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?

Imagine what your content could do if it were smarter. (image via drewsaunders)

When I started my web career, the content issue that got me most fired up was findability. My white whale: knowing that the information I sought was out there on some web site – or even knowing exactly what web site it should be on – and not being able to find it.

Now, more than a decade later, we’re still grappling with these problems. At the same time, the landscape has gotten so much more sophisticated. We have smart phones, location aware services, natural language search tools, and the wisdom of the crowd. But is our content keeping pace with this increasingly demanding environment? In most cases, no.

So I’m really looking forward to Intelligent Content 2011, a conference started by Ann Rockley. The event, now in its third year, has been expanded to three days of workshops and presentations about all the new technologies and strategies that will help content overcome the things that have been holding it back.

But what does “intelligent content” mean? To me it means content that contains cues that indicate what it’s about, who it’s for, and the context in which it would be most useful. You could say it’s content that’s ‘self aware’. These qualities may not be evident to readers, but it makes it possible to present the content in more meaningful and flexible ways.

The theme of this year’s conference is “All Things Delivered,” focusing on how content in all its various forms reaches its audience in a timely and cost-effective way. After an opening workshop on intelligent content by Ann Rockley and conference co-producer Joe Gollner, attendees will have to make a difficult choice between workshops on social media (Robert Rose & Michael Weiss), mobile (David Clemons), customer experience (Samantha Starmer) and DITA (Mark Lewis).

The following two days will be filled with talks and demonstrations. I’m particularly looking forward to Anthony Allen’s keynote on Digital Publishing, Scott Abel’s session on Intelligent Social Networking, the X-Fest Technology Showcase, and Paul Trotter’s talk on Future Trends in intelligent content. And there are many other interesting looking talks on personalization, structure, process, application development, publishing, and more. Check out the complete program and see which topics appeal to you.

I’ve wanted to go to Intelligent Content every year it’s been held, but the past two years I wasn’t able to make it work with my schedule. This year I’m very excited that I’m not only going to the conference, but will also be one of the official bloggers. See you in Palm Springs!

When will robots start writing all the copy for us? (Image via Mirko Tobias Schaefer).

Yesterday I spoke at the Smart Content Conference. In one of the morning talks, Jeff Fried of BA-Insight emphasized the point that analytics, semantics, and machine learning are powerful technologies, but not perfect technologies. As such, he advises that business innovators should be realistic about their capabilities.

Over the course of the day, there was much talk about the interaction of these technologies with social information, and about how these tools could be used to help people (such as content creators and call center reps) to fulfill their responsibilities more efficiently. At the end of my presentation on semantics and publishing (based largely on the Nimble report) someone asked, among other things, which analytic or semantic tools could serve to automate the creation of ongoing stories.

My answer:  this is not a task that can be 100% automated. To be fair, she may not have meant 100%, but I wanted to reinforce this point. There are tools that can help – semantic media monitoring tools for research and tracking, machine-assisted tagging tools for more thorough metadata, and many others – but these are still just tools. For optimal results, they should still be wielded by a person.

In fact, by the end of the day-long conference, I had started thinking about how to combine the content creation efforts of machines, experts, and crowds to benefit from the strengths and overcome the limitations of each. Maybe it will be the topic of one of my future conference presentations.

The buzz is only as good as the community making it. Image courtesy of Kaibara.

The Breakdown: A lot’s been going on in the Content Strategy community. Rachel takes a moment from her packed schedule to talk about recent events, including April’s Content Strategy Forum in Paris.

Hoo-boy, we’ve been busy. And from the looks of things, we’re not the only ones. Interest in Content Strategy has been growing at an amazing rate, and there are lots of new voices joining the public conversation. Here are just a few of the recent examples:

• Why You Need A Content Strategist by Relly Annett-Baker
• Messages from the Content Strategy Forum by David Farbey
• What’s the difference between a Content Strategist and a Web Editor? by Lauren Pope
• Content strategy (on New Media Age) by Meg Carter
• Toward a Content-Driven Design Process by Tiffani Jones
• Content Strategy for the Web Professional by Jonathan Kahn
• Get strategy. Write content. Fly! by Angela Barnard
• Top 10 Takeaways from the 2010 Content Strategy Forum by Newt Barrett
• Content Strategy forum Paris roundup: volcanoes, wine and a big room of writers by Randall Snare
• Contente – a blog by Nicole Jones and Michael Seidel who, in their own words “enjoy talkin’ dirty about content strategy.”

And all the usual suspects have been pretty active too, but there isn’t room here to capture all of that. Just check #contentstrategy on Twitter to see the latest events and posts from across the web.

In a busy conference season, last month’s Content Strategy Forum stands out as an exciting milestone. Thirteen months earlier, in March 2009, about twenty people gathered for the Content Strategy Consortium in Memphis, and it was thrilling to see the range of people who were there to discuss this new discipline for an entire day. Just over a year later, 170 people gathered, from 18 countries across three continents, for a two-day event in Paris. The first day consisted of 4 sold-out workshops (including the one on “Understanding Content” which I co-led with Karen McGrane). The second day had three tracks of talks, which often led to some dfficult decisions.

If you weren’t able to be there in person, many of the presentations are on SlideShare, and videos of some of the talks are also available online. And discussions have already begun about the details of the next one. Which begs the question, where do we go from here? I have a few thoughts:

1. The content strategy community has officially become international. We should do what we can to keep that momentum going, encouraging and participating in events that are local, global, and virtual. I hope to see you all at Content Strategy Forum 2011!
2. There are still a lot of people just discovering content strategy and the value it brings, but it’s time to deepen our conversations about it. At CS Forum, there was a clear hunger for case studies, and more information about techniques and practices for solving specific content problems.
3. Continue spreading the word to a wider audience. Luminaries of the web design industry, such as Jared Spool and Jeffrey Zeldman, are talking about Content Strategy and that’s bound to help attract the attention of people who have been struggling with digital content issues and don’t yet know that there is an entire discipline emerging to help them deal with it. We should all be getting out there, speaking at a variety of conferences, and seeing who else we can convert.

What else do you think the discipline should be doing?

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.