The Breakdown: In this installment of the SXSW Q&A series, we talked with Christine Connors (@cjmconnors) of TriviumRLG LLC.  She told us about her panel “Semantically Yours: Dating Tips for the Semantic Web” and how anthropomorphizing your data can make it smarter.

S/G: What is a “data persona” and how does it help us make smarter applications?

Christine: A data persona is not much different than a user persona. User personas are utilized as part of the design and development phase of websites and applications to ensure that key user needs are met – interaction and information needs.  User personas detail fictionalized characters that represent the prime demographics of the target audience – the who, what, when, where, why and how of the users choice to use an application or website. This context allows the design team to craft a more positive interaction for the content prioritized by the business.

By anthropomorphizing data, an organization can identify which characteristics of the data may be of most use to its users and extend the persona paradigm to enable views of or uses for that data. Again, think of the 5Ws: Who is the data? What kind of data is it? When is the data in the prime of its life? Where is it most applicable? Why would someone want to use it?

S/G: What are some interesting semantically enabled applications people can look at to get a better idea of what’s possible?

Christine: I love Zotero, an open source tool for managing and sharing research resources. Also, the Drupal content management system has a wealth of semantically enabled modules based on work from MIT, DERI Galway and Structured Dynamics. The core of Drupal 7 itself is semantically enabled and I’m looking forward to the reports on its utility that should begin arriving soon.

S/G: What can people expect from your presentation?

Christine: My good colleague and friend Kevin Lynch and I have been struck, for years, by the difficulties explaining the benefits of the semantic web and semantic technologies to business people and consumers. We intend to present, in a light-hearted accessible way, why the semantic web is worth getting to know. After all, it’s often the prettiest girl in the room that doesn’t have a date – all her potential suitors are too afraid to speak to her!

S/G: You’re one of the panelists on a monthly podcast called The Semantic Link. Who should be listening to it, and what kinds of topics will it cover?

Christine: We have a great regular panel of experts on the Semantic Link podcast with technical, business and content backgrounds. We do our best to present all angles of a topic, and welcome application developers, content producers, executives and managers to listen in to – and more importantly ask questions of – our gang. We will cover hot topics – new products, new standards, upcoming events; and discuss recurring challenges in the semantics industry.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW?

Christine: I myself am looking forward to seeing presentations on the intersection of technology and art. I am fascinated with the ability of semantic technologies – machine and human powered – to extend, visualize, challenge and provoke awe in the arts of all kinds: film, music, visual and more.  Making the fine arts more interactive, engaging active participants rather than passive viewers – these ideas are what excite me.  

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2011 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by tantek
Badge – by adactio
Microphone – by hiddedevries
iPad – by smemon87

The Breakdown: In the latest installment of this year’s SXSW Q & A series, we talked to Jess Hemerly at University of California, Berkeley.  She gave us a sneak peak on her panel called “Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain the Same?”  With her panel she’ll be exploring the topic of why metadata for music is so critical for the industry and what we as lovers of music need to know about it.

S/G: Tell us about your panel and what you’ll be discussing.
Jess: Our panel is called “Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain the Same?” and we’ll be talking about music metadata as information and as culture, and where and how law intersects both. One of our big thematic questions is, “What is metadata?” and we look forward to engaging in a really interesting discussion from there.

S/G: Who is on your panel, and why did you invite them to participate?
Jess: Jason Schultz is a clinical professor at Berkeley School of Law. Prior to Berkeley, he was a Senior Staff Attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jason’s interest in both intellectual property law and media and culture at large make him the perfect person to discuss music metadata from the legal perspective. Our other panelist is Larisa Mann, a PhD candidate at Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence & Social Policy program. Her work at Berkeley is legal anthropology, conducting ethnographic research on copyright law and local creative practices, specifically within Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. She is also a great DJ—DJ Ripley—so she not only brings a researcher’s perspective, she also depends on metadata in her role as a performer and artist.

S/G: How much of the digital metadata landscape is the wild wild west? Is there any one source that ensures the accuracy of this information?
Jess: We’ll look at this more in depth in our panel, specifically the tension between proprietary sources like AllMusic and CDDB and open sources like discogs, MusicBrainz, and FreeDB. I am doing my master’s research project on MusicBrainz, an open source music metadatabase, and one of the things that users continue to stress is the importance of their ability to see and correct bad data. With MusicBrainz, you can log in and fix something. With closed services, you can send a note complaining, but you never know where that goes or if anything will change. And then there’s the issue of really obscure that may never find its way into proprietary sources, which affects its completeness. These are just some of the trade-offs between different metadata sources, and we look forward to really digging into these issues at our panel. The idea of a single “perfect” source is hardly a reality. CDDB has mistakes, MusicBrainz takes work to use, and even sellers like Amazon gets track listings wrong. It’s also important to note that because metadata is relevant to the social context of music, there isn’t really one “right” way to organize metadata. Different communities, subcultures, genres, and styles rely on different metadata and you won’t know what’s relevant until you know who is interested.

S/G: Musicians have enough work just hustling for their next gig. Now they need to be managing their metadata?
Jess: If they want to be found, yes. Metadata is what we talk about when we talk about music. An artist’s name is metadata. An album name is metadata. A release year is metadata. If they want to be found in the digital landscape, the last thing they want is to be left out of metadata sources because these sources are increasingly tied to discovery. More information means more ways to discover something you might like. “Track 02″ on “Unknown Album” will not help fans discuss it with other could-be fans. Bad metadata makes it harder to find things within a fan’s collection. We’re also really looking forward to discussing how we can push the boundaries of what qualifies as metadata because it goes far beyond just the tags on an MP3 file.

S/G: Can you elaborate on the legal implications of musical metadata and how that plays into the conversation?
Jess: Various battles over metadata have hit and could hit nearly every major aspect of intellectual property law, e.g., trademark, patent, copyright, and data scraping. Who legally owns metadata has serious implications for the ways that people and even artists can use that metadata. The ownership of metadata is also important when identifying materials sampled or shared in another work, allowing a fan to really understand how different pieces of works come together while simultaneously appropriately attributing a sampled work to the original author. Jason has some really great audiovisual examples of how this plays out, as well as a laundry list of precedents that either have shaped or will potentially impact the future of music metadata.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW 2011?
Jess: It’s actually my first time at SXSW, so I’m really looking forward to just the overall experience. I am definitely excited for our panel and to get people involved in the metadata conversation. We have some audience interaction planned, so that should be fun. I’m looking forward to Chris Poole’s keynote and to the panel with the Gregory Brothers (“Too Soon? Timing Topical Web Videos”) because I am a huge fan of Auto-Tune the News. I’m also looking forward to the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights: You Decide because it’s both a timely and extremely important topic.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2011 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by tantek
Badge – by adactio
Microphone – by hiddedevries
iPad – by smemon87

At the end of the Intelligent Content Conference, in a discussion led by conference organizers, Ann Rockley, Joe Gollner, and Scott Abel, people shared insights and questions about where this discipline will be going next and what they’d like to see discussed at the conference in the future. Hopefully some of these topics will surface in future presentations.

Solution Analysis

Right after the conference, I wrote a post about some of the content trends that had been most discussed: single-source publishing, content on mobile devices, enhanced publishing, user-aware and location-aware context, and end-to-end content strategy. But some attendees were left wondering how to evaluate when a solution would be appropriate for their clients or projects. So we’d like to see more discussion of techniques for doing upfront analysis (including ROI measurement tools) and more case studies (including metrics for measuring effectiveness).

Alignment of Inputs and Outputs

While tech writers tend to focus on the creation of content, many of the current content strategies (social integration, mobile delivery, semantic relationships) are dependent on the way the content is distributed. While DITA is a standard used to help author structured content, there are other structures that are designed to help content flow smoothly into other platforms and play nicely with other technologies. This is a specific aspect of end-to-end content strategy that not enough people are talking about yet – how do we get the input formats to align with the output formats to support the content through its entire lifecycle.

Just as we’re not going to get very far by overemphasizing one stage of the lifecycle over others, we’re going to be in a much better position to do all the things we want to do with our content if we can map these tools, technologies, and standards together in a meaningful approach with smooth transitions from one stage to the next.

Marriage of disciplines

This is something I had been talking about since the beginning of the conference, and it was the subject of my post at the end of day 1 (“An Appeal for Content Agnosticism”). Too many disciplines are having similar conversations in isolation. People practicing technical communication, web content strategy, instructional design, marketing, user experience, content analytics, social media strategy, search strategy, etc. have a lot to learn from each other. Conferences like this – and other content-focused conferences coming up this year – should help create the bridges that are needed.

So, once again, I suggest that everyone attend a conference or a meetup that’s slightly adjacent to your comfort zone. When ideas start flowing and breaking down the silos, who knows what exciting things might happen. What sort of developments would you like to see in the content disciplines?

See also:

• Intelligent Content Conference: Workshops
• ICC Day 1: An Appeal for Content Agnosticism
• ICC Day 2: What We Heard

The second full day of the Intelligent Content Conference was also filled with interesting talks and demonstrations. Patterns started to emerge around the topics that are important today. In this post, I’ll sum up some of the trends that I saw across the three day event.

Single-source publishing

There’s a growing need to create content once and publish it in a number of different formats, configurations, and platforms. Authoring standards such as DITA are designed to add structure to the elements of content (in DITA’s case, technical documentation) so that they can be segmented and reconfigured and still retain their context in the overall body of content.

The tools that support this kind of publishing include component content management systems – which have been around for a while – and some newer tools that are designed to produce multi-platform content for specific purposes. Several of the conference sponsors are companies that make component content management systems: SDL, Author-it, and Vasont. In the realm of more targeted authoring tools, I had the chance to play around with a platform called LearnCast. It’s designed to allow people to create educational content – including video, audio, and interactive elements – that’s compatible with any mobile platform.

Content will be everywhere

Several of the speakers observed that content is breaking out of its containers (an opinion shared by us here at Scatter/Gather). And of course, people increasingly want to access digital content on their mobile devices: phones, tablets, netbooks, etc. Single-source publishing tools are going to be indispensible in making that possible for organizations with limited resources, but there are also decisions that need to be made.

To really streamline content production, organizations should separate the content from platform-specific layout or functionality. But this could mean missing out on some of the desired features of apps. As a result there’s a growing tension between the benefits of creating device-specific apps and the benefits of creating digital content in platform agnostic standards, such as EPUB. As the platform wars heat up, do you sacrifice features? Or reach? Or will we develop ways to get the best of both worlds?

Enhanced publishing

Let’s hope we develop ways to get the best of both worlds, because paging through a PDF on a tablet is not going to cut it for most people. They want interactivity, social integration, collaboration, and links to other sources of information. They want a good experience.  Eric Freese (Aptara) gave an overview of some of the enhanced eBook capabilities of the EPUB 3 specification, the first public draft of which was just recently released for review. Unfortunately, many features that are currently available, even in version 2, aren’t supported by the eReaders on most tablets.

Content needs context in order to be intelligent

Without context, content is just information. It may or may not be useful in a given situation. With context, you can deliver content that’s actually relevant. This means being aware of your users’ needs, which could be broad or very state-specific. Derek Olson (Foraker Labs) gave an inspiring demonstration of the breastcancer.org iPhone app and discussed the kinds of research and design decisions that went into creating an app that delivers highly targeted content to an audience with very specific medical and emotional needs.

Context also means being location aware, especially in the case of mobile content delivery. Localized content applications can be powerfully engaging when done right. This was the topic of a lively presentation and discussion led by Mark Fidelman (Mindtouch). The discussion was focused less on the capabilities and more on the privacy implications of providing a lot of personal information to corporations in exchange for discounts and rewards. People have different comfort levels, but many people in the room (including Mark), felt that we’re already giving away a lot of personal information all the time, we might as well be compensated for it in some way.

I was also pleased to hear several speakers discuss the need to tag content with meaningful metadata in order to make the most of all this contextual awareness. Rich, semantic taxonomies, properly structured and applied to the content, help make sure that information gets served up when and where it’s most useful.

End-to-end content strategy

Though a number of useful tools were demonstrated at the conference, it’s important to keep in mind that buying a tool doesn’t, in itself, solve all of an organization’s content problems. I like the way Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, expressed it during the wrap-up: “Vendors talk about ‘end-to-end solutions’ but they don’t seem to understand what ‘end’ means.” Generally, they define the “end” as the point when their product is no longer involved in the process.

In fact, several speakers had presented their view of the content lifecycle. Rahel Bailie, for example, identified a four stage process: analyze, collect, manage, publish, and then back to analyze again. Other speakers proposed models with three stages, or even six. But however many stages each person envisioned, they all agreed that it’s a cyclical process. And while certain tools may help with one or more stages in the cycle, no tool covers all of them. For example, a content management system isn’t going to help determine user needs or business priorities. There are tools that can provide data that will support those activities, but they still require human insight and a solid approach to developing a strategy.

In other words, use tools for things that tools are good at, and let people do what people do best. And involve your audience when you can, as well as your employees. Content creation is happening at such a massive scale now, any successful effort will probably require some combination of editorial effort, automation, and user/social contributions.

Next: What’s next?

At the end of the conference, the organizers, Ann Rockley, Joe Gollner, and Scott Abel, led a discussion with all the conference participants on what we had seen and what’s next. In my final post on ICC11, I’ll talk about some of those upcoming trends.

See also:

• Intelligent Content Conference: Workshops
• ICC Day 1: An Appeal for Content Agnosticism
• ICC Wrap-up: What’s next?

The Breakdown: On Day 1 of the Intelligent Content Conference, Rachel realizes that there’s something major, but essentially imaginary, getting in the way of interdepartmental content conversations.

On the first full day of the Intelligent Content Conference, we were treated with a range of talks about how to create and use intelligent content for different platforms and purposes. As a content strategist who attends a lot of conferences, much of this was very familiar, but with a bit of a twist because many of the people involved come from a technical communications background.

Yesterday, during pre-conference workshops, I found myself wondering why more content strategists weren’t in attendance. I even commented in my wrap-up post that, from the very beginning, the emphasis here has been content strategy. Many of the things being discussed are the same topics that are covered at all of the web content, content strategy, and UX conferences I normally attend.

The fact is that there are several self-identified content strategists here. But as far as I can tell, many of them come from a slightly different realm than the ones I’m used to encountering. Listening to some of the conversations taking place in between sessions, I’ve noticed a recurring focus on “technical documentation” and in the conference itself there’s a lot of emphasis on standards and tools that are specifically designed to support that type of content. It’s the kind of emphasis that brings to mind the aphorism “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Now, please excuse the Stephen Colbert “I don’t see color” moment we’re about to have here, but it has suddenly dawned on me that I’ve been living in a world of content discrimination and I don’t understand it. For a long time now I’ve been hearing people say things like “We’re talking about WEB content” and my brain responds “Right, we’re talking about content.” But the point has just hit home that we’re not always talking about the same thing – some of us are talking about marketing content, or journalism content, or enterprise content, or technical documentation.

I realize there are differences, sometimes important strategic differences, but there’s also much more crossover than people are generally talking about. There’s a lot that these different factions of content professionals could learn from each other, but instead people are reinventing the wheel in distant silos. Often these silos are imposed by the structures and culture of an organization, but that’s no reason why we can’t foster more cross-pollination when we step out of the office and travel to conferences.

Which brings me back to the ostensible topic of this post: the conference I attended today. There were many great talks covering mobile content apps, social content, taxonomy development and usage, the content lifecycle, digital publishing, collaboration, content curation, and the tools that can make it easier to do all of these things. There was a good dose of discussion of structured content, and many mentions of an authoring standard called DITA which is used to structure technical documentation, but aside from that any of these talks would have been right at home at any of the web design conferences I’ve been to.

Towards the end of the day I had two interesting conversations that helped coalesce my thoughts about the things I’ve learned at the conference so far. One man mentioned to me that although he had seen several case study presentations, he still hadn’t seen evidence that any of this was having a broad impact on an organization. I suggested that it wouldn’t be possible to have a broad impact on an organization while viewing everything through the lens of tech docs. In order to have that kind of impact, an organization needs to develop an integrated content strategy that covers all of the types of content they maintain – tech docs, intellectual capital, marketing communications, editorial assets, etc.

The second conversation was with Mark Lewis, contributing author to DITA 101. We discussed the standard and the type of content it supports. I know that DITA can easily be expressed as XML, but I asked him whether anyone is using it in conjunction with other content standards (such as Dublin Core and RDFa). This led to some speculation about how DITA might become part of a wider solution set. One option would be to expand DITA to cover more content types. But retrofitting like that tends to water down the original intent of a technology. The other option, which I prefer, is to figure out how to make DITA interoperable with the other standards already in use. That way it still plays to its strengths, and becomes an integral part of a solution that can cover the entire range of an organization’s content.

There’s a lot of potential for content professionals from different backgrounds to learn from each other. I encourage everyone to go to a conference that seems slightly adjacent to what you normally do. If you’re a design-oriented content person, go to a CMS or technical communications conference. If you’re a tech writer, go to a UX or web design conference. It’s the best way I know to get new perspectives on the things you think you already know.

See also:

• Intelligent Content Conference: Workshops
• ICC Day 2: What We Heard
• ICC Wrap-up: What’s next?

The Breakdown: Yesterday, February 16, 2011, before the Intelligent Content Conference officially began, there was a day of Pre-Conference Workshops. Here’s a summary of what I heard. 

Ann Rockley, Intelligent Content Eye-Opener: Content Strategy

In the first workshop, organizer and conference founder Ann Rockley answered the question “What is Intelligent Content?” In brief, it is content that is:

• Structurally Rich
• Semantically Categorized
• Easily Discoverable
• Efficiently Reusable
• Dynamically Reconfigurable

Now, for anyone who still thinks this is a conference that’s just about the technical side of content, I would like to point out that the subtitle of this opening workshop was “Content Strategy.” And indeed the rest of the talk was about exactly the kind of practices we content strategists often do – gathering business requirements, auditing and analyzing content, defining the structure of content, identifying a reuse strategy, and creating a taxonomy.

I’m excited about potential crossover between the “technical communications” community and the “content strategy” community. There’s a lot that both can learn from each other.

Joe Gollner, Implementing Intelligent Content Solutions

Next up, co-organizer Joe Gollner provided his take on how to make these strategies into realities. In this talk he got down to brass tacks a bit more, but framed the discussion in language and concepts that would be accessible to business owners, as well as content professionals and technologists. He talked about balancing business considerations, opening communication channels, assembling the implementation team, managing risks, addressing legacy content, processes and controls, and battling entropy and “barnaclization” (which is a great way of describing scope creep).

Gollner described “Intelligent Content” as requiring a balance between knowledge, technology and business. I have long held the same belief (if by “knowledge” you mean messaging, communication, or editorial goals). But, based on my many years working in the User Experience group at Razorfish, I would also include user needs in that mix.

Gollner had several practical suggestions on how to get to implementation, several of which are described in this post he wrote last year called Seven Steps to Intelligent Content. The rest of his tips would be hard for me to cover without just recreating his entire deck here, so let’s hope he posts it online at some point.

David Clemons, Please, Turn Your Mobile Device On!

In the afternoon there were three very interesting sounding workshops taking place at once: one on developing a corporate social strategy, one on developing a mobile workforce, and one on the ROI of DITA.

I decided to go to the mobile workshop led by David Clemons. If you followed the #icc11 Twitter stream during this part of the day, it might have seemed like the social workshop was the only one going on (but, then, it makes sense that the social-oriented people would tweet a lot, right?). Trust me, though, there was a lot going on in the mobile workshop as well.

Clemons discussed the need to publish content to a wide variety of mobile platforms, and some of the considerations for doing so. Then he demonstrated one of the tools offered by his company, Push Mobile Media. It’s a tool called LearnCast which allows people to create and publish cross-platform mobile courseware pretty easily. We got into small groups and each group created mobile courseware and then tested it out on our various mobile devices. It was great, after a day of listening, to do some hands-on work with content.

The pre-conference workshops were a great intro for the conference. See also:

• ICC Day 1: An Appeal for Content Agnosticism
• ICC Day 2: What We Heard
• ICC Wrap-up: What’s next?

Delivered to your door every day. (image via Rob Gallop)

The Breakdown: Publishers have been wondering if the tablet is going to save journalism. News Corp recently put a stake in the ground with their launch of The Daily. It’s way too early to tell whether this experiment is going to be a success or a failure, but we’ll let you know what we think of it so far.

When The Daily, the first publication created exclusively for the iPad, had been out for a week I sat down with Beth Lind (@bethl), the head of the Media & Entertainment practice in Razorfish’s NYC office, to discuss what we liked and what we thought still needs work.

Beth had seen a preview presentation of the prototype, and the first thing she commented on was that they had launched with all of the features they demonstrated at the preview – and that’s no small achievement these days. Then, as she pulled up the app, it announced that there was a new version, but she had to uninstall the old version before updating. This had the unfortunate side-effect of clearing out all of her saved articles. Here are some of our other initial observations:

What we liked

Beth is excited that someone is finally using the tablet to present content in ways that go beyond static pages. The layout is still pretty magazine-like, but it uses interactivity in some subtle and fun ways.

• 360 degree images
• Images that can be zoomed in and out
• Animated design elements
• Graphs that build as the page loads
• Seamless use of inline video
• Embedded polls
• Audio functionality reads the news to you!

What we didn’t like

Oh, it’s always easier to criticize, isn’t it? Here are the things that fell short of our expectations.

• It crashes, it freezes, it takes a long time to load
• The interface of the app is confusing and inconsistent. I often found myself clicking on things that seemed like they should do something, but they didn’t.
• It was wise for them to include the ability to share, but in order to make it work the content has to be mirrored on the web (which makes it not-exactly-iPad-only). This is a shortcoming of the platform, not the app, but whose fault is it that when you share a link it offers unhelpfully vague messages like “Check out this article from the Daily” (on Twitter) and “I want to share the web version of an article from The Daily, the tablet-based original news publication.” (on Facebook)?
• The audio feature is awkward and only applies to some of the articles
• It’s a walled garden. We think it must be aimed at that super-select segment of early adopters who want to get all their news from a single source. If you want to read other points of view on a story, you still have to visit any of the thousands of other news sources online.

Of course, we’re sympathetic about these shortcomings – these aren’t easy problems to solve. But the bigger question is the value equation: Does The Daily bring something valuable enough to the table to make people look past the bugs and pay for a weekly subscription? A lot of these issues will be fixed sooner or later, but halfway into the 2-week free trial period, neither of us was convinced that it was something we wanted to pay for. The coverage is not unique enough, and the features are not quite there. We’ll keep an eye on it though and see how The Daily develops. 

The Breakdown: In the latest installment of this year’s SXSW speaker Q & A series, we talked to publishing innovator Richard Nash (@R_Nash). In 2009, Richard left his gig running Soft Skull Press to launch Cursor, a new publishing model that aims to bring communities into the publishing equation. He gave us his predictions for the industry and the scoop on his intriguingly-titled SXSW panel, “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted. Not!”

S/G: Tell us about your panel and what you’ll be discussing.

Richard: The genesis of this panel is in a joke, as is the case with most any idea I have. (Or at least, successful ideas—the serious ones never pan out.) I was editing a manuscript and the author asked me how things were going. Halfway through completely rewriting it I grasped that I just needed to flip two clauses and bingo, problem solved. So, I told the anxious author that I practice the art of the Minimum Viable Edit. But of course, I stole the phrasing from the Lean Startup concept of the Minimum Viable Product. I thought how peculiar that editing literary fiction and launching a tech/media start-up should share such structures.

So could we use SXSW as a suitable venue to begin to tease out where culture and technology might have some similarities, deep in each other’s grammar? I remember feeling, after Danah Boyd’s keynote last year, that we might be reaching the outer limit of what technology can do to change society without the engagement of the culture-makers, the people who deal with voice and character and emotion and joy and hate and beauty. And, vice versa, looking at the culture industries right now, it’s clear we cannot move forward economically or creatively without engaging with technologists more robustly. Hence this [panel].

S/G: Who is on your panel, and why did you invite them to participate?

Richard: Well, I wanted straddlers. Not stragglers! Fence straddlers. So Kevin Smokler is an essayist and CEO (of the Chris Anderson-founded Booktour.com); Joanne McNeil runs the blog TomorrowMuseum on fine art, technology and a wee bit of fashion; and Calvin Baker is a novelist who is also Chief Content Officer at the start-up ScrollMotion. Folks who deal with abstraction and the concrete, thinkers and implementers.

S/G: You left a well-respected publishing company, Soft Skull Press, to start a company called Cursor. What exactly is Cursor, and when will it be open for business?

Richard: Cursor is a model for a new publisher. It’s a community-centered one that combines the wisdom of the crowd with the decisiveness of the editor, from the start of the publishing process (editorial development and product acquisition) all the way through to connecting readers with the writers.

This model will work, we believe, not by creating new communities from scratch but by powering existing communities, existing informal networks of writers and readers. The first instance of this, our first community/imprint, is Red Lemonade which is currently in alpha testing but which should be public by mid-April, when the imprint starts to publish its first books, available in bookstores everywhere they’re left…

S/G: What trends do you see happening in the book publishing industry in the coming year?

Richard: One chain, Borders, will undergo a radical shrinking with the help of the bankruptcy courts. An ever-growing handful of mostly women-run independent booksellers will reinvent the bookstore as a cultural community center focused on the social connecting power of the word. The corporate publishers will focus on an ever-narrower group of titles that can provide them with enough volume to stay in business, just about. Independent publishers more than five years old will struggle as the print sales decline but they’ll be more than adequately replaced by thousands of tiny publishers.

The price of digital content will continue to drop, but we’ll start to see more evidence of a diversification of the print product away from generic 6 x 9 inch objects towards a more artisanal mode of production with higher prices and less waste. And we might see the glimmers of the post-eBook world.

S/G: What do you mean by the “post-eBook world”?

Richard: The eBook is quite transitional, a slavish mirroring of the physical book- not, I must add, because it is text-only. We are not on the cusp of vast quantities of so-called transmedia novels. We already have image-and-word-based storytelling: it’s called film and television. We already have interactive story-telling: it’s called video games. No, the way in which eBooks are slavish imitations is that they’re designed to mimic the print book business model, the single unit sold for some number of dollars. The business model of long-form text-only narrative delivered digitally will not be the downloadable eBook. Though I don’t know what it will be, I’ll confess. But there will be some type of cloud-based model that will be to books as Pandora, Last.fm and Spotify are to music.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW this year?

Richard: Turning on and tuning in…

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2011 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by tantek
Badge – by adactio
Microphone – by hiddedevries
iPad – by smemon87

In Tahrir Square, a man thanks Facebook. (image via monasosh)

The job of a despot just ain’t what it used to be. Ask Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He tried taking down the internet. He tried cutting off cellular communications. Still, the Egyptian people found a way to speak. Not just to speak though, but also to communicate their message broadly, through the Internet, to all the peoples of Earth.

Dramatic stuff, huh? Indeed, we’re lucky to live in such times. A hundred years ago and for eons before, such an uprising would’ve been put down quickly and violently and few would have heard or seen the details of what unfolded beyond the immediate area. Now, however, there are cameras and cell phones recording. And there are content distribution platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr to feed the resulting information quickly to the rest of the world. For this reason, many believe that the current uprising in Egypt originated not with any political or religious faction, but with what’s been rather loosely referred to as the “Facebook generation.” That may be a somewhat inexact descriptor, but it speaks to something that feels like the truth.

When Mubarak and company shut down the phones, the Internet and any other form of communication they could get their grubby hands on, some suggested that reliance upon social media as a coordinating force had been overrated, since the crowds continued to gather in Tahrir Square anyway. Regardless, we began to see an interesting pattern: whenever communications channels were cut, the Egyptian people and those sympathetic to them found effective ways to restore those channels – or to create new channels. The need for communication proved a rushing stream: throw a few boulders in it and the waters soon began to lap, then run as a torrent around them. Give people the ability, the technology to communicate and not only will they embrace it, but they’ll fight to keep it.

How’d they go about this? Who helped them? Let’s have a look.

Some big names stepped up to fill the communications gaps Mubarak enforced in Egypt. Namely, Google and Twitter rushed voice-to-tweet functionality to market, specifically for the Egyptian people. People can call one of two numbers and leave a message, which is then posted as a tweet to the Speak to Tweet account on Twitter. Clicking on a tweet sends users to SayNow, a company recently acquired by Google, which hosts the files as audio you can listen to and share. These tweets include #Egypt as a hashtag, so they can be found easily, or any other country calls are originating from when possible.

I’m not sure how successful this effort has been, especially since the tweets apparently aren’t curated and, other than the hashtag, each tweet gives no hint as to its precise content. However, the new functionality was certainly trumpeted far and wide, and it must be a valuable trough for anyone with the time and skill to wade through it.

The Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera also found some creative ways to give Egyptians their voice back. Using services like ScribbleLive, Al Jazeera has been able to expedite stories from their reporters online via technology as clunky as a landline, if cellular networks aren’t available. Analog again meets digital for the benefit of the people. ScribbleLive’s service allows calls to be saved as mp3s and published with minimal hassle. It’s a service that first emerged when it enabled another news service to extend a megaphone to the voice of the people: Canada’s Global News used it to cover the protests at the 2010 G20.

Deprived of access to the Internet, some Egyptians are really kicking it old school, resorting to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and other computer-to-computer communications to exchange information. You’ll recall that BBS were originally set up to mimic real-world cork bulletin boards, where people could pin up flyers and community announcements. They also allow users to communicate via something called a “modem.” You remember those, right?

Word of these creative if retrogressive steps can be found in the chatter on Twitter, where so much of the news from Egypt has surfaced first due to Twitter’s extraordinary immediacy. For that reason, the networks and the news channels find themselves constantly referring us to Twitter, with ABC, CNN and NBC even highlighting and referring to the tweet aggregator TweetDeck by name on occasion, which must mean a boon for that little company.

Those tweets aren’t just coming from Egypt either. They’re coming from Tunisia and Jordan and other points across the Middle East, too. Worldwide, people yearn to be free. We’re still learning exactly how powerful and provocative the Internet can be in enabling them towards that freedom.

What creative ways have you seen people use to reestablish and maintain channels of communication under duress? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Want to know more?

• “Tweeting from Egypt’s Tahrir Square” – On the Media
• “Tech-savvy youths led the way in Egypt protests” – Jim Michaels, USA TODAY
• “We’ve waited for this revolution for years. Other despots should quail” – Mona Eltahawy, The Guardian – Change in the Middle East as kickstarted by the Facebook generation
• “Nick Kristof turns to Facebook to report from Egypt” – Megan Garber, Nieman Journalism Lab

Listen back to the future. (image via 12St David)

The Breakdown: Following up on our 2010 Content Strategy Rewind, we polled our content strategy team to provide their thoughts on what they think is in store for 2011 and beyond.

Michael Barnwell, Director Content Strategy
Divining trends and insights from big data is my guess for 2011. As data compiles relentlessly, despair from poor findability may shift to excitement about the bounty of data that could be sifted to illuminate cultural, political, and social patterns. Mashups set the course for this sort of thing, but the great heaps of unfiltered content that accumulate day after day— a lot of it public—may offer revelations on a much grander scale through exquisitely executed data mining.

Rachel Lovinger, Associate Content Strategy Director
This may sound incredibly boring to most people, but I’m becoming increasingly interested in content modeling: the definition of content types for a site, their attributes, metadata, and relationships to each other. I think content strategy is really important in understanding the intersection of UX design, editorial goals, business goals, and technology. Content Strategy brings all those elements into alignment, and the content model is what makes abstract strategies a reality.

Aileen Gemma Smith, Senior Content Strategist
As we think more about global organizations and web presence, part of content strategy will be to ensure a message is consistent across languages and cultures. This is an interesting challenge because we have to think about concepts translate and how different ideas resonate beyond what is personally familiar to us.

Patrick Nichols, Senior Content Strategist
I am a content strategist, and I relish my opportunity to help clients strengthen their content operations. But I’m increasingly intrigued by the concept of context strategy, wherein the proximity of content elements shapes their meaning as much as the words or images themselves. This is nothing new—it’s something we and information architects have been studying for years. But with social spaces continuing to proliferate, and content creators increasingly losing control over their creations’ context, I think it’s going to be fascinating to study the impact of varying contexts on identical content and perhaps sharpen our approach accordingly.

Elizabeth Bennett, Senior Content Strategist
We can expect to see a brighter spotlight on the care and feeding of content as a core business mandate. Things like tagging, taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, often relegated to those in the CMS trenches, will be on management’s radar to a degree not previously seen. Awareness—and nervousness–of how content behaves across platforms will be a top priority. For all you library science folks: Get ready to be sexy!

Haven Thompson, User Experience Associate
Early this year, the New York Times’s paywall will go live. Although paywalls have been going up (and coming down) for years now as media companies attempt to monetize content, the verdict is still out on what the best approach is. I’m eager to see how this industry leader’s attempt plays out, and how the user experience surrounding the paywall helps or hurts it.

Erin Abler, Information Architect
As a library and information studies geek, I’m hoping to see more emphasis on creating interoperable metadata in 2011.  We need to progress beyond the idea that any metadata is better than no metadata, since the quality and “crosswalk-ability” of metadata solutions are going to become more critical over time. By “cross-walkability” I mean the ability to map one metadata schema to another so that information in different systems can talk to each other. Existing metadata standards can provide guidance with this mapping, but they can’t operate without high-quality metadata and well-defined semantic relationships. I think this challenge is less about visibilty to the client and more about education within the content strategy community – which may make it a hard sell for awhile.

Matt Geraghty, Content Strategist
When it comes to having a strategic plan for keeping your web content current after launch, we’ll start seeing a heightened sense of urgency to  have more well executed long term editorial plans in place.  Gone are the days of launching a site and letting it stagnate.  As we covered in our recent post Sowing the Seeds of Content, more businesses are now beginning to realize that it just starts with site launch and that the real work begins on Day 2.  Call in your favorite content strategist for help. After all, your business and brand may depend on it.