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.
- XML in the Wilderness- Joseph Gollner
- From Novice to Geek: Getting Started with WordPress – Tom Johnson
- How Do You Grow Wiki Use?- Stewart Mader
- MadCap Software: Cost Effective Content Reuse – Mike Hamilton
- Meet the Bloggers: Not Nearly as Disasterously Funny as the Movie – Anne Gentle, Darren Barefoot, Scott Nesbitt, Aaron Davis and Tom Johnson
- Document Engineering in User Experience Design- Robert Glushko
- Social Media 101: Now Everyone’s a Technical Writer – Darren Barefoot
- Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management: Ensuring Productivity in a Web 2.0 World- Sherry Michaels
- See Dynamic Publishing in Action!: Author Content Once and Automatically Publish it to the Web and Print- Joshua Duhl
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!
May 11, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Thanks for the great comments about the event. Eileen and I appreciate all the help you provided. We’re already planning next year!
More to come soon. Don’t forget you can publish the slide decks from the DocTrain site. It’s a very cool way to increase traffic to your blog and provide useful information.
Scott Abel
DocTrain West Program Manager
http://www.doctrain.com
May 15, 2008 at 5:33 am
I’m actually getting excited for my run of conferences as well. I’m attending the Association for Psychological Science, and the International Congress of Psychology (chicago, berlin).
Anyway, glad to hear you had a good time. And thanks for passing on the word about the blogging hints.
May 15, 2008 at 10:07 am
Scott – thank you for the tip! I’ll get on putting those together.
Nate – I’m so jealous! Those conferences sound all kinds of awesome. You’ll have to let me know how they go!
May 18, 2008 at 10:11 am
I’m so glad you enjoyed the “Meet the bloggers” session – it was one of my favorites too. I plan to post my notes from the session since I still have the list of questions I used – I think I asked 9 of the 10 questions I prepared. The group did such a nice job of answering the questions and offering a variety of viewpoints.
May 18, 2008 at 10:47 am
I also thought it was fun that a panel of five guys had passionate opinions about mommy blogging.
Oh, and thanks for linking to Just Write Click!