Tag: content strategist

Readers Don’t Classify their Experience

In Web Organization is not Like Book Organization, I said that the TOC does not work at a large scale. It is worth talking a little more about why it doesn’t work, because it has important consequences for many of the navigational schemes that people propose for the Web and other large information systems.

The reason a TOC does not work at a large scale is that a small scale TOC acts as a list that the reader can simply browse, but a large scale one becomes a classification scheme that users have to navigate. If you can’t take the TOC in at a glance, or at least read it through comfortably, then you have to trace down particular paths in the hierarchy of the TOC, and that means you have to figure out the classification scheme behind the TOC. And that does not work. 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, maintaining that as long as that is what the job ads call it, that’s what the job is called.

Thus I have been reluctant to call myself a content strategist. Scott Abel’s recent interview with Barbara Saunders indicates I am not the only one having doubts about the title. Yet many of the people I interact with professionally call themselves content strategists, and more than once those people have used the #contentstrategy tag when tweeting about my articles or blog posts. I seem to write a lot about the issues that content strategists care about, yet still I find myself reluctant to get the content strategist tattoo. read more