I'll be speaking at two events this month:

• The DITA Online Summit June 7th
  (http://www.pubsnet.com/courses/dita_summit.htm)
  I'll be kicking off the summit with an introduction to DITA, followed by DITA in-depth presentations and case studies from a whole bunch of good folks, including Jen Linton of Comtech Services (author of the DITA Users Guide), Bill Rabkin of Idiom, and Jody Bookless of Autodesk. It looks like a good mix of subjects and case studies, and it's not too late to register.
• The X-Pubs XML Publishing Conference in Gatwick, England June 20-21
  (http://x-pubs.com/)
  I believe I'll be providing a short kickoff here, followed by a demo of specialization on day 1 and an overview of DITA and integration possibilities for day 2. A solid schedule with keynotes from both JoAnn Hackos and Ann Rockley - looking forward to crossing the pond (I'm Canadian) and meeting more DITA users from outside North America.

As a side note, I finally got my T-shirts from CafePress (unfortunately too late to show off at the STC, but in time for the DITA Online Summit, where no one can see them). They look pretty good, especially the golf shirt, even if I don't play golf.

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Blogging from the conference center at STC 2006, where we just had a great keynote presentation from Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, two of the founders of the Internet.  Got into an interesting discussion afterwards about how to manage the uniqueness of IDs - a problem I'm still trying to understand in the context of DITA. While a globally unique identifier clearly has advantages, including persistence and reliability, it does have some disadvantages, such as length and lack of scoping. Does the ID need to be globally unique, if all references are scoped by membership in a plugin architecture, as in Eclipse?

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Just an update on my activities:

• Presenting at the STC conference May 7th-10th, giving an intro to DITA presentation, co-presenting on task-oriented information architecture with DITA, and also participating in the standards forum to represent DITA and OASIS. For more info: http://stc.org/53rdConf/
• Presenting at X-Pubs in England June 20th-21st, giving an intro to DITA presentation, specialization demo, and DITA integration presentation. For more info: http://www.x-pubs.com/
• Ordered some DITA OASIS gear at http://www.cafepress.com/oasis_open, hoping to show it off at the aforementioned events.

On the DITA TC front, working hard on the conditional processing feature right now, trying to get to a design we can all agree on for managing the creation of new conditional processing attributes via specialization.

It's been great to read the blog posts from CMS 2006 - I was there in 2005, when DITA had its first full track at a conference, and the excitement was building then. It's amazing how far we've come in just a year: from one or two CMS vendors with DITA support to all of them! Although I suspect that as with the editors, the level of support varies, and features will continue to improve over time: typically supporting topics first, then maps, and finally specialization. Still, the level of focus on DITA as a common standard across CMSs is amazing, and one year since the standard was published is a very fast time to achieve consensus in an industry.

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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.

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