Information scavenger hunt: How do you find a needle in a haystack?

Shawn and I are working on an article for MSDN Magazine about how to design and take advantage of custom locales. We're trying to supplement the information already available in MSDN and on our blogs with some best practices that ought to help developers who want to take advantage of custom locale technology.

But working on the article has started me wondering: Where do our customers typically find that they get the most useful information about how to use the technologies that we're releasing? There are a whole bunch of options: MSDN help documentation, MSDN Magazine articles, KB articles, newsgroups or other public forums, blogs... the list goes on. But in order for us to ensure that we make our documentation available in the most useful possible way, it is important for us to know how customers search for and find the documentation that we produce. Do some of these distribution channels work better than others? Would something else work better?

The way I see it, the primary distinction is between non-interactive formats (e.g. MSDN help documentation) and interactive formats (e.g. blogs, newsgroups). So it makes sense to use forums to present the kind of information that those forums best support. But I'm interested to hear what you think about how well we do with this today. In particular, have you looked for information and been unable to find it? What kinds of information do you expect to find in the various locations that you look? Which forums are the ones you keep coming back to, because they're the most useful, extensive, immediate, and/or fun? Does someone else do it better than Microsoft does?

I think we could do a better job of communicating about our technologies to customers, and I'm trying to take advantage of the interactive format of this forum in asking the question. :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  For pure API info, I go with MSDN.
  If I deiscover it is not working "as advertised," I search a bit on the web, and if that is not enough, I write a small application "execising" the API I want to understand.
  
  For the big picture, for the "why" part, for strategic stuff, I go to www.microsoft.com/globaldev (although kind of slow-moving) and to the few i18n blogs I know (well, this means in fact google, because the blogs.msdn.com search is really bad :-)

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  Okay, so then here's another question: Why blogs over newsgroups (if indeed I read you correctly)? Or do you use newsgroups for different kinds of information? Or do you think the newsgroup model is broken?
  
  Oh, and as for why I'm asking: As we're expanding our extensibility toolset and thinking about ways to make information about the tools available, I'm really trying to understand which forums will be the most useful to people so that we can focus our efforts appropriately.

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  I've posted a few comments here:
  
  http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?postid=511
  
  Tim

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  I'll post more in response soon, but for now: this Kieran is a she, not a he. :)

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  Apologies; now corrected :-)
  
  Tim

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  <<Why blogs over newsgroups>>
  I don't think I have answered this part.
  Because in the blogs the signal/noise ration is way-way better.
  

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