Alan Brandon

Aptara, a publishing technology and process company, has released a nifty little video about publishing eBooks. The 2-minute video highlights the five things every publisher must do to successfully produce eBooks for readers such as the iPad, Kindle, and smart phones like the Android and iPhone.

(via The Content Wrangler)

In the last couple of months there has been some great discussion inspired by Michael Hiatt’s blog post about the “myth of single-source authoring”.  I love Michael’s summation of the nearly 20-year history of single sourcing:

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

In my experience at companies large and small, I have never seen a successful implementation of a single-source process. Like so much else in writing (and life) one size does not fit all. Sure, single-sourcing has its place and can be a great tool for some types of information delivery. But different audiences need different communications channels, and different channels need their own approach to crafting information.

Also check out Tom Johnson’s podcast and interview with Michael at Tom’s blog, I’d rather Be Writing.

Wikipedia will soon add video to their online encyclopedia. That’s pretty cool, but what’s even more impressive is that they will eventually be adding web tools to allow Wikipedia users to edit the video online.

From an article on Technology Review:

The project also includes developing Web tools to create smooth methods for transferring and editing videos. When a Wikipedia editor finds relevant snippets, he will be able to preview them, and set the “in” and “out” points, without having to worry about file conversions.

The convergence of words, pictures, sound, and video is getting closer to “seamless”. With in-browser tools becoming more widespread (photo editing tools in Flickr, for example) the breadth of media available for techincal communicators is greater than ever before. I know this will benefit information users and consumers in the end (as soon as tech “writers” figure out how to take advantage of the new tools).

via 2moro docs.

The microblogging service Twitter is experiencing monster growth. It’s great for keeping in touch with your friends and fans, but does it have any use in tech writing? Paul Pehrson discusses this in his recent blog post, “Twitter and Tech Communication“:

I’ve seen several Flare users get product support from MadCap employees using Twitter, and I think that is nice for a quick question with an easy solution. Twitter, however, is not a great format for a detailed question that required specific examples and detailed answers. In such cases, the best solution is probably to go to a related email list or forum where you can ask the question in enough detail that experienced users can provide helpful results.

Twitter can be a great tool, and can help people get answers quickly. However, when you have a question and need an answer, you probably ought to consider your question, and determine what channel is best suited for the type of answer you need. That may or may not be Twitter.

Pehrson focusses on Twitter in a customer support role. While complex answers won’t fit in Twitter’s 140-character limit, a tweet is an excellent “RTFM” vehicle. Just like the live chat some support sites offer, Twitter lets a support rep send the customer a link to the information they can read on their own.