikido is mentioned in non-Aikido contexts, it's usually misunderstood and misapplied. A case in point is this article, Business Aikido: Gaining Strategic Advantage Through Leverage, on the otherwise pretty good Marketing Profs site. Here, the concept of Aikido is just decoration for the author's point about using Web 2.0 strategies. She opens and closes with it, but her main points have little to do with Aikido, even metaphorically.

In Aikido, martial arts students study and practice katas—pre-arranged movements that enable them to deal with an opponent successfully. The centuries-old art teaches practitioners to use the force of an opponent against the opponent. This strategy gives the student a definite advantage if attacked.
...
Start practicing your own Aikido moves, and use your opponent's strength to your benefit.

This description reveals at least three misunderstandings of Aikido. First, a minor factual correction: while it is based on older, traditional Japanese martial arts, Aikido itself was created in the mid-twentieth century by Morihei Ueshiba. The second misunderstanding is more subtle. Rather than talking about using "the force of an opponent against the opponent", Aikido practitioners would be more likely to talk about redirecting the energy of an attack. The objective of Aikido techniques is not to defeat the opponent, but to resolve the conflict.

This leads to the third and most fundamental misunderstanding in the article. When using martial arts as a metaphor for business, we must ask "Who are we fighting? Who is the opponent? Who is attacking whom, and how?" The article seems unclear on this point. Certainly, it seems a mistake to view the customer as the opponent. Is it the opponent then the competition? Here is where a more apt Aikido metaphor could come into play. Instead of merely saying "be small, flexible, and agile instead of big, strong, and slow", an Aiki-based attitude would be "adjust to the situation so that you are no longer in competition or conflict". If the competitor occupies a given space, yield that space and pursue another. Be soft where they are hard, and vice versa. In Aikido practice, we refer to the attacker, not as an opponent, but as a partner, because they help us learn. Likewise, business need not be a zero-sum, win-lose game, if we adjust our mindset.