How do users really want their technical information presented?

By now, some of you might have read Steve Wilson's latest blog. In it, he requests that technical information be presented through blogs. Not that I'm discounting his input, but it seems to me lately as though our internal stakeholders are making a lot of "everyone wants blogs" statements without having heard directly from Sun's customers that they want their technical product information provided using that mechanism.

Blogs have their place. They are a really good mechanism for selling products and for developing conversations around features for those products. And, of course, blogs are a cool way to just talk about non-product related information too. However, do people consider blogs to be "accurate enough" to provide quality technical information? Can blogs replace "books" (as Steve suggests) or do you (product users) still want some information to be provided in a more "traditional" format? What about wikis instead of "books?" I am curious (as always) about what our real users want. 

Posted at 09:16AM Jun 22, 2007 by jcinfoblog in Music  |  Comments[4]

North Dakota musings (part 1)

The last few weeks have been both hectic and difficult, so blogging has not been at the top of my list of things to do. I'm actually in California right now, at a group offsite, trying to put together our strategy for the next fiscal year, but you don't care about that. You want to know my impressions of North Dakota so far.

Well, the weather has been kind of nasty. There have been a lot of severe thunderstorms, some with tornados and some with quarter-sized hail.  It could be worse, though, as the tornados were not real close to us (within the county, but not close enough to set off the tornado sirens) and the hail wasn't big enough to do any damage.

The most interesting thing so far are the "dakrats." Most folks call them "prairie dogs," but in North Dakota they are known as "Dakota Rats" (dakrat for short). They are everywhere. My cat wants to go "play" with them, and gets quite excited to watch them out the window. For more information on prairie dogs, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_dogs. I'll post some pictures after I return from my current trip.

 More later.

Posted at 07:55PM Jun 18, 2007 by jcinfoblog in Music  |  Comments[3]