Out of the Gate
For the second consecutive year, the conference opened with a panel, rather than a keynote speech. The panel: User Assistance Trends: What's Ripe, Hype, and Out-of-sight, with Saul Carliner, Dave Gash, Michael Hughes, Sarah O'Keefe, and Joe Welinske
Leading off the Tools and Technologies section was Joe predicting a return/resumption of RoboHelp which brought a laugh from the crowd that remembered Joe's prediction of one year ago about the sunsetting of RoboHelp. Joe suggested that Adobe, which last year bought Macromedia seems to have a different idea about what to do with RoboHelp
Adobe is not only at this year;s conference with a vendor booth (and a "Macromedia RoboHelp" poster), they are sponsoring a big evening social event.
Another predictions suggested the emergence of AJAX (asynchronous Java and XML) at the dominant user assistance technology, making such assistance more dynamic.
Dave suggested that within the next few years, there will be an anti-technology backlash within the user assistance development community, that we will want to re-focus on writing and designing information and won't want to learn the Next Big Thing in technology.
Resplendent in a long ponytail, Dav also suggested that the web will be heavily censored by the U.S. government within the next 5-8 years, suggesting that mainstream media is already heavily regulated by the government and controlled by corporations, and so the freedom of the web is a potential threat to that conrol.
Mike rounded out the IT trends predictions by suggested that the Internet will crash. Not if, but when, and then the big question becomes who will rebuild it.
posted by Chuck Martin @ 9:32 AM
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