What runs but never gets tired?

A river. And, apparently, Tom Johnson.

At the STC conference last week, I had the good fortune of chatting with Tom over the topic of marketing vs. influencing. Neither of us cares much for the term marketing when it comes to promoting oneself in the workplace. This could be related to the word, our personalities, or where we work, or all of the above. We do seem to agree that in our positions, we prefer the more subtle role (responsibility?) of influencing decisions and activities regarding design, workflow, architecture, communication strategies, content, and so on.

Outside the office, though, Tom has a much greater influence, for he's doing more to promote our profession, and us as professionals and individuals, then he probably realizes.

Today, for example, he unleashed WriterRiver.com, a social news site for technical communicators, where you can submit news stories. On this river of news, you can also vote to float or sink a story. Most excellent.

This new site complements growing suite of other technical communication resources, such as the I'd Rather Be Writing blog, Tech Writer Voices podcasts, WordPress QuickStart Guide, and Tech Writer Blog Directory.

Networking Opportunities We Love

Check out the revamped WindyBits.com. It's an excellent resource for tech-savvy Chicagoans interested in learning about local networking opportunities. You'll find the WindyBits RSS feed on our blog. See below.

Thursdays @ STC Chicago will appear on the WindyBits event calendar each month. I posted our March 6th event to the calendar just two days ago, and we've already received positive feedback from people who first learned about our networking event via the feed. Long live RSS!

RSS in Plain English

Click to Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.