For those of you not in the technical writing business - DocTrain West was an awesome conference all about content management, training and web 2.0 stuff.

Before I start getting excited and rambling on about the sessions I attended - I have a few thank yous!

Thank you to Scott Able of the Content Wrangler and to Eileen Savary for coordinating everything and just generally being awesome. I had a great time volunteering with both of you and I am in awe of your organizational skills.

A big thank you too, to the Marriot Vancouver Pinnacle Downtown. The hotel itself was lovely and the staff were incredibly attentive and well organized. Also - you have the best kitchen staff ever. Those lunches were fantastic!  

And, of course, thank you to all the people who actually presented - it was great to get to meet you and learn from you!

I couldn’t attend all the sessions since there were many going on simultaneously, but here are links to the sessions I did attend.

All of the sessions I attended were interesting and informative - but the ones that I got the most from were the ones regarding blogs. I have been pretty focused on blogging lately, so they had the most immediate relevance for me.

The Meet the Bloggers session was extremely entertaining and interesting. It’s too bad it wasn’t taped to be a pod cast or YouTube video - the discussion ranged from why people write blogs to the best ways of keeping a ”mommyblog”.

The sessions about blogging made me look at my own blog and say “What is it I want to tell the world?” I have to confess I’m still not sure what my overall message is. I’m interested in a lot of different things and I’m excited about a lot of them too. I had intended to write only about technical writing - but that isn’t the sum of who I am or how I think. I don’t want to just write about the day to day minutiae of my life either. “Woke up. Did stuff. Went to bed.” would cover that pretty well anyway.

Two of the suggestions I got that I will try to keep in mind in future posts are: “blog with a goal” and ”quality over quantity”.

This post is already done for as it rambles on a bit (I picked the blog name with purpose at least!) and quality is a matter for the readers as I feel I can do no more with this one.

P.S.: Note the new links I’ve got up - excellent material for all your technical communications needs!