Joining Membership Organizations: When $100US Is A Big Waste Of Money

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler Each year about this time, many knowledge workers are asked to decide which membership organizations they want to join. Knowledge workers are often required to submit membership requests to management, usually accompanied by a written statement that outlines the benefits of the membership being considered (the value of membership to the organization). For those of us who are self-employed, we may use a similar, albeit less formal, approach. In both scenarios, the decision to pay membership fees relies on the cost of membership, its Read the full article…

Life Sciences Conference Added To DocTrain 2008 Event Roster

Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008 aims to explore content challenges faced by pharmaceutical companies, medical device and durable medical equipment manufacturers, and health and hospital corporations around the globe. The annual event takes place at the historic Crowne Plaza Union Station in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana, June 23-26, 2008. Sponsorships and speaking opportunities available. Contact Scott Abel, program manager, for details.

Darren Barefoot To Be Featured Speaker At DocTrain West

Popular blogger and technical communication professional Darren Barefoot is a featured presenter at Documentation and Training West, May 6-9, 2008 in Vancover, BC. Barefoot will deliver both a half-day workshop, “29 Web 2.0 Tools”, and a 60-minute presentation, “Social Media 101: Everyone’s a Technical Writer”, in addition to participating as a guest panelist during “Meet the Bloggers”, an hour-long discussion with some of the industry’s most popular technical communication bloggers (led by techcomm blogging guru, Anne Gentle). Darren recently completed work on a new book, Getting To First Base: A Read the full article…

GOOG-411: Toll-Free Directory Assistance From Google

It’s free. It’s easy-to-use. And, it’s making telephone company provided Directory Assistance programs obsolete. It’s 1-800-GOOG-411, the new voice-enabled wireless directory assistance service from Google. Of course, aside from being convenient—and did we mention, free?—it also offers enhanced services including delivery of detailed driving directions and a map sent to your mobile phone. Watch this video from the voice researchers at Google as they explain the new service. Then, check out the GOOG-411 Frequently Asked Questions to learn more.

Google Airwaves: Search Giant Moves To Acquire 700MHZ Spectrum

From a pool of 266 applicants, Google Airwaves, Inc. is one step closer to bidding on the 700 MHz spectrum, up for auction because it is being vacated by television stations mandated to transition to digital broadcasts starting January 24, 2008. As such, ownership of the 700 MHz spectrum will return to US government, which plans to quickly convert the airwaves into much needed cash by auctioning off the wireless spectrum to the highest bidder. There may be Google wireless plan in you future, some speculate. According to Google, “As Read the full article…

Content Convergence and Integration 2008: An Interview With Rahel Bailie

Santa Claus Licenses DocumentReader Software to Reduce Backlog of Christmas Wish Letters

Sometimes, marketing folks come up with a good idea that is so creative, you just have to give them kudos. This is certainly the case—at least partially—for the folks at A2iA Corp. whose marketing team announced recently that Santa Claus had licensed their product, A2iA DocumentReader, so he and his staff of elves could better manage the millions of Christmas wish letters sent to the North Pole from children around the world. The Santa campaign was a good idea, but A2iA missed the boat by failing to integrate the campaign Read the full article…

IBM Introduces Free Smart Email Search Software: Pinpoint Accuracy Helps Save Time & Reduce Overload

When a company that has more than 350,000 employees worldwide who collectively send and receive more than eight billion e-mails every year sets out to invent a ‘smart’ email search solution, it’s serious business. That’s precisely what IBM Research has done—an e-mail search that can figure out what you are trying to find, even when you aren’t so sure yourself. And now, IBM is letting the rest of the world in on the secret sauce by making IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES) for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook available Read the full article…

Building Your Requirements for a Content Management Implementation

By Suzanne Mescan, Vasont Systems, special to TheContentWrangler.com Your organization is considering implementing a content management strategy. What will you need to get started? Pick a content model. If your content is not yet in a structured form, you must choose a model for your content. Several standard DTDs (document type definitions) exist – such as DITA, DocBook, and others – and can get you started more quickly if your content fits one of these models. Do some investigation to see if there is an established standard for your industry Read the full article…

Apple Marketing Genius: iPhone Fastest Rising Search Term On The Net

If advertising campaign success can be measured by the popularity of a product name being used as a search term, then the folks doing the marketing for Apple are big winners. According to Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist, iPhone is the fastest rising search term—not just in the US—but in the world. But it’s not just good news for Apple, some US politicians also have something to squawk about. Google’s fastest rising search terms (global) for 2007: iPhone Badoo Facebook Dailymotion Webkinz YouTube Ebuddy Second Life Hi5 Club Penguin In the Read the full article…

Documenation and Training Life Sciences Call for Participation

The Call for Participation for the upcoming Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008 Conference (June 23-26, 2008) is open. The event explores solutions to content challenges faced by pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and health and hospital corporations. Attendees will include medical, science, and technical writers, marketing professionals, instructional designers, regulatory specialists, information technologists, document engineers, interaction designers and content and online community managers. You can submit your presentation and workshop proposals online until December 20, 2007. Before you submit, find out what we’re looking for and what information we Read the full article…

Mining The Talk: Unlocking The Business Value In Unstructured Information

Book review by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler It’s not often that a structured content evangelist like myself finds himself wondering about the business value of unstructured information. After all, structured content is easy to work with, process, and thanks to XML, automatically reuse. Unstructured content is messy, inconsistent, and nearly impossible to process in large volumes in any meaningful way. Right? Wrong. According to researchers Scott Spangler and Jeffrey Kreulen, co-authors of Mining the Talk: Unlocking the Business Value of Unstructured Information (IBM Press), unstructured content, the most common Read the full article…

Forget Listserv Digests—You’ve Got MarkMail: Intervew With Jason Hunter, Mark Logic

TCW: Jason, the last we talked was about a year ago.  For our readers who don’t recall that interview, can you tell us a little about yourself and the company you work for? JH: Sure, Scott. I work as Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, focusing on large-scale XML content manipulation.  Prior to Mark Logic I did a lot of work in Java: I wrote the book Java Servlet Programming (O’Reilly), helped develop Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant, created the JDOM open source library for XML manipulation, and worked as Apache’s Read the full article…

5 Reasons The “Wikipedia Secret Mailing List” Isn’t A Big Dealhttp://www.ikiw.org

By Stewart Mader, special to The Content Wrangler There’s been a dust-up in the past few days about an alleged secret mailing list that some administrators on Wikipedia were using to privately communicate without getting input from the larger community. To quote: “Revealed after an uber-admin called ‘Durova’ used it in an attempt to enforce the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to undermine the site’s famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny Read the full article…