STC Carolina Chapter
January Membership Meeting
Tools, Trends, and Technologies in Software User Assistance

Thursday, January 21, the Carolina Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) is extremely excited to have Joe Welinske, of WritersUA, give a special presentation about the current state of the software user assistance field. Joe's presentation will provide an overview of the latest trends in software user assistance, including the most important technologies, key terminology, and predictions for the future of the field.
Joe Welinske is an excellent speaker and very highly renowned the software user assistance field. This is a presentation you will not want to miss! For more information about Joe Welinske and WritersUA, please visit: www.writersua.com.
The cost of admission is $5 for STC Carolina members and $15 for non-members. Admission for students is free. Please bring your Student ID.

Join the Carolina Chapter of the STC for: Tools, Trends, and Technologies in Software User Assistance

When: Thursday, January 21 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Where: Tekelec, located at 5200 Paramount Parkway Morrisville, NC 27560-8499
For directions, please visit: http://www.stc-carolina.org/tiki-index.php?page=Tekelec

This is a response to a blog post by Larry Kunz, Technical communication trends in the 2010s. I think at some point we need to stop talking about the future as if we can really see any trends when what we are really trying to figure out is the present. Larry has barely touched the surface about the dynamic nature of our business and the extent of change that will occur, and even now is occurring. Here are three fairly major trends that Larry seems to have forgotten to mention anything about:

1. Recognize that change is part of normal operating procedure. Don't keep looking at trends as if they are out there in the future. They're happening now and we will have to adjust to changes that are continuing to occur.
Recognize that we will have to wear many hats and change them often.

2. Social media is a way of seeing the use of the Web. We don't control the conversation and we shouldn't try. Recognize that the Web is our friend, not just another (or a multiple-faceted) media, it is THE media but it is also a different type of media than ever before because it allows interaction and participation in ways that were never possible with other media.

3. We are still far from getting enough online. I know it's tough for a lot of people (look at executives) and for a lot of types of data (look at medical records) but it all has to get online eventually. And it has to interconnect.

I'm hoping this is the beginning of the discussion about trends in our profession. We should be able to know what is going on in our profession, but let's not pretend that the world is static or that we are not connecting in new ways and connecting with information in new ways.

There is a growing voice that claims that companies should have a social media director or a chief operating media-ist or at least some one at the higher levels of management who would be in charge of social media for the firm. The logic is that leading the charge for this new form of communicating and engaging with the customer should be done by an advocate in management, right? But the point of social media is that everyone is communicating and engaging with everyone in real-time at all levels and this goes against conventional corporate hierarchy. The fact is that if you want to do social media, let everyone in the company participate in it, let everyone communicate with the customer as needed, and let the engagement begin. You can't channel all the social media effort through one person or else it's not social media. I'll be developing this idea further but this blog entry is a starting point. Do you think there should be a point person for social media in a company or does a change of business mean that an executive does not execute in the same way anymore?

There's an interesting article on NewScientist about Wikipedia's lack of recent growth.

From the article...

The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively.

One possible cause could be resistance to new editors (contributors) to Wikipedia.

The revert rate for editors who make between two and nine changes a month grew from 5 to 15 per cent over the same period.... "This is evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content..."

Read the full article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17554-after-the-boom-is-wikipedia-heading-for-bust.html

Okay, gang, get the word out. Bill has proposed a topic for a presentation at Ignite Raleigh, and he needs your vote. The top 10 presentation ideas selected by the online community (that's you) will present at Ignite Raleigh.

You can vote – http://voting.igniteraleigh.com/
You have 10 votes and can give up to 3 to any one presentation.

You may have to click on the New tab to find my idea:
Who's the Point? Finding Me and Meaning in Social Media

Ignite Raleigh is on August 5, 2009 at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh.
We want everyone to focus on Ignite presentations that teach something and have social value, but are open and creative.
The presentation submissions and voting deadline will be July 20.

Please login and vote!! http://voting.igniteraleigh.com/

And pass the word! The more votes the better.

We should probably post more topics about personal branding and what search engines are picking up about us — this is a topic of great interest to many of us and cannot get more personal than this. How are each of us viewed online?

I noticed today when I did a search on my name (Bill Albing) that Google Search has added more items including Twitter posts (or tweets and re-tweets) and attachments (files such as meeting minutes posted on a site) that have my name on or in them.

This is awesome but also scary that the Web has this sort of memory about stuff that can be years old and largely forgotten, about stuff that can be trivial or detailed, about stuff that is available for anyone to see at anytime. Information is never obsolete or deprecated.

More to come.

Elsewhere, I've blogged about today's Race for the Cure. But I just had to also mention that it was curious how much signage and identification and information there was all over the Race for the Cure and all over people. There were endorsements and sponsorships of participating companies on signs and items and booths; there were remembrances of family members or friends with slogans and names on paper or on t-shirts; there were race numbers pinned to shirts of people. There were little signs and posters and name tags and slogans everywhere, on everything and on everybody.



And there were so many people and more than one race (a one-mile race for kids and the longer race for adults) that the Finish sign was not where the adults finished the race. In fact, there were so many people when we went that, with the constant stream, we had no clear start or finish from unloading from the buses to the front of the campus where the race officially started and down through the streets of Raleigh and back. But that did not stop any of us from walking the entire race and talking or chatting and feeling good and finishing. There was enough people to follow, that directions signs would have been irrelevant.

This evening, several past presidents of the Carolina chapter of STC (the Society for Technical Communication) met for dinner and discussion at Carmen's Cuban Cafe. While there could have been many more present, the five of us who dined had a great time discussing a range of topics from bee-keeping to Facebook conventions to the financial situation facing the professional association. The meeting was really for Bea Bailey who will be taking over as president of the Carolina chapter. She has some great ideas and a wonderful group of people working with her, so I predict she will do a fine job as president. Of course the chapter is only half (in terms of number of members) as it used to be, reflecting the drop in overall membership of all of STC. Her challenge will be to decide whether to see the chapter as half empty or half full. I got the sense that she is a much quieter presence than some of us more talkative past presidents and perhaps her ability to listen will do her well. What she did say sounded like the voice of experience (having served as vice president) and the voice of one who knows what she is doing. I would imagine that this same transition is happening in many places around the country (and world) as chapter presidents hand the reigns to the next in line. I hope they all have as much calm and steady leadership as the Carolina chapter.

Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) talks about the future of Wikipedia and its future focus on accessbility and usabiltiy.

Watch this inteview as STC (the Society for Technical Communication) awards Wales as a 2009 Honorary Fellow.

While we don't usually talk about such minutia, today we were researching proper copyright syntax and came across something interesting.

The phrase "All rights reserved" which was added to copyright statements to extend those rights beyond the United States, now is no longer needed.

To quote from the Wikipedia article, which has a good summary:

''"Copyright law in most countries no longer requires such notices, but the phrase persists."

"The requirement to add a notice became obsolete and essentially deprecated on August 23, 2000, as every country that was a member of the Buenos Aires Convention (which is the only copyright treaty requiring this notice to be used) is also a member of the Berne Convention which requires protection be granted without any formality of notice of copyright."''

For more information try these sites:

What is Copyright Protection?
http://www.whatiscopyright.org/

Copyright Basics
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf

U.S. Copyright Office
http://www.copyright.gov/

Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=12313&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html