Alan Brandon

There’s a nice writeup by Sonia Simone on the Copyblogger about the recent Horizon Realty PR fiasco.  Quick summary: Horizon Realty Group, a Chicago real estate company, sued one of its tenants for libel because she posted on Twitter that Horizon “didn’t care” about the mold in her apartment. The tenant only had about 20 followers on Twitter, but the heavy-handed actions of the company soon made it to trending topics on Twitter. This means the issue was reaching hundreds of thousands of readers.

The key line of the Copyblogger piece is:

You don’t get to bury your story on page 47. There is no more page 47. Every story is somebody’s page 1.

Organizations must stay current with the latest communications channels if they want to control their message and influence their story.

I got a lot out of Scott Abel’s book review of DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers on The Content Wrangler — and I haven’t even read the book! I think Scott really nailed the progression of structured writing over the last decade or two.

… The personal computer, the World Wide Web, desktop publishing, … have transformed not only the way consumers interact with content, but these advances have also altered the way professional communicators work. … Technical writers and editors have been forced — like it or not — to move to a more formal method of creating content, often for a global audience. Gone are the days of the free-for-all approach to creating technical documentation products one-at-a-time … The advent of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and rapid adoption of topic-based content standards like DITA have forced [technical communicators] to separate content from format and end our addiction to desktop publishing. Today, technical communicators must learn to write modular, topic-based, context-independent content using a new breed of authoring tools.

While Scott focusses on DITA (the subject of the book he is reviewing) I would add Information Mapping to the modular tools and techniques that are enjoying a resurgence in the write-once-publish-many boom.

The modular approach to technical writing is nothing new, although the names of the concepts have changed and shifted. I remember HP’s writing system was based on modular building blocks of information.