For the the February 1, 2007 meeting, Neil Perlin will be visiting our chapter to talk to us about “Creating Help In the Web 2.0 Age.”
Here’s a description of Neil’s upcoming presentation:

Creating Help In the Web 2.0 Age

For years, technical communicators have created help on a mass industrial model – one finished help system for all users. But two technologies, XML and Web 2.0, offer ways to change that model, letting us create just-in-time help personalized to specific users’ needs, with content written by users themselves. How does this work?

In the case of XML, a feature in a specific authoring tool, Flare, lets us automatically create help systems that reflect the needs of specific sets of users, possibly even specific users, when those users request help. In the case of Web 2.0, we get the flexibility to let end users write content themselves, taking some of the load off technical communicators.

This all sounds futuristic and idealistic, but the automatic Flare output has already been done on a test basis, and user-contributed content is all around us – in wikis, for example.

This presentation discusses the philosophy and technologies behind these two new approaches to creating help. It illustrates the specific place in Flare that lets us create automatic, just-in-time output. It then looks at the philosophies, technologies, and implementations of user-contributed content.

Date: Feb 1, 2007
Time: 6:30 to 9:00 p.m.
Cost: $10 members and nonmembers
Location: Holiday Inn Express, Tampa See Directions to the Holiday Inn Express 

General Meeting Info
Chapter meetings are held the first Thursday of every month at Holiday Inn Express in Tampa. The meetings begin at 6:30 p.m. and last until 9:00 p.m. Light food is served, and the cost is $10 for both members and non-members.

About Neil Perlin
From the STC site: “Neil Perlin has twenty-eight years’ experience in technical communication, with twenty-two in training, consulting, and development for various types of online formats and tools including WinHelp, HTML Help, CE Help, JavaHelp, RoboHelp, ForeHelp, Flare, and some now largely forgotten. Neil is a columnist and frequent speaker for STC and other professional groups, a member of the Boston Chapter STC, the creator and manager of the Beyond the Bleeding Edge stem at STC’s annual conference, and an STC Associate Fellow.

Neil is a Madcap Certified Instructor for Flare, and an Adobe Certified Instructor for RoboHelp and Captivate. He provides training, consulting, and development for online help and documentation, Flare, RoboHelp, Captivate, XML, and single-sourcing through Hyper/Word Services of Tewksbury, Massachusetts. He can be reached at nperlin@concentric.net or via www.hyperword.com.”