Less than two months and counting!  Have you registered yet for the Annual Conference?  Have you told co-workers and associates to register too?  You still have time…  May 4 is the deadline to take advantage of the advance member rate of $795 (USD).

Hotel reservations must be made by April 13.  Book today for your stay: http://www.stc.org/54thConf/lodging/index.asp

Whether you attend to learn new skills, explore hot topics, or network with the best, this year’s Conference features something for everyone, including:

• 100+ education sessions
• 5 new Certificate Programs
• evaluation workshops
• 5 Institutes (or conferences within a conference)
• 4 one-day Pre-Conference Workshops
• the EXPO
• 2 keynote speakers (Simon Singh and Ze Frank)

For the latest information about the Conference and to register with the special advance rate, visit http://www.stc.org/54thConf/index.asp today. 

 See you in Minneapolis!

Every month, the managers of the STC Technical Editing SIG receive a spreadsheet that represents the membership report for the SIG.  It tells us who the new members are, who the renewing members are, and who the inactive or cancelled members are.  We use the new member list to send a Welcome letter out, and we’re working on trying to reach out to the cancelled members.

I thought that I might share with you some of the numbers of our SIG, as of the end of February 2007:

• Total members:  2937
• New members:  171
• Cancelled, inactive:  105

Throughout the year, due to the dues renewal (Jan 1st this year) and due to the conference, these membership numbers will ebb and flow.  In September 2006, we had around 2700 members, and we seem hover around this number throughout the year.

Every so often I’ll post another membership report.  Let us know what you think, or what else you might like to know about the SIG and how its working.

The Technical Editing SIG is trying something different for our newsletter and Web site. Instead of waiting for a monthly or quarterly distribution, we are posting news items to our blog on our new Web site as we receive them. If you’re a member of the SIG, you’ll be receiving a regular electronic newsletter that provides a rollup of all the articles. But if you want to read the articles as they are posted, all you have to do is subscribe to the RSS feed of the SIG’s blog.

If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds, they are quite easy to use. A feed is a method of syndicating content so users can subscribe to it. These days, there are dozens of available subscription tools and aggregators that make it easy to gather your RSS subscriptions in one place. This is particularly handy if you read more than one blog or listen to more than one podcast.

How do you subscribe to the SIG feed? We created a Subscribe tab at the top of every page so you can see your options. If you don’t use a feed reader or aggregator, you can choose to subscribe via e-mail. If you choose the e-mail subscription, you’ll get a notification within a day after an article is posted.

If you do use a reader, you can use any of the links we provide on the subscription page, or you can manually enter the feed address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/STCTechEdit).

I hope you enjoy our new newsletter and Web format. Happy reading!