Are Structured Authoring and Wiki Opposing Forces?

There are two camps in technical documentation. There’s the “quick web” folks who connect easily and author easily, and then there’s the “structured quality” camp that requires more thoughtful testing and time spent on task analysis and information architecture.

Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2007). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Wikis

Getting a Handle on Your Content Types

“Content types” are among the least understood, and yet most potent, aspects of user experience and web design. Most people encounter them for the first time when implementing a grand-scale content management system (CMS) because you have to define content types before building templates for each kind of content you’re going to publish. Because they associate content types so closely with CMS, some make the mistake of equating content strategy with content management. They’re not the same thing, though they are certainly related. Your content strategy specifies the content types that will then be modeled for your CMS.

Content Strategy Noob (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Technical Communication Trends and Ideas

Technical Communication continues to change as we find new ways to meet the needs of our audiences. I have attended several conferences recently and discussed several of the latest trends with other technical communicators. This article provides a quick list of several of these trends and ideas.

Mueller, Paul. Answers for All (2009). Articles>TC>Content Management>Information Design

さまざまな利用を想定して書く

オンラインコンテンツは、文脈とは無関係にユーザーの目にとまることが多い。本来想定された目的とは違う目的で読まれることもよくある。そうした目的を全部予測することはできないが、テキストのさまざまな利用を考慮することはできる。

Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Content Management>Writing>Information Design

Back-End Designs and the CMS Cycle of Disillusionment

Usually, the one thing missing from the planning of a WCM-driven web site is what's most likely to shoot the implementation in the foot: the functional design of the CMS back-end. The form and function of how the CMS will work, look and feel for the end-user of the system, not the visitor to the web site, is too often overlooked. This is odd: isn't the rationale for getting a CMS in the first place usually based on some kind of ROI in efficiency in actually producing the content and sites?

Bloem, Adriaan. CMSwatch (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Moving from Web Management to Information Management: Four Things You Can Do Now

Web Managers must think globally (information) and act locally (Web) all the while trying to widen your universe and build the internal business relationships which will allow your organization to manage its information more holistically now or in the future.

Welchman, Lisa. WelchmanPierpoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy>Information Design

Converting to XML: Is it Always the Answer?

Although managing costs is important anytime, it is especially important in today's economic reality where budgets are shrinking drastically. Getting your money's worth as well as what you need to support your data should be a core factor of any data project. The two biggest cost factors are the type of conversion work you need done and how much of it you'll need. This article focuses on how your goals for your project relate to the output format you choose, and how that format impacts costs. While some outputs, like XML, provide higher capabilities, they also cost more to create.

Gross, Mark. Data Conversion Laboratory (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

Alternatives to XML: Keeping Down your Document Conversion Costs

While I'm a big fan of XML for many purposes, it's a misconception that it's the single best solution in every scenario, and it's worthwhile to consider the alternatives in situations where the benefits of XML are not necessary. In this article, I discuss alternatives to XML, SGML, and HTML that might be suitable when budgets are more limited. While XML is perfect for highly coded information, other options can work well for many kinds of information. Markup languages are at the high end of the cost spectrum, so if you don't need the benefits they provide, you certainly should consider the alternatives discussed below.

Gross, Mark. Data Conversion Laboratory (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

Content Curation: A Manifesto

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. I think that professional writers and technical writers should consider a move towards this role. We already search for and find the best content, sift through loads of content, discard poor content, and publish the most worthy content whenever a software release goes out. This description also sounds like something a content strategist would do as part of their analysis of the content.

Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Technical Writing

Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future?

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job.

Bhargava, Rohit. Social Media Today (2009). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy>Information Design

What is Intelligent Content? And Why Won’t Scott Abel Shut Up About It?

Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically.

Abel, Scott. Content Wrangler, The (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

What Information Developers Can Learn from Software Developers

The shift in information development from a narrative to a modular writing style reflects the established shift towards modularization of source code. What can information developers learn from software developers? What are the challenges and benefits of the modular approach?

Higgins, Paul. TC World (2009). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Documentation

Get Smart With SharePoint Documents 

Given the pressures on firms to provide increased value at lower costs, it’s imperative that they find ways to reduce the costs of creating and managing documents and increase their value to clients and personnel. Microsoft SharePoint provides a range of features to make your firm’s documents “smarter,” from capturing rich metadata to automating workflows to intelligent search. As applied, these features can transform passive documents into active, reusable resources. In this article I’ll describe some of the ways that SharePoint can reduce the effort to create, manage and retrieve documents and increase their value, as smart documents, to both your firm and its clients.

Gerow, Mark. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 Navigation Hierarchies and Key Filters 

The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference. I get excited about this kind of thing because metadata is a big part of all of the software we build. But some people are probably saying "Why should we get so excited about new metadata features in SharePoint? The new UI and improved capacity are really the neat things about SharePoint 2010."

Puffer, Charlie. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Microsoft SharePoint

The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1 

This deconstruction of content is not limited to Twitter. The movement to expose underlying data and make it more actionable is gaining momentum across industries and platforms. One example is the move to report financial data in XBRL format (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Another is the growing use of microformats and RDFa, which are small patterns of HTML that represent data on commonly published subjects on Web pages, such as people, events, blog topics, reviews, and tags. Twitter's character limit and accessibility, however, are the simplest and most recognized example of how elements of connected data can provide value both individually and in aggregate.

ReadWriteWeb (2009). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Social Networking

Fixing Enterprise Architecture: Balancing the Forces of Change in the Modern Organization 

There's long been something fairly unsatisfying about the relationship that enterprise architecture has had with the business side of most organizations. Recently there's a growing realization that traditional enterprise architecture as its often practiced today might be broken in some important way. What might be wrong and how to fix it are the questions du jour.

Hinchcliffe, Dion. ebiz (2009). Articles>Content Management>Information Design