Day 2 was a Web 2.0 summit - lots of Web 2.0 yesterday as well, one interesting feature is seeing everybody go through an intro slide defining it in subtly different terms.

Here starteth the sessions:

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Just finished day 1 of Conference Week 2007, in San Diego; the first day consisted of pre-conference workshops, including one by yours truly. Here are some quick impressions:

• I started off by giving a two-hour workshop/presentation on information architecture, DITA, and Web 2.0; I lost track of time and skimped on the final demo, which is unfortunate, but still think it went generally okay. The audience was small (15 or so) but engaged, and we had some good discussions about information architecture, the reusability of topic-based content, and the changing roles of information architects in the Web 2.0 space. I'll aim to get my slides uploaded later tonight.
• Next workshop I attended was on Web Globalization meets Web 2.0, by Simon Mathews from Ion Global. Some excellent examples of places where translation is either made possible by Web 2.0 technologies (such as user-provided subtitling for shared videos) or made a priority by them (such as the success of Web 2.0 web sites across many different languages and cultures). Also a nice nod to DITA as a key architecture that is making a lot of the pain of translation more manageable (DITA: we help you tolerate your pain).
• After that was a presentation by Shaun Walker of dotnetnuke, who presented on content management strategies. Some good practices summarized, providing a checklist of questions to ask of a content management vendor. I'll admit to being disappointed that source format, or at least interchangeability/portability of content, wasn't mentioned. I definitely see DITA having an important role to play here as a cross-CMS interchange standard, even where it isn't playing a more central role as primary source format.
• Finally we had a workshop from Ty Baysinger at Autodesk, presenting on their DITA-like content management case study. Autodesk was one of the early adopters of the DITA model, although not technically a user of the standard. They're seeing generally good results, although I wish there were a business case for them to converge back on the standard now that DITA is formalized- I think they may be missing some opportunities on the DITA map front in their reuse architecture, for example.

Off to dinner now, hopefully I'll have time to post again tomorrow.

I'll be giving a short workshop at Content Week 2007 on "Information architecture for Web 2.0" - inevitably, I will have a DITA angle. The conference is January 29th-Feb 1st, in San Diego.

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The conference just finished, and I'm writing down some impressions while they're still fresh.

Day 1 kicked off with my keynote on "DITA evolves" - starting with an introduction to DITA, then talking about the ways in which DITA can adapt to different environments or authoring requirements, can scale from simple pilot projects to complex cross-enterprise applications, and the resulting network effects that can emerge from the combination of pervasive usage and robust reuse.

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I've got the recordings of a two-day workshop sponsored by PTC last year available - thanks are due to IBM for providing my time, PTC for recording the workshops, and to OASIS for hosting the recordings and sample files:

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