Thu May 8, 2008
The conference proper kicked off today with some excellent speakers across the board. There were a lot of presentations, so I’m going to keep it short and give you the gist of each one along with my personal “what’s hot” recommendation on something juicy, cool or just plain geeky that I gleaned from the talk. If the slides for the talk are available online, I’ll embed them as well.
So without further ado, here’s my take on the presentations that I attended.
Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
RJ Jacquez (Adobe)
RJ spoke about how we live in a highly visual world where videos are the primary content delivery method - especially for Gen Y.
What’s hot: Adobe Air
XML in the Wilderness
Joseph Gollner (Stilo International)
The importance of XML cannot be underestimated in the design of content technologies. In fact, web 2.0 is a consequence of the ‘openness’ of XML.
What’s hot: Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos
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Wikis are wonderful, or are they? A real-world story of using wikis for user information
Alan Porter (WebWorks)
Wiki evangelist Alan Porter showed how his company uses wikis for their intranet as well as for project management with clients.
What’s hot: Wiki mavens
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A comparison of three visual help authoring tools
Neil Perlin (Hyper/Word Services)
Neil reviewed three authoring tools: Captivate, Camtasia, and Mimic. Each tool possesses a different feature set, so it depends what you need them for.
What’s hot: My vote for the most user-friendly tool is Adobe’s Captivate.
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Putting everything back together again: delivering effective information products
Joseph Gollner (Stilo International)
With DITA and S1000D emphasizing small multi-purpose units, consideration must be given to what end configuration will most benefit the user.
What’s hot: DITA online community
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Meet the bloggers: Not nearly as disastrously funny as the movie
Anne Gentle, Darren Barefoot, Tom Johnson, Scott Abel, Aaron Davis, and Scott Nesbitt
This was a fun session where we got to meet some of the world’s most prolific technical-writing bloggers in person. You can find some of them in my blogroll.
What’s hot: Made to Stick