We used to be in the writing business. Then we were in the communication business. Now we are in the content business. It’s probably getting time to change the monika again. I have a candidate: “story.” There have always been two schools of thought about the word “content”. Some love it. Some hate it. I… Read More »
It is easy to think of metadata as a few information fields that you tack onto an article when you submit it to a CMS. In this vision, metadata is something fairly small, a triviality in comparison to the content itself. The reality is just the opposite; for any piece of content or data, the… Read More »
When I started my career in tech writing, it was the age of the writer. Tech writers tended to work independently on a single book for months at a time. Better, for many, they not only got to write the book, they got to design it and shepherd it through the publication process. At the… Read More »
Summary: As content consumers, we love hypertext. As content creators, we still believe in content management, even after years of disappointment. Content management disappoints because it does not scale for culture. It is time to embrace hypertext instead. I should know better. Every time I put the word “hypertext” in the title of a post,… Read More »
In a comment on my Content Wrangler article, It’s Time to Start Separating Content from Behavior, Laura Creekmore said (emphasis mine): [T]his conversation has brought to mind some thoughts I’ve had recently, and I think this is an even more difficult issue. Because eventually, we’re going to come up with all the technological fixes we need to resolve the… Read More »
Two recent blog posts, Structured Content is Like Your Closet by Val Swisher, and Content Strategy Can Save Us All From Slobdom by Meghan Casey, both illustrate how content management works today by analogy with a well organized closet. It is a perfect metaphor for current content management practice, and provides the perfect starting point for examining what… Read More »
I’m a fan of emerging technology, and generally tolerant of emerging terminology, but when it comes to job titles I tend to the view that if it was not mentioned in the Domesday Book, it isn’t a real job. I have, on diverse occasions, decried attempts to replace the title “technical writer” with something else,… Read More »
Today, Alan Houser (@arh) tweeted: Before I die, I want to hear somebody speak well of their CMS. Especially in #techcomm. Surely somebody must be happy with theirs. To which I (@mbakeranalecta) replied: Indeed, but the CMS model is wrong. Can’t manage large data sets on desktop model. Can’t have good implementation of a broken… Read More »
The transition from DTP to structured writing continues to be a bumpy one, and content management issues continue to plague many implementations. In many cases, the content management strategy depends on writers structuring things properly and they fall apart when writers fail to do so. For instance, reuse of chunks of information ought to make… Read More »
A document may be flower, a rock, or a tree. That is, it may bloom for a day and be dead tomorrow, like a newspaper. It may last forever and never change, like Pride and Prejudice or King Lear. Or it may grow and change over the course of a long, if not endless, life… Read More »