ITauthor

I wonder how many people who have installed Windows Live Writer have ever again written a Wordpress blog post from within the Wordpress Web interface. Surely not many.

Just an idle thought.

I just installed the Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer and I’m about to see how it works. The idea is that when you post to your blog a dialog box pops up with some boiler plate words, the blog post and a TinyURL. You can modify the template, and you can edit the message before it gets tweeted - or at least I’m hoping you can. Let’s find out.

Something Ann Gentle said on the Communications from DMN podcast made me think about they way I use blogs and forums. This is especially relevant right now as I’ve got variations of the same question sitting on three forums.

What she said (about 24 minutes into the show), while discussing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book Groundswell, was:

There’s this ladder of involvement in social media. Some people like to write blog entries. Some people only like to comment on blog entries. Some people like to review products. Some people just like to read other people’s reviews and act on that review.

I’m an occasional blogger. Sometimes I’ll post every day, other times months will go by and I don’t post at all (usually when I’m up to my eyeballs at work). In some ways I admire the committed bloggers who write lengthy and well thought out posts every day without fail – and sometimes more than one a day. But I do often wonder why they’re spending so much time and thought on this rather than on their paid employment, or their family.

I’m also an occasional blog reader. I use Feedblitz to mail me posts from lots of blogs, but a lot of the time I just read the summaries and never the whole blog post, or I just delete the email without reading anything. My reason for not reading more blog posts is that I know that if I didn’t ration myself quite strictly I could easily spend several hours a day doing nothing else but reading blogs.

What I’m not is a commenter. I rarely ever comment on blog posts and as for forums, I can’t remember ever answering a question on a forum. And this makes me feel bad for two reasons:

1. I love it when people email me, or add a comment to my blog, with a point about something I’ve said in a post, or on a podcast. However, I rarely ever contact the writers/hosts of the blogs/podcasts I enjoy reading/listening to regularly. So they never know I’m out here, one of an invisible audience, enjoying their work. I really should do something about that!
2. I don’t use forums except as a last resort – at which times they often prove invaluable. I have some questions out in forums at the moment as part of my search for the right online help architecture/method for our new applications. And I remember back in 2002 when I was doing some pretty hairy stuff with RoboHelp, I got a lot of help on the Help forums from people like Rick Stone, Rob Chandler and Char James-Tanny. But I’ve never felt any inclination to become an MVP of anything myself and watch the forums on the lookout for people to help.

Am I just a bad, self-centred person?

Well, no, I don’t think so. For me it’s all about a balance of guilt. I hate spending much time at work doing anything that’s not what I’m being paid to do. I pretty much feel like my company has bought my time from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch) and therefore they own my labour during those hours and if I’m writing a blog post or helping someone on a forum I’m essentially cheating my employers. So I make every effort not to be drawn into this kind of thing, and if it does happen I make sure I work extra hours at the end of the day to make up for it. I think this is the generations-old Calvinistic influence showing through.

And when I’m not in work I feel guilty if I spend too much time blogging or preparing podcasts, because I have a wife and kids who deserve some of my time and attention. So once I’ve done some blogging and some podcasting, that just doesn’t leave much time for anything else that would take me away from my family.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things. Maybe, as Ann Gentle suggests, it simply that there are some people who mainly just blog, some people who mainly comment and some people who never blog or comment.

About six years ago we got a new manager at work and he had trouble with all the names and acronyms we use. He asked me to put together a Web page of terms and explanations for our intranet. But - without doing any consumer research - I thought I’d go one better and, using a vast amount of home brewed Perl and Javascript, I construct a Glossary site that was essentially a Web front end for a little database. Anyone in the company could add new glossary terms and definitions or edit existing ones. I spent quite a bit of time on it (my own personal time because the guilt thing prevented me from effectively charging the company for my work on this), and the end product was pretty damned good and did things like emailing specified addresses every time a change was made (because I was a little bit worried that a loginless system would tempt someone to go in there are write scurrilous definitions). However, in six years, although I know people (mainly new-starts) refer to it, no one but me ever adds or changes anything. It’s exactly like me and Wikipedia. On average I probably use Wikipedia a few times a week and have done for years. But I’ve never ever edited or added a single thing. I’m not proud of this, I’ve just never felt any desire or obligation to do so.

Communications from DMN:
Talking shop with Anne Gentle

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The voices in this podcast belong to: Graham Campbell and Alistair Christie.

This time round, Graham and I discuss the best way of interviewing technical writers.

Skills/attributes we mention as being things we’d look for in a candidate for a technical writer position include:
1. Evidence of solid English language skills (particularly competency in written communication)
2. A genuine enthusiasm for technology (and preferably a fascination in software)
3. Signs that the candidate would fit into the team, provide effective peer review and would be able to interact with the developers
4. The ability to review the work of colleagues effectively – and to have your work reviewed

Podcast recommendations:
The Best of MySpace – http://www.bestofmyspace.uk.com/
Mostly Tunes – http://www.mostlytunes.com/

Note: The song I play at the end of this show is one I heard on a recent Mostly Tunes show:
Be OK by Ingrid Michaelson – played here by grace of the Podsafe Music Network.

Listen to more of Ingrid’s songs.

Application recommendations:
Adobe Buzzword – http://www.acrobat.com
Google Calendar – http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/options/ 

Tips:
Press Q on Google Calendar for a quick, natural language way of adding an appointment.

What I’m listening to:
Graham is (still) listening to the music from the Transformers movie.
 

Oops! – a note about the sound quality
Despite a quarter century of podcasts (if you see what I mean) I still managed to make a couple of schoolboy errors with the recording of this podcast:
1. I didn’t check the levels properly, so Graham is too quite and my mic is maxing out
2. I accidentally recorded in mono. Usually I record with each mic into one side of a stereo recording so that I could remix the levels.
So apologies if I sound worse than usual in this recording and you’re struggling to hear Graham.   

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

I posted my first question on Stack Overflow today and already it’s had a couple of replies. I can see how Stack Overflow could become a little addictive because it has elements of a game built into it. For starters, you build up reputation points, which you get from other people by providing answers, but you need some reputation points before you can start giving points to others, and you can’t comment on other people’s answers until you’re above a certain rep level.

Have a listen to Hanselminutes Show 134 to hear Jeff Atwood, CEO of Stack Overflow, talking about the concept of the site and what they’ve done to make it an appealing place for software developers to hang out. The bit that really struck a chord with me was when he described Stack Overflow as sort of an antidote to Experts’ Exchange, the latter being a site that really rubs me up the wrong way because of its underhand tactics. There are so many times I’ve searched for something technical on Google and found a hit that looks like it might provide the answer I was looking for but I don’t notice it’s at Experts’ Exchange until I get there and discover the details are obscured because the site is run as a private club, which I refuse to join.

I like Stack Overflow. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I think its search facility is very weak right now. If you want to find stuff it’s best to use Google, like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com/questions YOUR QUERY

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com/questions online help

The other aspect of it is that, if you’re not a programmer – or even if you are – it can be an intimidating place for the newcomer. You have to brace yourself and be prepared to be told you’re an idiot and should go away and never darken the doors of Stack Overflow again. But, in some ways, that’s not altogether a bad thing. It’s intended to be a games room for professional programmers – it’s not designed for just anybody to go and find an answer to any old thing. But, unlike Experts’ Exchange, everyone’s allowed to come in and wander around and listen in on the conversations. However, if you try answering a question you’re not qualified to answer, or you start asking questions that should have been asked elsewhere, then you can expect the regulars to give you a hard time.

I’ve just started the challenging task of hiring a new technical writer.

As a result I’ve been reviewing our interview process, researching what other bloggers have had to say on the subject and generally thinking about the challenge of getting the right person.

As chance would have it, Writer River dropped an email in my inbox on Monday with a relevant article: 
The Interview Question You Should Always Ask

This is one of those blog posts where the comments are as interesting as the actual article. The question referred to in the title (you might want to stop reading here and go and read the article first … no?, okay let’s continue) is “What do you do in your spare time?” I’ve never asked this question but I thought it was a good one. If an applicant says he/she writes a blog, contributes to open source documentation projects and creates instructional videos and posts them on YouTube, then they probably immediately elevate themselves into the contender bracket.

However, some of the comments warned of potential HR headaches, or nightmares, arising from asking this question.

I would never ask this question.
1) It might take you somewhere where you do not want to go:

What do you do in your spare time? - I sing in the choir at my church.
or
I take care of a disabled husband.
or
I meet with the therapist that is helping me to battle my addiction.

Another commenter added the following grim warning:

Should this candidate reveal something in their answer that could be viewed through the lens of being "protected", and you elect not to hire the candidate, you may find yourself spending significant time with your legal counsel.

This also made me think that maybe I should consider getting our HR person involved in the interview. I’ve always preferred not to have the HR person sitting in through the whole interview, but maybe I should, I’m not sure. I tend to think that HR problems generated from interviews (other than for internal candidates, which is a more complicated situation) has got to be more something that happens in the more litigious US, not here in the UK. But maybe this is an accident waiting to happen and we should be less easy-going/conversational in our approach to interviews, which would be a shame.

Some good resources on interviewing are:

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0) by Joel Spolsky
• Thoughts on Interviewing by Gordon McLean
• Interviewing by Gordon McLean
• 10 Alternate Tests for Evaluating Technical Writing Job Candidates — A List for Hiring Managers by Tom Johnson 
  This is another one where you really need to read through the comments.