Liz Danzico's presentation at Webstock: damn, I had to miss it.
My own presentation focused on the struggle for non-specialist writers to understand the demands of everyday, old-hat technology, even ignorance about Styles or a content management system can cause havoc.
Knowledge workers write at work about stuff they know. Even plain old writing is not their main skill, and they now have to adapt their writing to a never-ending wave of technical requirements. Expectations are unrealistically high; technology has raced ahead of people's ability to write content appropriately.
Rahel Anne Bailie comments on another Danzico session last year, on the Framework Age. Liz was concerned with the mismatch between technology and content writing: "For all the talk of Web 2.0, there's been little said about how content fits into the world of AJAX, RSS, social media, and RESTful APIs." (OK, I had to Google REST.)
A recruiter says the demand for writers with hyphenated skills sets is growing: IA-writer, Usability-writer, developer-writer, and so on. It's the next-generation demand of what writers saw a decade ago, when a new set of technical publishing tools came on the market. The bar has been raised again - what does it take for writers to meet this one?
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