The audience of one: making professional communication personal

Technical communication groups must adopt an object-oriented approach to documentation to provide a database of content objects that can be assembled on the fly for customized content for particular niche audiences and eventually for personalized content for an audience of one. Relying on XML tags content management software, and a movement sweeping the marketing and manufacturing departments of many large corporations, the drive to provide personalized content is just beginning in technical communication departments, which have resisted the change. But as we move toward single sourcing and XML, we will also be making personalization possible. This paper considers how personalization will affect the technical content we provide to individual users.