The Myth of Single-Source Authoring

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2009). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Writing

Shotgun Communication

After new product releases or service updates, a torrent of disparate corporate information follows based on the perceived requirements for each team to show their worth. Sales collateral, Marketing webcasts, Support knowledgebase articles, Engineering release notes, and internal reference guides from formal Documentation teams stagger out like drunken sailors looking for their ship after a Cinderella liberty. Add to this meandering information all of the informal input from bloggers, social sites, forums, and independent Web sites, and you have a fog of information to stumble through to find real knowledge and employ best practices for purchased products and services.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2007). Articles>Content Management>Organizational Communication>Business Communication

Knowledge from the Cloud

How do you string together disparate pieces of information to generate working knowledge? For now, you need to put it together yourself as part of a document or other type of master repository. Hopefully, this will change in the near future with linked data applications, personalization of content based on semantic interpretation of information, and information aggregators to capture and present usable knowledge.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2008). Articles>Content Management>Semantic

The Fog of Information

In our world, information comes at us from all sides with the same lack of wholeness or trustworthiness. News outlets twist assumptions and conclusions to pander to their audience’s political predispositions. Social networks include feedback from all types of personalities with some good and some self-serving, and some just plain erroneous information. Companies provide product information scattered across knowledgebases, web sites, forums, and formal documentation with a corporate bias aimed at the prospective sale. Emails clog up our inboxes and authenticity is at a premium. The result is an overload of questionable information and little functional knowledge.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>Content Management