Speaking in London,  Razorfish content lead Rachel Lovinger was part of a panel with Karen McGrane (Bond Art + Science) and Jeff MacIntyre (Predicate LLC).   Local IAs, web developers, and web content professionals met in the basement of a pub to discuss Content Strategy Manhattan Style.  Watch part 1 above and see the rest of the event here.

Surviving SXSW — One foursquare badge at a time.

Here’s the news from the front lines at SXSW: Content is here to stay! Sure, there were people calling for content management systems to rest in peace, warning that social media can destroy your business model, and decrying the death of the New York Times. But, in fact, people are still enamored of digital content in all its forms. They’re talking about who’s making it, who owns it, who wants it, who has it and who doesn’t, how it gets made, where it is, and even how it can live on beyond its creators.

There were nearly 800 panels, lounges, book signings, parties and other events at SXSW interactive this year. Here are just a few of the highlights of my conference:

Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For – Let’s start with a little shameless self-promotion. I had a great time giving this talk with Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) of Bond Art + Science. The slides are posted on Slideshare and you can listen to the audio of our talk on the event details page.

Are Content Farms Good or Evil? Yes. – The answer is not as simple as the title jokingly suggests. As a content strategist, it’s easy to get riled up about this topic, but step back from the hyperbole (sweatshops? sharecroppers? hardly) and the sad truth is that the main offense of content farms is probably going to be a new spike in mediocrity.

Offering Your Content in 100 Languages – June Cohen of TED Conferences, Leonard Chien of Global Voices Online, and Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla discussed how they work with devoted global communities to translate their projects into local languages.

Writing Web Content For A Living – With panelists like Erin Anderson of Brain Traffic and Ian Alexander of Eat Media (as well as Tiffani Jones of thingsthatarebrown and Dan Maccarone of Hard Candy Shell), it’s no wonder that this panel ended up being as much about content strategy as about web writing.

Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online – Some technical difficulties at breakfast prevented me from getting to this discussion until it was nearly over, but what I caught sounded like a lively and interesting discussion. Hopefully the audio recording will be online soon, and in the meantime the panelists have created a website (The Future of Context) to continue the discussion online.

If you didn’t make it to the conference (or even if you did and couldn’t make it to all the panels you wanted to see), many audio recordings of the talks are already on the site, and many more will be added soon. (Go to the A-Z list of panels, and check the details page to see if your chosen talks have been posted yet.) And if you still can’t get enough, you can always go back and re-read our pre-SXSW Q&A series.

Did you attend SXSW 2010? What were your favorite panels and why? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Riding the Content Strategy Wave: not nearly as dangerous as you might think. (Image via fishfoot)

Mesdames et messieurs, allons à Paris !

Earlier this year, the Content Strategy community put a stake in the ground at the IA Summit’s Content Strategy Consortium, which – as far as I know – was the first ever official meeting of a sizable group of content strategy professionals from a wide range of companies and organizations. This coming April, CS has will have its large-scale International debut.

Content Strategy Forum 2010 is a 2-day conference that’s been organized by STC France and STC TransAlpine. The schedule is packed with professionals who are practicing Content Strategy in France, Ireland, England, Canada & the United States. Workshops will take place on the first day – including one on Content Analysis that I’m co-leading with Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science. The main conference day includes keynotes by Rahel Anne Bailie (Intentional Design, Inc.) and Kristina Halvorson (Brain Traffic; author of Content Strategy for the Web) and enough enticing talks that attendees are bound to have trouble choosing (check out the whole program for details).

The hosts are European chapters of the Society for Technical Communication, a professional organization for people who are involved with communicating information about technical processes. It’s a fairly broad discipline that incorporates many research, analysis and communication practices, and has a lot in common with Content Strategy. The intended audience for the conference is “anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

2009 has been a breakout year for Content Strategy, and this conference heralds some major steps forward in 2010: sharing methodologies and perspectives with another content-oriented discipline; expanding the CS community beyond the US/English-speaking Web; and introducing more delicious, delicious pastries. I hope to see you there!

Keeping content in the conversation at SXSW 2010. (image via splorp)

The SXSW festival, traditionally known as a showcase for music & film, has also become one of the most high profile Interactive conferences. Their call-for-papers and speaker selection process for the event starts almost as soon as the previous year’s conference is over, and it includes a public voting component called the Panel Picker.

That means that you, faithful Scatter/Gather readers, can help me earn the chance to represent our growing field of Content Strategy at this important conference. So, even if you aren’t sure if you’ll be going to SXSW next year, please consider voting for these panels that I’m involved with (registration is free and easy):

• Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For – We design websites for users, but if we don’t also have a deep and thorough grasp of the content that will be served up to those users, we’re not going to be able to create optimal experiences for them. Learn how to do Content Research to augment your User Research. (solo presentation)
• Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data – Thanks to the Linked Data movement, the Semantic Web is poised to break wide, bringing a host of new design complexities and content strategy considerations to the table. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to start missing it up in the open data world. (dual presentation with Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc)
• Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It – So. How’s your content? Accurate? Up-to-date? Anything your audience actually cares about? Yeah. We didn’t think so. Most of the content online is crap. Your users deserve better! And you can help change the game. Find out how to fix your content (and to finagle the resources to do it). (panel I’ll be on, moderated by Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic)
• Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy – You’ve heard the term. Seen the twitters. Curious minds want to know: What’s web content strategy all about? And how is it different from what everyone’s been saying all these years? (Hint: You’re the choir. Let’s go forth and preach to the multitudes.) Leaders in the CS community speak candidly about the emergence of a new discipline. (Panel I’ll be on, organized by Elena Melendy, Independent Content Strategy Consultant)

Also, as long as you’re voting, here are some other interesting content-related panels by our colleagues and friends in CS. Check these out too:

• Will We Pay for Content Online?, Domenic Venuto, Razorfish
• Context Strategy: Wrangling Content Gone Wild, Patrick Nichols, Razorfish
• Sex Sells; Stories Stick: Why Characters Count Online, Charla Grenz-Solheim, Razorfish
• Content Strategy FTW, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

• Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones, threebrick
• Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones, threebrick

• Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.

Plus, there are many other interesting panels by our colleagues at Razorfish – too many to list, but check them out and vote for them, too!

Image via Marius Watz

This was my first year attending the IA Summit. I’m not an Information Architect, so I had no idea what I would find there, or how much of it would be applicable to me. I went because I was participating in the pre-conference Content Strategy Consortium (agenda here), and I decided to stay for the entire conference because several of my coworkers were speaking and the program looked promising. (Note: I’ve tried, where possible, to link to the presentations online. Some of these talks may be a little hard to understand just from the slides, but at some point Boxes & Arrows will post podcasts of the audio.)

There were many talks on content-related issues. Andrew Hinton led a workshop and gave a talk about the importance of Context. Dan Brown, whose talks I missed because the schedule was too packed with amazing things, spoke about data driven sites in Modeling Concepts and Designing Rules. From the comments coming through on Twitter, I got the sense that a lot of Content Strategy type issues were addressed. Colleen Jones, one of my fellow consortiumists, gave a very practical and entertaining talk about Usable, Influential Content.

But the thing I was most excited about was the prevalence of talks about the Semantic Web and what it means for the future of IA. I’ve been trying to address this same issue in my own work for several years now, so I was looking forward to seeing what the IA community would bring to the discussion. Here’s a brief rundown of the talks I saw on this subject (with more detailed accounts of each talk over on my own blog, Meaningful Data):

· In A Fundamental Disruption, Peter Sweeney and Robert Barlow-Busch of Primal Fusion posed the question “How do IAs design for information that’s self-organizing?”

· Chiara Fox set out to introduce the audience to The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0

· Richard Ziade and Tim Meaney, of arc90, focused on the data-sharing aspect of the Semantic Web in their talk, Discovering & Mining the Everyday

· In The Facets of Faceting, Kristoffer Dykon and Helle Hoem presented some case studies on taxonomy and ontology structures used for navigation

· Chris Thorne, of the BBC, focused on the architecture of URIs in his talk, Ubiquitous Information Architecture: Building for change and web 3.0

While I’m excited that the topic was so pervasive, I was a little disappointed that the level of discussion has not advanced very far beyond “What is the Semantic Web?” We’re talking about the questions that need to be asked, but not about realistic, practical answers. Hopefully, now that people are being exposed to these ideas at a rapid rate, it won’t be long before IAs and Content Strategists put their heads together and start coming up with some elegant approaches to designing semantic solutions that address user and business needs.

Wall-to-wall street art in Austin, Texas, 2009. (image via Jairus)

Guest contributor Kyle Outlaw just returned from SXSWi where he moderated the “Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money” panel. Kyle is a Senior Information Architect at Razorfish.

What follows is by no means a comprehensive summary of this year’s South by Southwest Interactive event. It is a highly subjective snapshot of some of the themes that I was exposed to during the short amount of time I was there. This is probably fitting since this conference in particular is really subject to individual interpretation, versus an event such as TED in which the user experience can be a little more uniform. The organization of the panels (many equally interesting ones competing against each other for attention) often requires that you make quick and difficult choices and there is a serendipitous element which guarantees that every attendee has a unique experience. This could be by design, and despite the appearance of chaos, there seems to be at the heart of SXSW careful attention to the development of an uber-takeaway on the part of the planners and this what I will attempt to briefly describe here.

Release Early, Often, and with Rap Music

On the day I arrived James Powderly from Graffiti Research Lab was being interviewed by Virginia Hefferman for that day’s Keynote Address. Hefferman writes The Medium column for The New York Times Magazine. James Powderly, a former robotics engineer who worked on tools for the Mars Exploration Rover, is a technologist, artist, “open source evangelist”, and as you may recall recently grabbed headlines for his brief stint in a Chinese prison during the Summer Olympics. Powderly expounded on the mythical role of the trickster in his oevre, and he highlighted the often underrated technical accomplishments of urban graffiti artists. Subways, for example, were being used as a medium to display art to the masses long before the internet. Rap music blasted intermittently from massive speakers on stage as Powderly showed some examples of collaborations with his long time partnership with artist Evan Roth (including LED Throwies and L.A.S.E.R. Tag), and various Chinese rappers such as MC Yan. Powderly discussed how the Graffiti Research Lab’s work eventually landed himself and his team afoul of the law. It was the ‘Free Beer’ laser signage on buildings that initially caught the attention of Chinese authorities, but it was their collaboration with the Free Tibet movement that eventually got him arrested, interrogated, and ultimately put in prison for ten days prior to being deported back to the US. What was perhaps most striking about this panel was how open source as a movement is beginning to transcend the technology industry and is now seeping into global politics, often with disruptive results.

The Death of the Audience

Later on that afternoon, I went to Bruce Sterling’s speech. The death of the author has been predicted for years, however, it is the death of the audience that concerned Bruce Sterling. Sterling is a veteran science fiction writer and Visionary-in-Residence at Wired Magazine. He is best known for his novels and Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology, and he was heavily involved in the creation of the cyberpunk genre along with such luminaries as William Gibson and Rudy Rucker. Showing a feigned (?) lack of deference to his audience, the much-anticipated speaker consumed chips and beer during his hour long discussion on the state of journalism, the economy, and micro-blogging. A regular at SXSW, he did not disappoint. While demonstrating his usual high degree of social media literacy, he expressed some bitterness toward Twitter because of its proclivity to distract audiences (particularly at SXSW), and ruin his legendary house parties. Sterling mourned the current state of journalism, offering a few suggestions for writers looking for alternative payment schemes such as becoming a ‘micro-brand’, maintaining multiple streams of income and so on (Sterling himself keeps residences in Austin, his home town and Italy – where he writes for the Italian version of Wired). On the subject of the user experience of SXSW, while Sterling still believed the South-by-Southwest to be relevant he also thought that it should be split up into smaller more manageable events.

The Power of Free

That was followed the next day by Guy Kawaski’s interview with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the forthcoming book FREE which is slated for release in July. A central theme of the interview was that content creators need to think differently about what ‘free’ means and moving beyond these preconceptions will be key to figuring out alternative methods to get paid for the goods and services they make. According to Anderson, whereas in Italian there is libros (freedom), and gratis (zero cost) the term free in English is both one dimensional and suspect. When something is offered as free we tend to think it is less valuable or of lower quality. A new economic paradigm is taking shape, argues Anderson, and it is based on the idea that the costs of creating goods and services (particularly software) is being rapidly reduced – to zero. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are just a couple examples of bands that are beginning to make most of their money from performances while giving away music online in stark contrast to the previous model in which concerts promoted album sales. They are pioneers in this newly emerging economy, says Anderson, in part because they are able to get beyond the stigma of free.

Uber-takeaway

On the surface, there wasn’t a huge difference between this year’s SXSW and last year’s. There were the usual impromptu debates in the hallways, cool t-shirts, mohawks, and excellent Tex Mex cuisine. Last year was mostly about Facebook and Twitter (and the frenzied convergence of both at Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech). If there is a broad theme that could be applied to this year’s SXSW, it was one of mass systemic upheaval (the logo was a fist clutching cellphone), and how artists and technologists should consider responding to it. No answers but lots of really big questions. At least that was my interpretation of it.

Leave no Content Strategist behind. (image via GrooverFW)

On March 19th I participated in a Content Strategy Consortium in Memphis. It was organized by Kristina Halvorson (Brain Traffic) and Karen McGrane (Bond Art + Science), as one of the pre-conference events hosted by the IA Summit. As far as I know, this was the first event of its kind – people from different organizations getting together to formally discuss the practice of content strategy. Many of the 22 people there had some form of the words “content strategy” in their title, but many didn’t. Some were consultants, and some were in-house. In-house content strategists!! I was delighted to be a part of this group.

Everyone who attended had a strong interest in defining the practice, sharing knowledge, and making connections with other people in the practice. We had a series of presentations and breakout sessions, led by the participants, on topics that included: how to explain and sell content strategy; how content strategy relates to other disciplines, such as IA, IT, publishing and marketing; theoretical views of content strategy; case studies; and processes & tools. Most of these presentations will be posted online soon, and when they are I’ll include the link in the comments of this post.

At the end of the day we broke into groups to discuss four things: defining the practice, identifying the processes and tools, building community and evangelizing. In the two hours we spent working and discussing these topics, we broke the ice and came up with a few concrete ideas, but realized there’s a lot more discussion to be had.

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