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Podcast: The Myth of Single Sourcing

by Tom Johnson on Dec 21, 2009 •
categories: podcasts

Download MP3
Length: 38 min.

In his controversial post, The Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt explains:

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today's world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

In other words, single sourcing your content across the enterprise is an idea that simply doesn't work. I responded to the post and had a lively exchange in the comments, so I decided to interview Michael for a podcast.

In this podcast I talk with Michael about single sourcing, collaborative authoring, mashups, help authoring trends, and other topics. You can follow Michael's blog at Mashstream.com.

(Note: We had a brief Skype issue at the start. The audio gets noticeably better at around the 5 minute mark. It's actually a great example of the clarity that the double-ender recording technique provides instead of just using Skype to record.)

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About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm a technical writer / API doc specialist based in the Seattle area. In this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, visual communication, information architecture, writing techniques, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out simplifying complexity and API documentation for some deep dives into these topics. If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the field, be sure to subscribe to email updates. You can also learn more about me or contact me.

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