Young persons guide to technical authors

The Department for Education is writing a national careers guide to IT-related jobs, and has asked Cherryleaf to introduce them to a young technical author who would be happy to feature in the book. The guide explains what is involved in their day-to-day work, and is used nationally in careers services, colleges and libraries.

Invitation to a networking event

Celebrate the long summer evenings and take the opportunity to network with your fellow authors in a relaxed environment.

Many of us work on our own and don't have the opportunity to share our ideas, thoughts and problems, or make contact with other authors.

Cherryleaf invites you to a networking evening to enable you to meet with your fellow professionals.

Join us between 18.30-22.00 on Thursday July 14th for a few drinks and food at the Sekforde Arms, central London.

Contact us to sign up and get more details.

Ghostblogging - Who you gonna call?

No time to learn the skills of blogging? No time to post content on a regular basis?

The answer is Ghostblogging - writing and posting content on your behalf.

We can create a Corporate Blog as part or outside of your Web site, and then employ one of our writers to update it. We work with you to ensure you have an authentic voice for your organisation.

The benefits are:

• Your Blog becomes a source of good, well written information.


• You are able to post on a regular and frequent basis.


• You have a Blog designed and maintained by people who are expert in this field.


• Your Blog is optimised your meet your objectives

Contact us for more information.

PhD on Single Sourcing

We were asked by a PhD student in technical communication at Oklahoma State University this week if she could include some of our articles and findings on single sourcing in her dissertation.

She is looking into whether native English readers and non-native English readers comprehend single-sourced English-language documents differently.

We look forward to reading about her findings.

Book - Winning by sharing

Leon Benjamin is launching a book called "Winning by Sharing". It is about the dramatic changes in the nature of work, the emergence of the network economy and its implications for corporations, employees and portfolio workers. It describes the emergence of extensive, global networks of people who want to work and conduct business in completely different ways, which are at odds with the traditional nature of the firm and its command and control organisational structures.

The Big Picture that comes with this book will show you how to thrive in the knowledge/network economy.

The Stress of Technical Writers

In 2001, the Techwhirl Web site published a report on Stress Management for the Technical Communicator. How can writing be stressful, you may ask. They cite overload of tasks, impossible deadlines or expectations and difficulty getting information from subject matter experts (SMEs) as the main reason why it occurs. So how do they manage the stress? The most popular forms listed were physical exercise, daydreaming and meditation, having a sense of humor and drinking.

Is technical writing so stressful? I reckon there are many professions that are much more so.

Microsoft Delivers Document Updates using RSS

The Microsoft Help and Support site is now providing an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) for its Knowledge Base articles. Is anyone else using RSS for its delivery of user assistance information?

Letting Users Create their own Paths to Information

Tags and tag navigation could offer a new and better way of finding and organising user assistance information. Tags allow the users to create the navigation route or routes to information. Sites such as del.icio.us, flickr, technorati allow readers to tag as they see fit. We think it could work well. What do you think?

Microsoft eHow-tos

Microsoft's Windows Mobile team has released a set of online user assistance topics that they have called "eHow-tos ". These are multimedia versions of "How To" topics, and we suspect they are likely to add "eWalkthroughs" too. Is this a useful innovation?

What's your Skype Presence?

In two years, Skype has reached 44 million users and have 3 million concurrent users online each day. 2% of all broadband users currently worldwide on the Internet are on Skype at any one time, and more than 5% of international voice traffic is going over Skype.

So what is Skype? At its base level, it offers zero cost PC to PC telephony and very low cost charges for PC to PSTN phone calls. However, its technology also offers you a global intercom, "always on" access to people, a way to avoid telephone tag, instant messaging, video chat, file transfer and many other capabilities.

This video stream of a presentation by Stuart Henshall explains some of the implications of Skype and asks "What's your Skype Presence?"

You can download Skype here and take a look.

Cherryleaf is on Skype. Whilst very few organisations have a Skype strategy yet, there are some that are already modifying their service offerings, selling and support systems to take advantage its capabilities. How will it affect your department, your organisation?

www.skype.com

Ironically, for technical communications professionals, it's quite hard to describe the role in a meaningful way.

One of our condidates came up with a nice way to describe her job. She redefined her job as "making sure that everyone has the information that they need".

This allows people to think about more than documentation, such as training and internal information that does not fit into a manual.

Are there better ways to describe what a technical communicator or technical author does?