A common shock in this virtual world is the first in-person encounter with someone you've known by email or phone. First, the double vision - your mental image contradicting the tangible person before you. Then the switch, and the person before you becomes the one you knew all along.  That good rewiring has happened a lot here at the CMS Conference, along with catching up with folk from previous encounters.

The conference had one track with an official DITA focus, but as people talked about their Content Management strategies in the management, technical, and demo tracks, DITA kept coming up. (I'm tempted to try to make capping remarks about that other, East Coast DITA conference, but the people who went to both said they were glad they did and neither conference sticks to the one coast anyway.)  The conversation has shifted from curious buzz ("What's a DITA good for? Will it clean my carpets while I'm away?") to experience ("Well, I don't see that it's necessary to centralize all of my conref targets").  Lots of case studies, progress reports, and lessons learned along with an optimism that we can make more progress - the highlights including insights from people like France Baril, Frances Gambino, Anna Hartman, and the Research in Motion folks.

Read more

Just posting some URLs I promised to:

• My workshop and specialization presentations and demo files are now uploaded to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dita2006/files/
• My interview on MyTechnologyLawyer is available at http://www.mytechnologylawyer.com/media/radio_060325.asx (I'm somewhere I'm in the middle)
• Also got a podcast interview at http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/michael_priestley_talks_dita/ (I spend most of the time talking about maps because I think they're cool)

Still trying to figure out what to call the conference... maybe I'll have it figured it out by next year.

Read more