As if there wasn’t enough to worry about for parents with last year’s crisis of Chinese lead painted toys, now the ^7 recycling icon is considered a toxic symbol. 

If this isn’t a massive issue of Corporate Authenticity, I don’t know what is. All polycarbonate bottles and other containers are suspect to some degree because of something called bisphenol-A (BPA).

From The Health Dangers Of Reusing Plastic Bottles And Bags by the Environmental Working Group:

…researchers concerned with the evils of a common chemical known as bisphenol-A (BPA) suggest you should toss out these baby bottles along with any toys suspected of containing lead or dangerous magnets.

How toxic is BPA? Nobody really knows for sure.

In fact, it’s still debated as a scientific issue, however WalMart has pulled BPA baby bottles from the shelves.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that…

“[T]he possibility that bisphenol A may alter human development cannot be dismissed,” says this new draft report from the U.S. department of Health and Human Services.

Though the evidence isn’t entirely clear, it’s possible that exposure to the chemical during infancy could cause changes in prostate and mammary tissue that raise the risk of cancer later in life, the report suggests. The latest analysis goes beyond two others from last year, both of which concluded the chemical was safe in low doses.

I’m still researching this matter after a year and it’s almost inconclusive, yet safer to err on the side of caution.

BPA: A Call For Corporate Authenticity

I tend to side with this frustrated parent’s opinion:

What we want is actually quite simple. We want companies that produce products which come into contact with infants’ and toddlers’ mouths, and which are exposed to high heat due to washing and sterilization, to disclose the types of plastic they use in their products.

We want companies to inform consumers so that people like us don’t have to do their job for them. Labeling like this will only influence the choices of people who care. If people care, they should have a choice. If enough people care about materials that you’re afraid to label your products with the information, you’re using the wrong materials.

Listen up, chemical companies. We’re having a conversation. We’re trading information, we’re becoming organized.

And if what you’re doing is threatening our children’s safety, we’re coming to GET YOU.

Legally of course.

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From Starting a Conversation: The Art of Comment Fetching:

Everyone measures the success of their blog in different ways - but when it comes to measuring engagement, comments and trackbacks are what really count.

Today’s Blogging Irony

It’s funny that the Technical Communication blog of Adobe, the market leader in just about everything written, spoken, filmed, or distributed - Well, their blog hasn’t had a comment from a user in two and a half months.

Oh, it’s got 1407 links to it in Technorati… But no comments.

Then again, I could be a bit sour because my comments on Adobe’s TechComm blog the three times I’ve made them, were either held for nine months (until I posted an image of the question on my own blog during a heated debate) and then posted like they’d always been there, or in the case of my comments last month, simply ignored.

Not very engaging. Sort of like Adobe’s current TechComm Technical Support. But that subject is so 2007.

The Adobe Captivate blog OTOH, is hot. Silke Fleischer’s got it going on, and by the metrics mentioned above, she is clearly engaging her audience. Maybe that’s why I link to it on my page and not to the TechComm.adobe.whatever.com blog.

Then again, Captivate is a very engaging product while the rest of the TCS doesn’t really push my buttons…

My blog? Oh, let’s not even go there. Every other month or so I literally get too busy to post anything. So enjoy it while it lasts…

Props to Agent K

I just dropped Karsten Gerhardt off for his connecting rail to LAX. Karsten, one of the principals for 3si2 Corporation, is heading out on a client business tour of Europe. Back in the day, I called him K even before that Tommy Lee Jones character from Men In Black. K laughs a lot more than Jones’ character so it’s not exactly a fair comparison.

K reminded me that he’s never looked back at the salaried employee world or drawn a W2 since our launch back in 2001.

Memories of Startups

Karsten, Jim Nesbitt, and I started 3nW Corporation after NVTL’s dotbomb layoff cycle back seven years ago. The corporation’s founding date is April 20, a homage for Jim’s great Ultimate Frisbee counterculture sense of humor. You’d never think he used to work at the Pentagon for the Chief of Naval Operations.

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Adobe is never going to live down the naming convention issue with RoboHelp. Maybe after they pass the new/old RoboHelp 9… I think of the naming SNAFU  like the Sierra Club thinks about a spotted owl. You know, the indicator species for an entire ecosystem.

If Adobe couldn’t get the name right, how much could they have cared for the entire ecosystem?

As for the reason that RoboHelp’s naming convention became a SNAFU, I’m just as much on the outside of that as the rest of you are. There has never been an official reason given by an Adobe employee.

So it comes down to Occam’s Razor between two theories. First, the Emperor’s new clothes weren’t worth someone losing their job over or second, the Product Manager didn’t see fit to ask.

From one poor soul on the HATT:

I was looking in Amazon.com for a book on RoboHelp 7. They listed a used copy of RoboHelp 7 for Dummies from the year 1999. Is this an error?

Rick Stone answered. I responded, not without a little tongue in cheek and a link to the RoboHelp Dead-again post. Please understand that I totally dig Rick Stone’s RoboHelp experience and his site is the best resource for RH users anywhere. He asked me to change the subject and talk about my time with eHelp…

I believe you used to be an official eHelp employee at one point didn’t you? Seems I recall you worked in the support center. Why was it you left?

Of course you can read that here on my About page… The rest of the conversation is on the HATT list…

Rick why not ask RJ Jacquez why he never brought up the name change; he’s been with eHelp, MACR, MadCap, and ADBE plus he is the RoboHelp Product Evangelist. If anyone should have been in the loop it should have been him.

Maybe he was working for MadCap at the time and wasn’t around. You know, before he went back to Adobe.

When you find new authors it’s exciting to read their viewpoints. I initially started this blog with a thread of analysis of Adobe’s RoboHelp 6 release with which I was thoroughly underwhelmed. I had been watching the discussion on MonkeyPi previously, and part of the enjoyment of blogging is responding to what I call distributed discussions.

Back to RoboHelp vs. Flare: The Blog Review

It’s interesting that today’s examples are all from Utah. Being a former Coloradan for several years I have to say it’s nice to see some of the Rocky Mountain crowd. Now let’s enjoy some distributed discussion of RoboHelp 7 and MadCap’s marketing.

First, a view from Paul Pehrson on RoboHelp 7’s competitive abilities with his analysis of Adobe playing the innovation catch-up game:

RoboHelp is now in catch-up mode trying to figure out how to emulate the innovative features in MadCap’s product suite. Now it is MadCap pushing the innovation envelope here.

Will RH be able to maintain pace with MadCap’s one (or more) releases per year? Will RH be able to come out with new features that aren’t already in Flare?

Maybe so, but RH 7 wasn’t proof of that yet. Again, it will be interesting to have this discussion in two years and see where the major players are at.

I found Ben Minson’s blog when he guest posted to Tom Johnson’s blog. Ben posted a critical thesis about MadCap’s marketing which, by the way, is a great opinion piece.

The thing that has bothered me the most about what has happened with RoboHelp and Flare is MadCap’s marketing approach, which caused “Flare” and “MadCap” to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Granted, Macromedia’s treatment of the original RoboHelp team was probably less than professional. However, Hamilton seemed to make it his quest to blow RoboHelp to smithereens. It wasn’t business—it was personal. If he could carry that little ring to Mount Doom and throw it in the fire, it would be worth everything that happened in between.

In my research into my Web 2.0 Technical Support series about MadCap Software I hadn’t seen anything untoward expressed online or in print. They did, however, carry a gag gift of the die kadov tag die T-shirt, an inside joke about RoboHelp’s shortcomings.

In fact, in my podcast with Mike Hamilton in December 2007 he was neutral about Adobe. I asked Mike H. several tough and somewhat leading questions about RoboHelp and Adobe. Before, during, and after the podcast he never said anything truly outside the norm, and in fact was more generous than I was in his analysis regarding the level of dedication that Adobe may have with RoboHelp.

In my podcast program we find the relevant segment within the Hamilton podcast:

10:10
Clarifies MadCap’s focus on Adobe: “…we don’t care what Adobe does, we’re focused on solving the problems of the technical writing community… I want to dispel any myth that we’re chasing Adobe.”

11:40
Why I started analyzing the space closer: MadCap’s openness in summer 2007.

12:10
Thoughts on other blogger’s views about Adobe’s Technical Communications Suite (TCS) launch. Mike responds by comparing integration of tools within Flare and within Adobe TCS – Example of Capture’s integration with Flare to support the concept of single sourcing workflow.

We went into other discussion of workflow…

34:30
Remembering RoboHelp: we each discuss where RoboHelp came from and why it’s so different from this model MadCap’s following. Mike elaborates on the competitive edge MadCap has right now in integrating all of their products.

36:40
Mike believes that both RoboHelp and Flare will be around for a long long time, of course he and I differ on this viewpoint. He does mention the caveat of how much innovation Adobe puts into RoboHelp being questionable which we both agree upon completely.

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Personally, I like the GUI changes 2.5 brings with it.

Here’s the pro-upgrade snip from NowSourcing | Don’t Let Technorati Drop Your Blog:

Technorati has often been criticized of not being on top of things, but this time around I must say good job, Ian and crew! Granted that many will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off

…Technorati authority and blog search coupled with Wordpress blogging is at the heart of social media. If you woke up tomorrow and your or your client’s blog was dropped by Technorati, there could be some serious ramifications.

Conversation is quickly becoming the new form of metrics in social media (sorry pageviews), and without a guide like Technorati, we’d be up a creek without a paddle.

But what if Technorati removed thousands of authority blogs en masse? Best upgrade soon, all!

And in this corner…

And now this from WebGeek’s | Say No to Technorati’s Forced Upgrades - Bad Information Spreads Like Wildfire:

There are a lot of problems with WordPress 2.5 that need to be fixed. For example, it’s broken many themes and plugins (for a LOT of bloggers) due to some standard WordPress hooks being broken. (Being a plugin developer, I have to stay on top of it.)

Keep in mind, upgrading before these issues are fixed could damage business websites that depend on WordPress if custom themes are broken, etc. It may cause costly downtime for businesses, along with many other problems…that’s not a joke. (Not to mention security vulnerabilities that could be introduced from a broken theme or plugin.)

Now, Technorati is saying that anyone with WordPress 2.3.3 is fine, so it might not seem like a big deal. The problem is, that for most bloggers, it’s not easy for them to upgrade to that specific version. For most it’s only practical to upgrade straight to WordPress 2.5, through use of automatic upgrade plugins, etc.

Just because WP 2.5 is new doesn’t mean it’s more secure - it’s just that the security flaws haven’t been discovered yet. There could be a whole slew of new security flaws waiting to be exposed.*

And now, the Technorati Hack

Scott Allen provides this information on WebGeek about how to keep your WordPress version without losing your ranking (possibly) on Technorati:

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This is important for all who are currently examining an LMS system or have one in place with an end-of-life plan.

In a nutshell, Blackboard was claiming Intellectual Property (IP) patented rights to the software user roles and responsibilities, much like the Microsoft NT Server technology assigns them, with an LMS layer of student / teacher responsibilities.

Keeping it brief:

Any Technical Communication software company who has the penetration into the existing e-Learning space has a potential to leverage those existing relationships and push out a Software as a Service (SaaS) demo for their users to try before they buy. Striking down the LMS patent claims held by Blackboard opens up the market along with insulating the existing LMS providers from further IP claims.

In short, my interpretation is that the court found that Blackboard’s claims were too broad. It also ‘Linuxizes’ much of the LMS market. Just what free enterprise needs in a $400 million market.

Of course, Blackboard will appeal the judgement. My perspective is that their model was based on fear and intimidation of the market without any real innovation after the initial development of the concept.

In my brief time away from my construction project in NorCal, I found this article at e-Literate about the Blackboard LMS patents being rejected:

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims.

There are some other background blog articles that are fantastic at presenting the entire picture of what Blackboard’s patents were, how they were presented, and what this means.

Legal stuff? Make it easy please…

I’ve got a background in legal review, but it’s nice to see someone analyze the legal brief and outline it. One of the best and easily understood - A Description of the Blackboard Patent in Plain English sums up its analysis:

Once we cut through the pseudo-technical mumbo jumbo it’s apparent that there is no there there. If Blackboard gets away with this it will be one of the great hoaxes of this century.

I recommend reviewing that article because it’s the most concise and combines visual diagrams along with Michael Feldstein’s e-Literate text explaining the case.

Needless to say, the discussion on the topic at e-Literate is most telling. User opinion is very strong, and this is yet another case of Corporate Authenticity being tested.

Yeah, but what does this mean?

My analysis is that this is groundbreaking.

It means that without the patents, there is a lot less risk involved with getting into the very lucrative LMS game.

It also means that Microsoft and Adobe risk a lot less in pushing LMS boundaries - maybe in existing product lines they already have for Technical Communication.

Other LMS wanna-be’s who happen to have a strong Technical Communication software product offering (Adobe, MadCap, even Microsoft) can now look at SaaS as a model for penetrating the LMS market through their existing customer base.

I see the framework that MadCap has developed as being the strongest towards this area, seconded only by Adobe. With MadCap’s existing focus on Lingo and the Analyzer, they have the ability to 2.0 their existing software quickly and rip a new one in the LMS market. With their rabid and enthusiastic fan (customer) base they’ll lose no time in coming up with a killer application.

Adobe is no slouch to eLearning. They announced a $200 million commitment to developing in India, primarily for TechComm, Gaming, and eLearning over five years. That’s equivalent to $1.2 billion spent in the US. I’m sure they’re working on something in that space as well.

Microsoft has some well hidden LMS potential I won’t speculate too much about publicly.

Maybe someone will offer me some dollars for consulting to talk about it further, but the broad strokes are seen in my past articles.

Previous CharlesJeter.com articles relating to LMS:

• My LMS / eLearning Disruptive Technology Concept
• Halo 3, XBox and Technical Communication? (Part 5)
• eLearning, Gaming & Tech Comm are new Adobe focus | Adobe to invest $200m in five years

Why is the SEC interested in Adobe’s Corporate Authenticity and RoboHelp?

In the same manner as Ikea’s technical writing is nearly wordless I’m just going to post this picture of the Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC) accessing my site’s Is RoboHelp Dead… Again?!? article and the Corporate Authenticity category this week and let the audience decide its importance.

Talk amongst yourselves…

Vivek Jain, [Group Product Manager] I’m sure it’s nothing to be worried about. The SEC doesn’t have jurisdiction in Bangalore, India.

Is this for real?!? Afraid so…

If anyone wants it I’ll email the .xps directly to you if you feel the need to validate this. I think I have a server log also. (unsure if it included January in my December one). By the way, checking my site today, I found overlooked someone else logging on from a government web site in Washington. I’ll keep that to myself for the moment.

PS: According to my stats I was crunching before that virus hit my system the Is RoboHelp Dead… Again?!? article is the top linked-to article of 2007.

I’ve long looked into Corporate Authenticity, and you never know who your prose might influence. I don’t think I could have said this any better: Marshall Kirkpatrick » When a Blogger Criticizes Your Company…

The best thing that companies can do in response to bloggers who have done their reputation harm is to take the bloggers’ complaints as seriously as is appropriate.

Readers will determine the validity of blogger criticism for themselves, but if the criticism is valid then there’s no hiding from it any more.

It’s best to be publicly responsive, on the critical blogs and on a blog of your own if you’re that concerned about it.

You may need to change your practices, just like you’d have to if a journalist in the traditional press criticized you in a way that you take seriously.

How Cluetrain of Marshall.

PDF Usability: it’s still an extra file format to support and to open…

I have had people ask me what the difference is between online help & a PDF. I’ve also had people ask me why not just dump out a .doc file or a .PDF and have that stand as the help.

Self help = money saved in time

Quality documentation leads to less frustrated user interaction, such as emails or making phone calls. If you can also ‘eat your own dog food’ and your internal staff is comfortable reading its own company’s software documentation people can help themselves and not further burden the knowledge resources. It’s something that a lot of corporations lose sight of.

Sometimes it seems like oversimplification to just tell people the readability difference between a ready to print user guide and online help is apples and oranges.

It’s also been hard for me to explain the value proposition and frequently I’ve heard it said:

…well, you do want people to actually read the documentation, right?

…or this one said about call avoidance being, at the end of the day, the true success metric of both online and print documentation.

Who takes the phone calls if the usability of the product confuses people? That costs money, right?

I’m not satisfied with either comment which is why I’m still researching how to gently deal with the issue.

But in this context I’m referring to the ability to find information within the containerized PDF and the innate strength of context-sensitive help (CSH).

Context-sensitive help as defined from Wikipedia:

Context-sensitive help, as opposed to general online help or online manuals, doesn’t need to be accessible for reading as a whole. Each topic is supposed to describe extensively one state, situation, or feature of the software.

I’ve authored within a PDF to duplicate the same type of online help standard, however I ran into complex issues hyperlinking externally to reach that direct content. The build process takes the same amount of time as it does to bang out a help file within a Help Authoring Tool, and then my information is siloed within the PDF.

The results of my research into PDFs in documentation back in 2002 led to my suggestion to the eHelp Executive team to implement a PDF ‘ripper’, which they implemented within version X4 and is still in use today through RH7.

The concept was that pulling content from rtf, pdf, doc, text, and html files makes a workflow much easier when aggregating content, and saves the help author the tedious job of copying, stripping the formatting by pasting into notepad, and pasting back into a topic file in your Help Authoring Tool. This was back in the HTML days, long before XML made that even easier to store content without storing the inherent styles.

Flash Forward Five Years

This PDF bugaboo of mine has a great deal to do with my shrugging of my shoulders about the embedding of Flash files, demos, audio, and now with the Adobe TCS Acrobat 3D files within Acrobat PDF files.

I’ve never tried to print an audio file… or a product demonstration on Flash. How does that work again?

Well, don’t take it from me, ask Jakob Nielsen, author of Alertbox

To get into the opposing side of PDF usage online, here’s one of the most famous articles online… Alertbox: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Summary:
Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentation.

PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.

For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn’t let go.

So since this article was written back in 2003

…Update 2007: Our new studies keep finding the same problems with PDF in online interfaces.

I’m not going to give you a problem without the solution…

And now here’s the Alertbox article how to fix that issue: Gateway Pages. I’ve seen this approach used throughout the UC Davis agricultural data website, along with several Federal information repositories such as the USDA. This has been adopted as a style within several corporations, including Adobe’s Investor Relations data.

Summary:
Spare your users the misery of being dumped into PDF files without warning. Create special gateway pages that summarize the contents of big documents and guide users gently into the PDF morass.

Ideally, companies would reformat each type of information for online use. It’s actually not very expensive to, say, create a set of Web pages for annual report information as long as the Web design is done while the annual report is being written. The cost comes when companies have a glossy annual report already finished and then say, "Webbify this."

If you distribute documents for printing or if you absolutely have to repurpose existing content into a substandard user experience, at least protect your users from nasty surprises. Create a gateway page for each PDF document and make sure that users are always guided through the gateway:

• All links to the information should be to the gateway page; none should go directly to the PDF file.
• The gateway page should include a short summary of the PDF file so that users can assess whether they want to go to the trouble of entering PDF-land.
• The gateway page should clearly warn users that they’ll be getting a PDF file. It should also state the file’s page count and download size.
• Break big PDF files into sections and offer separate links into each one, with a brief summary of the content next to each link. Also, provide a link to a single file that includes all pages, and tell users to use this link if they want to print the document.
• Consider adding instructions for how to download the PDF file without the annoyance of having it open in the browser. Unfortunately, this is difficult for average users to do with current technology; it would be nice if there were a special type of link that would always download a file rather than displaying it.

If you refer users to PDF documents on other websites that follow these guidelines, always link to the gateway page, not directly to the PDF.

Finally, on the gateway page, follow the guidelines for opening PDF files in new windows.

Obviously Jakob does not like PDFs and he’s not alone in that assessment. I’s one that Adobe has worked hard to address, and I have to give them points in what’s occurred over the past five years since I really dug into the Acrobat workflow.

Not withstanding my agreement with most of Jakob’s points I am surprised that he still doesn’t upgrade his assessment with this year’s release of Acrobat.

He also has this statement about opposing PDF blobs of content found within his 200th article posted a few years back:

Fighting Multi-Million-Dollar Interests

Several times over the years, the Alertbox has taken on entrenched interests backed by hundreds of millions of dollars. The result has usually been victory, though it’s too early to tell for my fight to decimate PDF blobs.

The reason I’ve often won — despite that fact that usability enemies are far better funded — is that I simply tell the truth as I see it in user research. I am not beholden to any special interests, so when I observe that humans behave in a certain way, I’m free to say so and to explain the industry implications. Human nature is very hard to change; companies trying to impose technologies that go against it often lose.

From PDF blobs to short entried blogs: Jakob on Blog Content

Jakob also doesn’t like blogging just for blogs sake. He recommends full length articles versus quick single paragraphs. Of course his caveat is that he’s in a consulting business with 3 to 5 years of readership prior to anyone attending his usability conference, and that if you’re selling a commodity such as pistachios, short blog postings make more sense.

But… Now some of you may understand that he and I do agree with the length of articles within the blog, along with the PDF blob concept.

Last but not least.. Why Good Documentation is a MUST

From Making documentation a commodity by Communications from DMN

Good documentation — whether a manual, a help file, a wiki, or a knowledge base — enables a user to solve a problem for themselves, rather than make a costly support call. It saves money by allowing support personnel to focus their attention and energies on the more difficult problems that users may encounter; ones that aren’t or can’t be covered in the documentation.

Even more than that, good documentation can be a sales tool. In a couple of cases, the documentation that I wrote was mentioned favourably in software reviews — as an effective guide to configuring and using the applications, and also as a guide to the capabilities of the software. When I left one company, a salesperson made a point of mentioning that the user guide helped him better understand the software, which helped close a couple of sales.

This opinion may be contrary to the trends in the market. Get ready for an increased market push from India in Technical Communications outsourcing.