さまざまな利用を想定して書く

オンラインコンテンツは、文脈とは無関係にユーザーの目にとまることが多い。本来想定された目的とは違う目的で読まれることもよくある。そうした目的を全部予測することはできないが、テキストのさまざまな利用を考慮することはできる。

Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Content Management>Writing>Information Design

XML and Marketing Materials

Marketing materials are always important, and in these difficult times, they are critical to the success of the organization, and there are huge pressures to do more with less and for less money. Enter XML. XML is often perceived as complex, rigid and horrible to work with (geeky, technical) — anathema to the average marketing communications author. But this is no longer true. XML and the tools that support them have matured to the point where the XML is hidden, much in the same way RTF is hidden from the average Microsoft® Word author. Using XML for marketing materials provides considerable benefits, including consistent messaging, reduced time to create content, reduced costs to maintain content, reduced translation costs, and powerful multichannel conversion capabilities. XML is creating a profound shift in the way we create, manage, deliver and control marketing materials. It is a shift that is resulting in significant ROI and increased levels of success.

Rockley, Ann. Rockley Group, The (2009). Articles>Content Management>Marketing>XML

Producing Documentation and Reusing Information in XML, Part 1: Document Publishing Using XML

XML provides a way to identify data items and subcomponents within any structured data set, but has its roots in documentation development and production. Robust, open standards for XML document markup and a rich set of freely available tools for XML document parsing and format conversion make it easy to install and configure a complete documentation development and formatting environment on any UNIX® or Linux® system.

von Hagen, William. IBM (2009). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>DocBook

Producing Documentation and Reusing Information in XML, Part 2: Reuse Information in XML Documentation

Discover simple solutions to reuse information in XML documentation, such as how to use XInclude to include other documents at a given point in a document and how to use XPointer to include small document fragments from other documents or a similar pool of information in XML format. Also, get tips for structuring XML documentation to simplify information reuse, and learn how to maintain stand-alone documents that you can incorporate into larger documents.

von Hagen, William. IBM (2009). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>DocBook

Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life. The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

Cohen, Noam. New York Times, The (2009). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>Wikis

Community and Documentation  

This chapter explores the idea that a small group of people who have a sense of belonging in an online community may provide content much like a technical writer does. Regardless of their background, education, or training, more people are becoming providers of technical information on the web.

Gentle, Anne. XML Press (2009). Articles>Documentation>Content Management>Social Networking

Back-End Designs and the CMS Cycle of Disillusionment

Usually, the one thing missing from the planning of a WCM-driven web site is what's most likely to shoot the implementation in the foot: the functional design of the CMS back-end. The form and function of how the CMS will work, look and feel for the end-user of the system, not the visitor to the web site, is too often overlooked. This is odd: isn't the rationale for getting a CMS in the first place usually based on some kind of ROI in efficiency in actually producing the content and sites?

Bloem, Adriaan. CMSwatch (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Do SharePoint Right Before SharePoint Does You Wrong

Microsoft markets SharePoint as an omnibus information-management platform, but like all software, it has meaningful strengths and weaknesses. People frequently label SharePoint a collaboration product, when in fact, it excels at some types of collaboration but virtually ignores other. SharePoint is useful for some Web Content Management scenarios, but poor at (many) others.

Byrne, Tony. CMSwatch (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Microsoft SharePoint

How Much Should Vendor Sales and Marketing Skill Really Matter for Customers?

When I parse the comments of technology customers in the midst of long-term vendor relationships, what I hear them asking for is predictability, rather than commercial zest. Sure, they want their suppliers to innovate, but since when is innovation a function of sales and marketing skill?

Byrne, Tony. CMSwatch (2009). Articles>Content Management>Planning

Moving from Web Management to Information Management: Four Things You Can Do Now

Web Managers must think globally (information) and act locally (Web) all the while trying to widen your universe and build the internal business relationships which will allow your organization to manage its information more holistically now or in the future.

Welchman, Lisa. WelchmanPierpoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy>Information Design

Easy Command Line Processing with the DITA Open Toolkit

The DITA Open Toolkit can transform your DITA files into a wide variety of output types. When you first install it, it's easy to get the impression that you need to know Ant well to use it, but you can pack most of its available options into a single Java™ command line.

DuCharme, Bob. IBM (2008). Articles>Content Management>XML>DITA

Authoring with Eclipse

The topic of technical publishing is relatively new to the world of Eclipse. One can make the argument that technical publishing is just another collaborative development process involving several people with different backgrounds and skills. This article will show that the Eclipse platform is a viable platform for technical publishing by discussing how to write documents such as an article or a book within Eclipse. In fact, this article was written using Eclipse.

Aniszczyk, Chris and Lawrence Mandel. Eclipse (2005). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>XML

Understanding the Value of Modular Content Reuse by Examining User-Generated Music Mashups

In the field of technical communication, practitioners are being challenged to adapt to a completely new approach to creating documentation and user-assistance materials. In this rapidly-changing arena, traditional content production practices are being replaced with modular, topic-based content production practices that allow organizations to recombine content elements—often automatically or on-demand—into new, derivative products.

Content Wrangler, The (2009). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Audio

XML Content Management the Dr. Macro Way: Simple Is Good

Because most of CMS integration efforts will be concentrated on the boundaries, it further supports the engineering conclusion that minimizing the amount of effort spent on the core functionality is good because it maximizes the amount of the total implementation budget that can be spent on implementing the boundary functionality.

Dr. Macro's XML Rants (2006). Articles>Content Management>XML

XCMTDMW: Characteristics of an XML CMS

I feel that the term "XML CMS" is unnecessarily specialized. In my world, content management is a much more general problem and 90% of what you need to manage XML well applies to everything else too. That's another reason I chafe at over-specialized XML repositories--they really can't manage anything else.

Dr. Macro's XML Rants (2006). Articles>Content Management>XML

Converting to XML: Is it Always the Answer?

Although managing costs is important anytime, it is especially important in today's economic reality where budgets are shrinking drastically. Getting your money's worth as well as what you need to support your data should be a core factor of any data project. The two biggest cost factors are the type of conversion work you need done and how much of it you'll need. This article focuses on how your goals for your project relate to the output format you choose, and how that format impacts costs. While some outputs, like XML, provide higher capabilities, they also cost more to create.

Gross, Mark. Data Conversion Laboratory (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

Alternatives to XML: Keeping Down your Document Conversion Costs

While I'm a big fan of XML for many purposes, it's a misconception that it's the single best solution in every scenario, and it's worthwhile to consider the alternatives in situations where the benefits of XML are not necessary. In this article, I discuss alternatives to XML, SGML, and HTML that might be suitable when budgets are more limited. While XML is perfect for highly coded information, other options can work well for many kinds of information. Markup languages are at the high end of the cost spectrum, so if you don't need the benefits they provide, you certainly should consider the alternatives discussed below.

Gross, Mark. Data Conversion Laboratory (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

Getting Content Into and Out of Wikis

As wikis mature, we’re using them for more complex business cases such as technical documentation, business analysis and project management. It’s becoming more and more interesting, if not essential, for wikis to support the import and export of content to and from other formats. Most wikis allow you to convert their pages at least to PDF and HTML. But what of other formats, and what about tools for getting content into wikis as well as out of them?

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Content Management>Wikis>Documentation

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

If content strategy isn’t in the current budget, though, how do you convince your client to add money for it? Your client might already realize content strategy can help create measurable ROI. If they don’t, help them understand. After all, relevant and informative content is what their audience wants; content strategy assesses the content they have and creates a plan for what they need and how they’ll get it.

Bloomstein, Margot. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Content Strategy

WebWorks ePublisher for Converting Documents to Confluence Wiki

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had the chance to experiment with WebWorks ePublisher, a set of tools that converts documents from Word, FrameMaker and DITA XML to a number of different output formats. One of those output formats is Confluence wiki. It’s been very interesting, so I thought I’d blog about it and see if anyone else wants to give it a go as well.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Wikis

Content Curation: A Manifesto

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. I think that professional writers and technical writers should consider a move towards this role. We already search for and find the best content, sift through loads of content, discard poor content, and publish the most worthy content whenever a software release goes out. This description also sounds like something a content strategist would do as part of their analysis of the content.

Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Technical Writing

Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future?

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job.

Bhargava, Rohit. Social Media Today (2009). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy>Information Design

What is Intelligent Content? And Why Won’t Scott Abel Shut Up About It?

Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically.

Abel, Scott. Content Wrangler, The (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

The Importance of Building a SharePoint Team

A successful team is perhaps won of the most critical aspects to a successful SharePoint project, because without the right people you can’t make it happen. The first thing to say is that building a successful team is not about hiring as many developers as possible and hope they get it all to work. In fact the place to start is not with the people who will implement the project but those who will envisage and plan the project.

Baddeley, Peter. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration>Microsoft SharePoint

Business Communications and Meetings to Become Steady Stream of Enterprise 2.0 Content?

Cisco's $3.2 billion intended acquisition of WebEx has me thinking of what Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer, calls "this next wave of business communications." What do you suppose he means?

Gardner, Dana. ZDNet (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Content Management