Content in the Age of Promiscuous Reuse

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CONTENT IN THE AGE

OF PROMISCUOUS REUSE Rachel Lovinger @rlovinger CS Forum 2012

Photo by spakattacks

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About Me: Rachel Lovinger

Experience Director, Content Strategist Razorfish, New York

Co-editor of content strategy blog scatter/gather: http://scattergather.razorfish.com

Author of Nimble: A Razorfish Report on Publishing in the Digital Age (June 2010): http://nimble.razorfish.com (@NimbleRF on Twitter)

Photo by Rohanna Mertens

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New York City Subway

A Story of Reuse

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© 2012 Page 5 Photo by jaimekop

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Route Change: This map is not in use

Name of Station has changed

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REUSE REQUIRES

FLEXIBILITY

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Chunks vs. Blobs

A Story of Structure

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Blob: A Tweet

Author

Content Blob Date

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Blob: A Blog Post

Title

Content Blob

Author Date

Tags

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Chunks: A Recipe

Title Author

Show Episode Tags

Image

Caption

Time

Level

Yield

Ingredient 1

Ingredient 2

Ingredient 3

Etc…

Directions

Guide / Menu

Recipe © Food Network

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Recipe: From Web to Mobile

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Someday, Intelligent Cooktops

Google Cooktop designed by Sarah R. L. Johnson,

Screenshot from A Day Made of Glass… by Corning

BLOBS are FIXED, RIGID

CHUNKS are FLEXIBLE

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The need for STRUCTURE

follows the rise of REUSE

A Story of Evolution

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Support Documentation

Technical Communications

• Since before the Web

• Help content and manuals, for print and digital

• Structured content delivered as print docs or hypertext files

• Provides topic-based just-in-time content

• Change Management: updates & translation

Docs

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Boeing: Change Management

Photo by Darren Olivier

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Boeing: Change Management

31 million pages : Imagine distributing printed updates.

Photo by Boeing

- 20 years

Docs

1999: CDs took up considerably less space

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Web Publishing

Editors & Template/CMS developers

When redesigning a site we thought about:

• Reusing articles & photos throughout the site

• Distributing content to sister sites

• Syndication to partner channels

This required the content to be flexible.

[This was largely pre-social & pre-mobile. Now we’d also consider:

• Sharing on social sites and content aggregators

• Appearance of content on mobile devices ]

- 10 years

Docs Web

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EW.com: Syndication

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Responsive Design

Mobile Web/App Designers

• We’re now looking at everything on the phone

• Pages & content created for the desktop don’t always work well on mobile

• Content creators don’t want to produce a different set of assets for each channel

Now

Docs Web Mobile+

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Mobile: Ubiquity

Fail Images from MobileWebFail

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Mobile: Ubiquity

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Reading on tablets

Photo by TheCreativePenn

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Streaming to TVs

Photo by Dennis S. Hurd

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Broadcasting to our own cars

Photo by HighTechDad

Boeing manuals:

Incredibly

challenging

Photos: Boeing by Darren Olivier, Pocket by lululemon athletica

Now, the entire

Internet is in

everyone’s pocket

Now we’re ALL responsible

for structuring content.

It CAN be done.

(And it’s not just a tech issue.)

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Ok, But How?

A Story of Tactics

Photo by avinashkunnath

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Why content people need to get involved

People who aren’t thinking about the broader meaning, purpose and uses of the content, are more likely to create:

• Single-use, single-context content

• Painful CMS interfaces

• Unsustainable workflows

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We need

• Flexible, reusable content

• Easy-to-use tools and processes

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Content Management

Separate the content from the display by using a CMS

Warning: WYSIWYG formatting fails to indicate meaningful structure

Image courtesy of Miva Merchant

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Responsive Design

Presentation layer defines display, per channel or device

Photo by jiraisurfer

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Content Modelling

Translate designs into flexible content chunks

Chart Song

Album

Page

Artist

Profile

Content Attributes

Content Types

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Web Standards

Use existing standards so content plays well with others

… Etc.

“The great thing about standards is,

there are so many to choose from”

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Rich Metadata

Help systems understand what to do with the chunks

Image courtesy of Wall Street Journal

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User-friendly Tools

Demand easy-to-use tools with advanced features

Example: Drupal 7 supports web standards & rich metadata

Structured content may feel

like a brand new problem, but

people have been thinking

about it for a long time.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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Recap: Tactics for Structured Content

1. Content Management

2. Responsive Design

3. Content Modelling

4. Web Standards

5. Rich Metadata

6. As always: need more user-friendly tools!

We’ve solved for these

problems in the past.

Now we have to simplify &

scale the solutions.

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Where to Learn More

A Story of Knowledge

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Karen McGrane

Content Strategy for Mobile

Rahel Bailie & Noz Urbina

Content Strategy for Decision Makers

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Content Everywhere

Bob Boiko

Content Management Bible

Ann Rockley & Charles Cooper

Managing Enterprise Content

Heather Hedden

The Accidental Taxonomist

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Online Resources

Start here:

• My SlideShare page: http://www.slideshare.net/rlovinger/

• Nimble: A Rasorfish Report on Publishing in the Digital Age

• Stephen Hay: Structured Content First

• Daniel Jacobson, NPR: COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

Then, since there are way too many to list…

• Additional Links: http://blog.rachellovinger.com/resources

• And: @rlovinger

Next…

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People to Follow

At the intersection of Content Strategy, Responsive Design, Structured Content, and the Future-Friendly Web.

• Cleve Gibbon (@cleveg : slideshare : blog)

• Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane : slideshare : blog)

• Rahel Anne Bailie (@rahelab : slideshare : blog)

• Sara Wachter-Boettcher (@sara_ann_marie : slideshare : blog)

• Noz Urbina (@nozurbina : slideshare : blog)

• Cennydd Bowles (@Cennydd : blog)

• Luke Wroblewski (@lukew : slideshare : blog)

• Ethan Marcotte (@beep : blog)

• Brad Frost (@brad_frost : slideshare : blog)

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Thanks !

rachel.lovinger@razorfish.com

@rlovinger

Photo by EricGjerde