Trends & Technologies LSIG

Welcome to the STC Carolina Chapter Trends & Technologies (T&T) Local Special Interest Group (LSIG). The STC Carolina (T&T) LSIG has a mission of identifying, assessing, and discussing the various tools, technologies, and methods of technical communication design and delivery. As technical communicators, we need to study development tools, gather tips from experts, review best practices, and evaluate new communication approaches.

This LSIG replaces the STC Carolina Online Communication SIG.

For questions, contact: Ann-Marie Grissino 919.562.2464, 919.426.8515 (cell), or amgrissino@keypointconsultants.com.

Meetings

• When: Regular meetings are held on the 3rd Wednesday of the month, noon to 1:00.
  Bring a brown bag lunch.
• Where: Location varies, please check the calendar

Next Meeting:

The September meeting will be a continuation of our Social Networking discussion. Bill Albing and Jenna Moore will be discussing LinkedIn, Naymz, and MeetUp.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007, Noon-1:00 at Aerotek Systems.
Meeting Details

Future meeting topics

• September 2007: Social Networking for Technical Communication Professionals-Part 2.
• August 2007: Social Networking for Technical Communication Professionals.
• September: Comparison of MS Office applications with new Web alternatives.
  • Related resource: (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=18053&hed=17+MS+Office+Killers)
  • OpenOffice
• October — Geeky toys
• November — Google Web apps (Writely and such)
  • Google Apps like Writely, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Earth, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop.
• December early — STC Carolina Competitions Best of Show meeting.
• January — Web-based conferencing. Okay, how about these cool (free?) tools:
  • http://www.thinkature.com/ for whiteboarding and mapping
  • http://vyew.com/always-on/collaboration/ for docs and desktop sharing.
  • Yugma (https://www.yugma.com/index.php). Let's try creating a Second Life space and seeing what we could do with it as a group. Can I alter your space? If we created spaces about documentation, books, etc. what could we do to make an info dev space?
  • DimDim - web conferencing http://www.dimdim.com/
  • Vyew web conferencing, docs and desktop sharing. Part of the setup allows a conference call, though not free.
  • Adobe Acrobat Connect. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnect/
• February — Are you creating help these days? What does it look like? How are you doing it? Are we moving toward help embedded in Web apps? Join the Online Help Unconference scheduled for February.
• March -

• April — Collaborative tools again, from Lisa P. Maybe we can talk about cheap/open source tools that might serve as a topic for a future SIG meeting.
  • Another idea is to look at the demo of Zoho's new ZohoNotebook. A sneak peak as it were. http://www.zoho.com/notebook/ They just announced it. Pretty cool and collaborative, isn't it? "multiple types of content"!! We can't use it yet, but we can watch the video. :-)

• May — Adobe Acrobat 8 Online Reviews. Online Reviews are easier with Acrobat 8 than they were in 7, much easier. Terry Smith will walk us through the Acrobat 8 enhancements.
• Other topics:
  • Podcasts for Tech writers: http://techwritervoices.com/
  • News feeds. How do you get the word out from your blog to the news aggregators and which news aggregators should you send to? This session is not about how to read RSS feeds, but rather how to get the RSS feed out from a blog or web site to others. If not broadcasting, at least narrowcasting, and how? Who should you ping and how do you to automate it?

Topics we've discussed or are tracking

• Wikis: Info about Wikis: http://www.techsoup.org/fb/index.cfm?fuseaction=forums.showSingleTopic&forum=2033&id=65589&cg=hometts&rss=1 and http://nonprofit-wikis.wikispaces.com/ for those who might want info on wikis in particular but can't make it to the "unconference".
• RSS
• Content Management Systems
• DITA and XML
• Web-based applications
• Podcasts
• Online help

Past Meetings

Related Links