There is a brilliant post by Gerry McGovern today entitled Moving from a world of producing to a world of connecting. We have a tendency, McGovern argues, to think of creating value in terms of creating more things, when we should be more concerned with creating connections between things. In a network, he argues, connections between… Read More »
One of the great hopes of content management is that taxonomy will save us. Developing a consistent and rigorous taxonomy, it is hoped, will remove inconsistencies from how describe and label things, enabling us to find and reuse content much more easily. It is a lovely vision, and it is doomed to failure. The underlying… 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 »
One of the questions I am often asked about Every Page is Page One is whether it simply means write articles instead of books. But while articles are certainly much closer to the EPPO model than books, there is something more to EPPO than simply writing articles. EPPO is also about the relationships between articles/topics/pages… Read More »
Summary: There is a romance to technical communication, because there is a romance to all useful things. But don’t expect the romance of technical communication to be apparent to everyone. Technical communication is a romantic profession. No, really. There is a romance to any profession if you love it. But why would anyone love a… Read More »
This is another in a series responding to questions from my TC Dojo series on Bottom-up Information Architecture. Q: We are still frequently requested to deliver PDFs. What is the impact of this new way of writing when the deliverable also needs to be PDF? A: One of the things we have discovered about documentation… Read More »
Does a bottom-up information architecture improve search ranking? This is another in a series responding to questions from my TC Dojo series on Bottom-up Information Architecture. I have several questions from the second session on writing, but I’m still working off the backlog of questions from the first session on organization. (Because we are moving… Read More »
I’d thought the Content is King debate was over, but I saw it rearing its jester’s head once again recently. Argh! “Content is King” is a phrase that seems to have come out of content marketing to express the simple idea that content is now the most important form of marketing. Which is actually a… Read More »
Do reference and learning require different organization in a bottom-up information architecture? This is another in the series of posts addressing questions from my TC Dojo webinar on Bottom-up Information Architecture. Q: Is there a difference in looking for a specific information fact (such as the depth of the Manicouagan crater) versus a search for understanding… Read More »
Is there still a place for a TOC in a bottom-up information architecture? Yes, but its role is different. This is another in my series following up on the questions asked in my TC Dojo webinar on bottom-up information architecture. Q: Is the TOC dead then? I’m used to structuring content based on an analysis of… Read More »