Just checking in from LavaCon in New Orleans. Have mostly recovered from the soul-scarring sights on Bourbon Street last night, and am finishing the first day of the conference listening to Robert Anderson demonstrate specialization. It's rude of me to be blogging while he presents, but I kinda know this part :-)

The day kicked off with a keynote from Colonel Jeffrey Beder, with the New Orleans Hurricane Protection Office. Interesting how much of the same issues resonate across any project, regardless of size and impact - the importance of communication, of leadership as well as management, and of having a clear and compelling vision for the project.

In Neil Perlin's Web 2.0 talk, I liked Neil's analogy of modular content as beads, which can all be different but still be strung together to make a necklace etc. I think DITA and Web 2.0 have a natural fit which I've described in other presentations - but we're all still waiting for the first compelling (public) case study (I know of a few in the oven, and they're starting to smell pretty good, but I'm told they're still too hot to eat).

Andrea Ames's lunch time talk on influence was of course both inspirational and influential (I'd expect no less of Andrea, one of the most influential people I know). But I won't try and summarize her presentation here - find your own Jedi master.

Then I got my turn at the podium, with The Way of DITA - I'm sensing an increasing interest in the use of DITA for non-technical contexts, which fits nicely both with a number of enterprise business document scenarios, and with the Web 2.0 connection.

And here I am with Robert Anderson in the DITA toolkit deep dive - he's making fun of me now, so I better start paying attention.

--MP in New Orleans