Writer River is a collaborative social news site that allows technical communicators to both find and share links to interesting content they find online. As more people contribute to the site — sharing links to blog posts, magazine or journal articles, podcasts, books, videos, and even literature — the more engaging the site becomes.

The dozens of highly relevant, useful articles that flow through Writer River each week can help you stay updated with the latest trends in technical communication.

Here’s how the site works. When you are set up as a link journalist, you can add links to the Publish2 technical communication newsgroup through three different methods: from a Publish2 bookmarklet, from Google Reader, or from Delicious. When you add a link, you can also type a brief comment about why you recommend the link. Writer River then automatically pulls the links from the Publish2 technical communication newsgroup and displays them on this site.

But here’s the cool part. You’re not just contributing to Writer River anymore. When you publish a link, you can also publish it to your own blog or post it across Twitter. This way, the link sharing is reciprocal — you share with others in the newsgroup, who can view the river of links on Writer River (or within Publish2). And you also publish to your own site at the same time. Additionally, if you see articles in the newsgroup that you like, you can click a Link It button to publish the link to your own site or Twitter account.

Finally, if you have WordPress, you can add a Publish2 widget that pulls in all the posts automatically (which is what Writer River does). You can also style the code so that it matches the branding of your site.

If you would like to contribute as a link journalist to the technical communication newsgroup, just complete the following form, and I’ll send you an invitation.

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