Find the Distinctions That Make a Difference
Rachel Lovinger (@rlovinger) just published a great piece on categorizing, called “Splitting Tigers, Lumping Rabbits,” on Scatter/Gather. I love her simple, elegant advice: “You just need to find the...
View ArticleA Definition of Content That Everyone Can Understand
On UXMatters, as a comment to Colleen Jones′s (@leenjones) excellent piece on the heuristics for assessing the quality of content, Fred Brenton issued this challenge: It would really help everyone...
View ArticleDescription Versus Evaluation in Assessing Content Quality
Colleen Jones (@leenjones), one of my colleagues from the Content Strategy Consortium (#csconsortium) recently published, “Toward Content Quality” on UXMatters.com. In it, she presents her cool...
View ArticleContent Typology: Getting a Handle on Your Content Types
“Content types” are among the least understood, and yet most potent, aspects of user experience and web design. Most people encounter them for the first time when implementing a grand-scale content...
View ArticleContent strategy is an act of love
There’s been conversation recently, especially on the Google group for Content Strategy about what it takes to be a content strategist. What’s the background? What’s the education? What’s the...
View ArticleYou’ll Wish You’d Had a Content Strategy Before Implementing Content Management
Two years ago, I had my first experience of implementing a content management system (CMS). I will withhold all names of organizations, people, and platforms to protect the guilty, but let’s just say...
View ArticleBe Known For Your Content, Not Your Name!
If you manage your corporate website, which houses content from multiple departments or business lines, you probably recognize this scene: You’re summoned to a meeting with some internal web clients...
View ArticleContent Transparency: Can you see me now?
Welcome to the age of transparency President Obama has promised “transparency” as a hallmark of his administration, which now publishes documents once consigned to darkness under rubrics of “executive...
View ArticleThe Mythic Bestiary: Content Owners
Shhhhh! Look over there! The Neverland of content strategy is full of wondrous creatures. We invoke their names in meetings. Their titles appear on project plans. We assign them tasks and...
View ArticleThe Information Gathering Spot: Addressing the Terrible Truth About People...
When I served as “information strategist” for the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio from 2000 to 2006, I was responsible for connecting over a hundred parishes, over two hundred clergy, and over twenty...
View ArticleSophie’s choice: Well-crafted content or empowered content owners?
It’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate a hard truth about myself: I’m a content geek. I know I’m not the only one. If you’re reading this post, you’re probably a content geek, too. But if...
View ArticleToward a taxonomy of content
This week, @dhh from @37signals published an article on the insufficiency of the term “content” to mean…well…content. I understand. It’s like how I love the container label “resources” or “tools” to...
View ArticleTaxonomy: A “Disambiguation”
I was not able to attend the several workshops on “taxonomy” at the recent WebContent2010 conference (#wcconf) in Chicago: Tough choices were made. Yet I think I got a lot out of those workshops...
View ArticleDemonstrating Content Strategy: Goodness from the Oven?
In today’s conversation on the Content Strategy maillist, we’re once again struggling with how to show people “what content strategy looks like.” Of course we’re struggling! “Strategy” represents your...
View ArticleYou just might be a content strategist if…
We owe Jeff Foxworthy of debt of gratitude for this comedic formula, and I think that it serves us well in content strategy. We who work in the content of websites generally are already doing “content...
View ArticleScrummy Content in an Agile World
Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish began a conversation recently about adopting Agile/Scrum software development practices for content strategy, and as synchronicity would have it, I am, e’en now, working...
View ArticleContent Modeling is more than “fields”
When content management folk talk about “content modeling,” they are usually referring to the process of building templates for a CMS. Besides the Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko, which is a...
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Content Strategy: A brief history of the Web
“Fish/Bird Tessellation by Escher I first discovered I was a content strategy guy at the 2009 IA Summit, at which Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson), CEO of BrainTraffic, organized the “Content Strategy...
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The Trouble with Semantic Markup: Response to schema.org
First thing this morning, checking in on the Twitter streams, I saw Jeff Evans (@joffaboy) announce the article, “Google, Bing & Yahoo’s New Schema.org Creates New Standards for Web Content...
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Adaptive Content: Our primary platform is burning; Time to jump.
We were honored at our last enterprise web developers’ conference to welcome Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) as our first keynote presenter. I have known Karen since we were both attendees of the...
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