Great people, good food, and leading-edge content. Kudos to the organizers and to the Marriott Pinnacle for hosting this terrific event. And a huge thanks also to the Westcoast STC for the opportunity to attend.

Here’s the best of the rest:

Document engineering in user experience design
Robert Glushko (University of California at Berkeley)

With little collaboration between designers (front end) and information architects (back end), the result is a poor user experience. A brilliant mind, Glushko coined a new term today: the content choreographer.
What’s hot:  Doc or Die

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Social media 101: Now everyone’s a technical writer
Darren Barefoot (Capulet Communications)

From Youtube to Twitter to Facebook, social media is about two-way conversations, collaboration, sharing, community, transparency, and authenticity. It also means we have to relinquish control of our content.
What’s hot: Web 2.0 in plain English

View slides on scribd

Changing the rules of the game for the benefit of the user
Joe Sokohl (Keane, Inc.)

In his talk, Joe emphasized knowing your end user – especially when training customers. Qualitative research is the key to giving end users what they want, not what you think they want.
What’s hot: The Kobayashi Maru approach to solving problems

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How an author and editor used a wiki to write a book
Stewart Mader (Atlassian)

Stewart wrote his book using only a wiki. He found that communicating with his editors using a wiki was far more efficient than using email.
What’s hot: WriteRoom (Mac only…grrr!)

The many-armed starfish: today and tomorrow in social media
Darren Barefoot (Capulet Communications)

I can’t get enough of Darren – he’s a terrific speaker. He expanded on social media tools and explained which ones were most effective for use in marketing strategies.
What’s hot: Brightkite

What technical communicators need to know about flash
Sarah O’Keefe (Scriptorium Publishing)

Flash is finicky, but useful if you need to explain difficult concepts using animation. From motion to shape tweens, we got the basics in this tutorial.
What’s hot: Brain games

Living multiple lives: The new technical communicator
B. Noz Urbina (Mekon)

In the closing keynote, Urbina gave practical advice on how to create documents more efficiently and save your company money (the reason companies pay for employees to fly to these conferences in the first place).
What’s hot: Fly me to London

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That’s a wrap. Now go outside.

So without further ado, here’s my take on the presentations that I attended.

 Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
RJ Jacquez (Adobe)

RJ spoke about how we live in a highly visual world where videos are the primary content delivery method – especially for Gen Y.
What’s hot: Adobe Air

XML in the Wilderness
Joseph Gollner (Stilo International)

The importance of XML cannot be underestimated in the design of content technologies. In fact, web 2.0 is a consequence of the ‘openness’ of XML.
What’s hot: Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos 

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Wikis are wonderful, or are they? A real-world story of using wikis for user information
Alan Porter (WebWorks)

Wiki evangelist Alan Porter showed how his company uses wikis for their intranet as well as for project management with clients.
What’s hot: Wiki mavens

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A comparison of three visual help authoring tools
Neil Perlin (Hyper/Word Services)

Neil reviewed three authoring tools: Captivate, Camtasia, and Mimic. Each tool possesses a different feature set, so it depends what you need them for.
What’s hot: My vote for the most user-friendly tool is Adobe’s Captivate.

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Putting everything back together again: delivering effective information products
Joseph Gollner (Stilo International)

With DITA and S1000D emphasizing small multi-purpose units, consideration must be given to what end configuration will most benefit the user.
What’s hot: DITA online community

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Meet the bloggers: Not nearly as disastrously funny as the movie
Anne Gentle, Darren Barefoot, Tom Johnson, Scott Abel, Aaron Davis, and Scott Nesbitt

This was a fun session where we got to meet some of the world’s most prolific technical-writing bloggers in person. You can find some of them in my blogroll.
What’s hot: Made to Stick

The implementation of STE involves developing a company-specific dictionary and using documentation software to aid in the mechanical side of ensuring uniformity of language across the board. The goal is to ultimately reduce costs and facilitate quality assurance. If you’re interested, here’s an abbreviated version of Berry’s powerpoint presentation:

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I found this presentation quite interesting, especially as there is little standardization when it comes to documenting software. Berry actually dismissed Microsoft’s style guide, and even the Chicago manual of style, as incompatible with the goals of STE, but did commend them for the attempt. Some of the audience thought that STE could become too stilted and robotic. Personally, however, I could see the merit of choosing vocabulary, for example, that is completely unambiguous when it comes to reducing workplace accidents.

A case in point – a manual in the aviation industry asked the mechanic to “cut the power” (ie. turn it off), whereupon a mechanic literally cut a power-line with sheers and died from electrocution.