Blogs & Wikis
Blogs
Weblogs, or blogs for short, originally started as online, public versions of personal journals. Users wrote on topics of personal interest and spouted off on their political beliefs or other opinions for an audience of friends and like-minded readers. Before long, people began thinking of a myriad of new uses for blogs, from reporting and commenting on both niche and popular interest subjects, to reporting and editorializing on current events, to promoting products and services. In our social media-driven environment, blogs, Facebook and Twitter posts are a necessity for anyone who wishes to be considered an authority on any subject. Through the technology of RSS (Rich Site Syndication), readers can subscribe to blogs, and the latest posts are delivered to blog reading software much the same way that e-mail is delivered.
For the technical writer, and the company they work for, a blog can be an opportunity to promote products, identify and address user concerns, promote web traffic to the company's site, and thus improve visibility and sales. A technical writer with a blog can thus not only be a technical resource for their customers, but a marketing resource for their company as well.
All blogging software, or blog platforms, includes a vehicle for reader comments. Unlike traditional read-only web pages or PDFs, blogs are a two-way communication channel. A technical writer blogging about features of their product is likely to receive reader feedback and technical questions. The questions can be answered directly in the comments or become the subject of a later post. Blogs offer the technical writer a great opportunity to meet face to face with product users and their concerns, and address them in a public forum that others with a similar concern can access and learn from.
Google and other search engines weight Web pages to a large extent on the number and quality of inbound links. In other words, if a large number of web pages link to a given web page, that page is considered to be important in the eyes of the search engines. Offering quality information on a regular basis by means of a company blog can be a great way to build the number of inbound links to the company's site, as every new blog post is essentially a new web page linking back to the parent site. In the near future, because of these combined advantages of better customer outreach and marketing potential, it is likely that more and more technical writers will be blogging as time goes by.
Wikis
We've mentioned wikis briefly before. A wiki is a simple, basic website that is designed to be accessible and editable by anyone who visits it. Wikipedia, the Worlds largest and most well known wiki, is a massive online encyclopedia that is created and maintained by its users. Several companies offer free, open source wiki software platforms, including mediawiki, that the wiki platform Wikipedia runs on, and TikiWiki.
Some more daring companies are starting to publish technical support wikis which allow users to, in essence, do the technical writing for the company. In the same way he might write or contribute to a Wikipedia entry, a user can log in and report on the solution he has found for a usability issue with a given piece of software. In the world of Web 2.0, companies are experimenting with letting users solve their own problems, then help others to do the same.
As an in-house technical writer maintaining a technical support wiki, your role will be more that of an editor than of a writer. You will be reviewing posted changes to the wiki, editing them for clarity, and checking them with relevant S.M.E. in your company. Wikis can be designed so that changes go live automatically or require administrator approval. Depending on the size of your wiki, you may wish to review each change before it is viewed by others, but remember that this slows the information down in its journey to the next interested reader.
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