I've spent the past two days at the STC Toronto spring conference and I'm very glad I chose this one to spend time and money on. It had a lot of attractions from the start (location: Mississauga, just minutes from home; free parking, gotta love that!), not least of which was its theme, kind of cheesily expressed, but nonetheless what I am interested in, "Preparing for the Content Management Tipping Point."

Yesterday's first presenter, Saul Carliner, gave us the information design context, the theoretical groundwork for the speakers to follow. I am familiar with his material, but he reinforced the value of the information design work that I do, and gave me more ways to express it to clients.

The afternoon was devoted to Information Mapping, and the less said about that presentation, the better. I applaud the structured writing principles it is based on, but the sales pitch for this very expensive proprietary methodology wasn't even intelligently crafted.

This morning, Michael Priestly gave an excellent introduction to DITA, which takes structured writing principles into an open standard that has much to offer content publishers. It was born from IBM's tech writing needs, but appears to have enough flexibility to be useful in other genres.

This afternoon, Scott Abel, a self professed content wrangler with an earnest passion for technology that can make our working lives easier, skipped lightly through the latest tech trends and delivered an entertaining session with real meaning. I was familiar, at least in passing, with most of the developments he talked about, but the value I got from his talk was the connections he made, the value potential, how each of these new things, like RSS, tag clouds, structured blogging, can make our lives different, and, yes, often better.

Tomorrow: the last day of the conference offers a session on content reuse and a workshop promising best practices for content management.