Tag Archives: content strategy

We Can’t Use “In Tray” Definitions for Content Roles

Everyone in the content industry seems to be trying to define their roles these days. There are a number of new roles and titles being described, and everyone wants to know where to draw the boundaries around them. Commenting on my recent post on Content Engineering, Jonatan Lundin asked, “So is an information architect a… Read More »

I am a Content Engineer

In the closing keynote of the 2013 LavaCon conference, Ann Rockley talked about the rising importance of content engineering in content strategy. A content engineer, Ann explained, is someone with one foot in the technology world and one foot in the content world. Last year I wrote a pair of posts on my hesitation about… Read More »

Why content jobs are never well defined

Content jobs are never strictly defined because they are the mortar that holds the bricks of the enterprise together. I’m attending LavaCon, and here, as everywhere, content people are debating the definition of their roles, the names of those roles, the boundaries and intersects between them, and the responsibilities and qualifications pertinent to them. Newer… Read More »

Tech Comm’s Obsession with Novices has to Stop

Once upon a time (sometime in the 80’s) everyone in the tech business was a novice. Novice tech writers wrote for novice users about novice products created by novice developers employed by novice entrepreneurs (most of whom, apparently, had recently dropped out of Harvard). There were no conventions about how any of this stuff was supposed… Read More »

Differential Content Strategy

Traditionally, the content strategy for technical communications has tended to be undifferentiated. That is, organizations would define the components of a doc set: user guide, admin guide, quick reference card, reference, etc, and would produce that same set of documents for every product and every product release from 1.0 to the very last release before… Read More »

Am I a Content Strategist?

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 »