Raw Feed

I haven’t blogged since I started working at my company.  I’ll get into some of my reasons in another post.  More to the point, a lot of you don’t really know what I do.

I’m the Web Editor for a corporation with about 20 offices in 4 different states.  That corporation provides services to clients in a lot of specialized areas.  I manage our intranet.  Between all the different geographic areas and all the specializations, figuring out what content goes in which box gets pretty interesting.  To clarify, when I say I “manage” our intranet, I don’t mean that I do all the content updates myself.  In fact, more and more pieces of our intranet are being updated by different people, but I have been charged with creating and administering a training program to all of them to keep the intranet looking relatively uniform.  This has been keeping me pretty busy the last few months.  “Manage” also means that I’m working on developing a larger plan and roadmap for the intranet, and that I keep the information architecture of the whole beast functioning.  That’s why my job required a library degree — it’s all about information management.  I also manage our external website, but on that site I’m more of the trained monkey, making changes people request.  I say “trained” because I still need to know HTML to do my job.

My corporation is sending me to the second half of Usability Week in San Francisco, which is run by the Neilsen Norman Group.  For those who care, Nielsen is Jakob Nielsen, world-renowned expert on usability and web design.  I am hugely excited.  It’s pretty hard to find a conference that deals directly with what I do.  I’m more techie and web-y than most librarians, but not nearly techie enough for most web conferences.

Here’s what I’m attending:

Thursday: Presenting Company Information on Corporate Websites
This is focused on external websites — managing ours is a part of my job, although at the moment our intranet takes up a greater percentage of my time, my brainpower, and my librarianish heart.

Friday: Content Usability 1
I’m looking forward to this one because it will go into detail about how exactly to write for the web, something I “get” instinctively and have a few ideas about, but can’t really teach anyone else yet.  That’s too bad, because I get a lot of content that’s not written for the web, and I don’t always have the time or the power to edit it.

Saturday: Intranet Usability 2
Although Friday’s session is part 1 of a 2-parter and Saturday’s is part 2 of a 2-parter, they’re not in the same series.  Nonetheless, they’re independent enough that I decided to mix things up a little.  I think this session is the one I’m most excited about, and that’s saying something.  I love the work I do with our intranet, but I want to make it even better, and I hope that this will give me some tools to do so.  Yum!

Three other things make this conference even better, and they’re all about location:

1. I get to stay at the Mark Hopkins.  Sweet!
2. The Mark Hopkins is across from Grace Cathedral, so I get to visit some of my old co-workers and walk the labyrinth on my lunch hour.  Super sweet!
3. I get to see Brad and Susan and Anne and Steve and Tricia.  Super mega sweet!

I am just about the luckiest (and possibly the nerdiest) girl on the planet.  Woo hoo!