The Society for Technical Communication is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators - anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.

The STC Toronto Chapter was founded in 1959 (then the Society of Technical Writers) and is the largest chapter in Canada.

About this Newsletter:

The Wandering Eye:
Technical Communication Blogs
by Keith Soltys

Weblogs, more commonly known as blogs, are the latest element in the evolution of the World Wide Web. The most common definition of a blog is a journal that is frequently updated and published on the Web. Although you can read blogs in the old fashioned way, by browsing to them in a web browser, it's much faster to use a feed reader, (also called an aggregator), which uses a protocol called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to gather updates to sites, so you can read updates to many sites in one place. A good feed reader is a personal portal to the web. There are many feed readers for all operating systems, but I prefer to use a web-based feed reader called Bloglines, which lets me access my subscriptions from any PC that has an Internet connection.

As you'd expect, technical writers have embraced this technology, and many writers are publishing blogs on a wide range of subjects. In this column, I'm going to look at some that are primarily about technical communication.

The Software Documentation Weblog, by Lars Trieloff, concentrates on structured authoring and related tools. Lars has recently published a book on DocBook and XML, and his blog is a good one to look at if you're using XML or thinking about it. Anne's Weblog about Markup and Style is a blog largely about web standards, including XML, HTML, and CSS. It's a good blog for web and online help authors.

The tagline for Usable Help, by Gordon Meyer, is "Examining documentation and help systems for software and consumer products." This is one of my favourites - posts are infrequent (a couple a month), but always informative and worth reading. The Context Wrangler, by Scot Abel, covers content management, technical writing, usability, and several other topics. Words on a Page by Scott Nesbitt is "about writing in several of its forms", including technical writing and freelance writing - Scott does both.

As it's title suggests, Writers India: Blog on technical writing, is a blog produced by and for Indian technical writers. The content seems to focus mostly on usability and matters of style. PoeWar.com Writers' Resources Center is a blog for writers of all types, but it does have good sections on technical writing and copyediting, as well as other topics like publishing and ethics. Creating Passionate Users is written by the authors of the Head First books from O'Reilly and has material on how to empower your users.

The EServer TC Library is an extensive database of technical communication literature hosted by Iowa State University. You can subscribe to a feed that will let you know when updates are added to the database. Many commercial organizations are now using this type of feed, notably news sites like CNN, the BBC, and CBC. The techwr-l mailing list has been a premiere technical writing resource since it started more than 10 years ago. If you subscribe to Bloglines, you can read it just like a weblog, because Bloglines can set up a feed for mailing lists. I find this faster and more convenient than trying to read it on the techwr-l site or through regular email. The main STC site, www.stc.org, also has a feed for updates.

So how do you find more blogs? Google's search is a bit too broad - you'll end up with thousands (or millions) of hits. Bloglines has a directory and search engine for blogs. Other blog directory sites include Blogwise, Blogs Canada, and Technorati.

Finally, I'm going to mention my own blog, Core Dump, which has been online for almost two years. Many posts, though by no means all, are about technical writing and related subjects.

Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 16 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site as well as a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children, a cat, and an ever growing collection of Grateful Dead CDs.