When we started this blog two years ago, content strategy was a fledging discipline—at least in the way it was talked about. We were all pretty sure that we’d been doing content strategy for years, but the practice hadn’t evolved to the point where it was generally agreed upon among practitioners and other neighboring disciplines what it really entailed. As the many posts and discussions since the launch indicate (take a look at the stats below), content strategy  is certainly further down the road, but where it’s evolving is anyone’s guess.

S/G Stats

• Over 100 posts published
• 100,000 views
• Visits from 145 countries
• 2010 and 2011 SXSW speaker interview features
• Panel Pieces and Conference Recaps
• Close to 300 comments
• Over 2000 visits from mobile devices
• Most popular post: The Content Strategy Forecast
• Most commented post: What Makes a Content Strategist

Your comments and contributions  continue to push it to places we couldn’t imagine when we launched. We’d like to take a short pause to thank you for all your interest and support in our first two years.  We look forward to having you contribute to the conversation. Here’s to year 3 and the next 100 posts.

-The Scatter/Gather Team

The Breakdown: In the final Q&A in the SXSW 2011 series, we chatted with Razorfish’s own Andrew Lewellen, a Chicago-based Content Strategist, about his panel “Interactive Narratives: Creating the Future of Storytelling.” The panel (Monday, 12:30) will explore the various sub-genres of interactive storytelling and will discuss professional opportunities for writers, developers, and designers in the growing field of interactive narrative creation.

S/G: What are the major types of interactive narrative being produced today?

Andrew: To me, there are two primary kinds of interaction with stories in the digital space: one is interaction in terms of users generating content to participate in a story. The Old Spice campaign last summer—“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”—is probably the best-known good example of this. Though not specifically a story, it was definitely a pervasive experience.

The other type of interaction is one of physical interaction with a graphical user interface, e.g. clicking on a link to see a new page or swiping your finger across a screen to control how you view content and media. I really look to the work of ScrollMotion, like their Esquire app, as a great example of this.

S/G: Can you tell us about the participants on your panel?

Andrew: Esther Lim is based in San Francisco and is a digital marketer, social media strategist, and game analyst. Robert Pratten is also in San Francisco, and he has a background in film and recently launched a new project, Transmedia Storyteller, which provides a platform for individuals and businesses to build transmedia experiences. Josh Koppel is a co-founder of ScrollMotion, a company based in New York that works with major publishing companies to convert their books into mobile apps.

With our presentation, we really want to show people how to use both types of interactive narritve to create more engaging story experiences. To do this, we’ve put a new media spin on an old fairy tale, “The Story of The Three Little Pigs.” Here’s how we’ve executed: Josh has built a mobile app for the story, which will function as the core story experience. Esther developed social profiles for each pig. Robert incorporated participation by creating Twitter accounts for each of the three pigs and the wolf. The audience controls the fate of these pigs by tweeting “run” to their accounts or “blow” to the wolf’s account. People can participate by going to this site. The mobile app includes functionality to view the pigs’ social profiles and the Twitter feed.

What this work demonstrates is how to use social media and participation to improve discovery and exploration of a core story that exists in a defined application or space. This is really the evolving approach to creating stories and engaging audiences with them.

S/G: How did you become interested in/involved with this type of content?

Andrew: I’ll give you two key events: when I was in grad school, getting my MFA at Southern Illinois, Robert Coover came to campus and gave an informal talk to the English Department, in which he asserted that literature would eventually exist in digital formats. Coover’s talk made me start to reconsider all my previous conceptions about writing and books.

A few months after that, I heard this interview with Les Paul in which he talked about his work to develop an electric guitar. He said the reason he started doing that was just because he wanted his music to sound different. That idea of his really struck me: use technology to change your craft. It made me realize that progress and change is the natural course of art. I always wanted to create writing that was unique and new. And new media presented itself as the best option to do that.

S/G: What is the greatest challenge facing developers and writers of interactive narratives today?

Andrew: There’s no [established] model. It’s hard to learn how to do something when there’s no model. I believe writing is a craft. As with any craft—whether it’s novels or cabinets or barbeque—you need to serve an apprenticeship to learn how to make that craft. Then, if you learn how to do it, you head off on your own and try to make a living doing your craft.

Writers have been relying on the same models—novels and short stories—for going on 150 years. And if a writer learns how to create work in one of those forms, they might be able to make a career for themselves. Learning to create writing and stories for new media is asking people to learning something new—and learn to do something that has no guaranteed audience. And in a format that is perceived as a threat to the form in which they learned to love their craft (books). I think that’s a lot for a writer to swallow.

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

Andrew: I’m most looking forward to meeting the people on my own panel. I’ve never met a one of them in person. We’re having a lot of fun creating this presentation; it’s the kind of work I’ve wanted to create for a long time now, and I’m excited to see it come alive. Other than that, I’m just looking forward to being at SXSW and meeting people who have similar interests and passions as me. The energy at these types of events can be infectious, and it can make you conceive of or take on work you had never thought of before.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2011 Q&A Series. And we’ll be back when it’s all done, with a recap or two.

Image credits, from left to right:

Austin – by tantek

Badge – by adactio

Microphone – by hiddedevries

iPad – by smemon87

The Breakdown: SXSW is just a couple days away. We spoke with Kaiser Wahab, a Partner at law firm Wahab & Medecnica LLC. He’ll be be leading a panel called “Reconciling YouTube and Grokster: Business Models for Web3.0” tackling the critical subjects of the future of content distribution, viable delivery models, the DMCA, monetization opportunities and the implications for digital content creators going forward.

S/G: What can we expect from your Panel?

Kaiser: First: A debate where the black letter of the law meets the real world experience of those charged with making the content flow.  Second: an actionable set of “best practices” for content distribs and producers to avoid liability and missed monetization opportunities.  Far too often the debate over Copyright’s boundaries are purely academic and rarely take into account how real world copyright enforcement is moving further away from the black letter.  What’s refreshing (or dangerous) about the Viacom line of cases is that it lays bare the inner workings of YouTube and is many ways a lesson in Startup 101 and Content 101.  And everything from the history of the DMCA to actual emails sent by YouTube founders and Viacom execs can and are being picked apart by pundits, in order to produce a knowledge base for how to do things right the first time, rather than by trial and error.  Our goal is to provide the “legal” (i.e., how do we avoid lawsuits?) knowledge base from those cases in a one hour format.

S/G: What are some of the cases you’ll be speaking to to frame the discussion on digital content delivery models?

Kaiser: Obviously, the YouTube/Google and Grokster cases loom large in the debate.  Ironically though,  most of the case law is in flux because the only two cases on record that have matured into judgments are YouTube/Google and Veoh (both of which are more solidly cast as DMCA debates) and Grokster (which gave rise to the so called “copyright inducement” standard.) Moreover, although the lower courts ruled on YouTube/Google, all those issues are up for grabs at the 2nd Circuit (and then perhaps the case goes to the Supremes.)  There is a small universe of cases that raised the same issues, but those never made it to judgment due to being settled out of court (e.g., Imeem).   So unfortunately, all of us are left with a very short list for reference and that is precisely why the YouTube/Google case is so seminal. It may single handedly make the prime rules governing all copyrighted content on the Net for the foreseeable future.

S/G: What are the main hurdles in making digital content delivery a viable industry?

Kaiser: There is a solid shift culturally and economically towards on demand and now even HD content for free that has been brought about by YouTube like technologies.  There’s no going back and it’s becoming increasingly clear to most that Copyright as a “weapon” just doesn’t work well.  So meanwhile, there is a robust and potentially crippling copyright damages scheme (and not merely for original works, but their derivatives as well), but the day to day reality is a far different portrait.  The tension between the two, despite stopgap measures such as the DMCA is increasingly an obstacle for rational conversation between distribs and users.  As a result, content owners have had to make “behind the scenes” adjustments to how they do business, while content distribs wait in fear for a “decapitation” style lawsuit.  Moreover, as new technologies increase the ability of distribs to screen and police content, there is uncertainty if those will increase the duties of the distribs to do so.  And in the meantime, practicing attorneys must advise their clients in the midst of this tension.  There has to be a dedicated push by all parties to create alternative schemes that can be ultimately codified as law.

S/G: Who are some of your panelists and what unique perspectives will they bring?

Kaiser: Two of our panelists in particular provide unique and “rubber hits road” viewpoints.  Jeff Dodes, EVP of marketing for  Sony/Jive has had to navigate the tension between the daily infringement of top artists like Britney and the fact the infringers are his purchasing constituency. As a result, he has had to find alternative ways to monetize user content derived from his catalogue.  That means working closely with YouTube to assure user creativity and enthusiasm are harnessed, while maintaining a window for the user to actually buy the music. In addition, Adrian Sexton, a digital branding consultant and former head of digital at Lionsgate, founded New Medici to advise large brands on the very same issues, as well as using digital media for high risk branding opportunities.  And that kind of experience can be invaluable to other content creators/ distribs.  I’ll be the moderator in a suit, for what it’s worth (I’m a lawyer after all), and my partner Olivera Medenica, widely published on the topics involving the Net and IP, will bring the “best practices” to the table.

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

Kaiser: Not wearing suits most of the time.  Mostly we’re looking forward to the very open, very raw discourse on everything from fear of robot overlords to whether Lamebook gets a legal “pass”.  It’s just not often one sees this depth and breadth of future thinking  crammed into a single set of conference rooms.

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: SXSW is just a few days away. As we pull into the final stretch, we spoke with Jim England (@JimEngland), co-founder of Keepstream about his panel “Humans Versus Robots: Who Curates the Real-Time Web?”

S/G: What inspired the creation of Keepstream?

Jim: Keepstream evolved from the development of another web app (CorkShare) we built while in college at Case Western Reserve University. Starting with no professional contacts outside of our university, we used Twitter to connect with developers, marketers, and other startup founders and built a group of important advisers and mentors. On Twitter, we saw meaningful conversations and important resources being shared, but did not find an easy and effective way to save or archive these interactions.

The turning point for the ideation of Keepstream was at last year’s SXSW. While we did not attend in person, we were able to follow a number of panels simply by reading the official hashtag of the event. These hashtags were great live, but it was difficult to find these relevant tweets in the future and there was no place to store or archive a curated list of these tweets.

We felt that there needed to be a website which would help in the saving of social media, so we built Keepstream to preserve and share these collective experiences within our social media streams.

S/G: What interesting uses of Keepstream have you seen so far?

Jim: We have purposely built Keepstream to be a flexible, open-ended platform and have been excited by the collections our users have built so far. Some of my personal favorites include a Twitter Q&A with Entourage actor Adrian Grenier, highlights from the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and a recap of articles on a new product launch.

S/G: Your panel is described as “an old fashioned smackdown between human and semantic-powered curation.” Can you tell us about the panelists, and what each of them brings to the debate?

Jim: I believe that curation applications should provide powerful tools for manual curation, keeping the content personal and relevant to the curator and to their audience.

Xavier Damman is a web entrepreneur from Belgium and co-founder of Storify. Xavier previously founded Publitweet, a platform to publish tweets on news sites such as European news outlets LeMonde.fr and EuropeanVoice. He believes that social media turns everyone into a reporter with curation as a manual process to turn bits of data in the cloud into meaningful information (stories) that can be used to inform the world in a better way.

Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for web content incubated out of SRI and in the same AI project (CALO) as Siri (acquired by APPL in May after their SXSW Accelerator win). Hank’s company comes at the problem from the “robot” side of the equation, creating a “Pandora for web content” based on advanced machine-based curation.

After spending five years as Chief Marketing Officer for Bazaarvoice, Sam Decker is now focused on aggregating, curating and displaying social content as CEO of Mass Relevance.  Sam believes that automation has to be a part of the curation process in order for the appeal to scale beyond the most hardcore digital enthusiasts.

Our moderator for the panel is Megan McCarthy, founding editor of Mediagazer and the first human editor at Techmeme. Megan has been described as the “Borg Queen of the Blogosphere” in an interview with American Journalism Review, so she has experience with both “robotic” and “human” forms of curation.

S/G: Do you think humans and robots can ever learn to get along? What do you think it would take to make that happen?

Jim: Each of the four startups on our panel are a blend of both manual and automatic processes, with variations on the percentages in the mix.  Robots and humans will learn to get along if we use algorithmically curated content as a starting point for human curation. In addition to a robotically curated base of content, it is necessary for humans to provide the finishing touches by removing some content and adding beneficial pieces that algorithms may have missed.

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

Jim: As a co-founder of a curation startup, I can’t wait to hear from an expert in the field: Steve Rosenbaum in “Curation Nation: A Model for Makers and Gatherers”.

I am also looking forward to supporting local Austin panels including Jason Cohen’s “A Bootstrapped Geek Sifts Through the Bullshit” and Josh William’s “Beyond the Check-In: Location and the Social Web”

As for keynotes, Christopher Poole (canvas) and Seth Priebatsch (SCVNGR) are going to absolutely crush it!

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: Our latest SXSW 2011 Q&A comes from Jon Voss (@LookBackMaps) founder of LookBackMaps, a project that uses photographs, maps, and augmented reality to engage users with history and historical photography. Jon spoke with Scatter/Gather about his upcoming panel, “Innovating & Developing with Libraries, Archives & Museums.” The panel will focus on emerging opportunities for developers to leverage historical collections and data in creating public-facing experiences.

S/G: What can we expect from your panel?

Jon: You’ll get a quick update on the innovative collaborations in the world of libraries, archives, and museums, and see how these institutions are reaching out to 21^st-century audiences in exciting new ways.

S/G: Why is it important to make historical data and archives accessible to the public?

Jon: Historical data and imagery are a critical part of our shared culture—[they’re] part of the fabric that ties us to a place and to other people around us. For most libraries, archives, and museums, sharing these assets is a key part of their mission. They do a lot of other things too of course, but as one archivist summarized to me, “[W]e preserve history to share it.”  What’s exciting is how these institutions are finding new ways to meet expectations of tech-savvy populations and a younger demographic that has a very different way of interacting with media than previous generations.

S/G: How can organizations present their data so as not to overwhelm users with an avalanche of information?

Jon: One way is to make this information machine-readable on the web, and I think libraries, archives, and museums will take a leadership role in the development and adoption of Linked Data technologies in the next few years. By sharing data in both human and machine-readable formats, a person or a program can query for information based on a subject, a keyword, or a location across multiple data sources. So instead of “checking in” to your neighborhood bar with your favorite place-based social network, you might just as easily check in to the saloon that was there in the early 1900′s, and see a picture of the long-gone patrons that shared drinks at that very location.

S/G: Can you think of a particularly innovative example of historical information being presented in an especially accessible, entertaining, and/or educational way? Why, in your opinion, is it successful?

Jon: Not to toot my own horn, but the LookBackMaps website and iPhone app [have] really captivated people’s imaginations in the last year or so with the simple way we’ve mashed up historical photos with current day views. With our site and app you can find a historical photo on a map and see what was there in the past. In the case of the app, you can overlay the old photo on your camera view and literally see the past come to life before you. It’s a new way to explore history, but its success is rooted in the fact that it brings history to people where they are, and that is in location-based apps. People want to know more about a place than where their friends are, or where the best coffee is. People want to know what was here before us.

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

Jon: The greatest thing about SXSW is the convergence of so many disparate ideas in one place. I’m hoping to catch some sessions on applications of the Semantic Web, the future of location-based apps, and different ways technology, media, and culture can advance the common good.

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 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?