Closing the Gap on the Adaptive Content Challenge

Don DayContelligence Group

@donrday

donrday@contelligencegroup.com 1

Agenda

• Obligatory overview of Adaptive Content

• Crux: How do I do Adaptive Content?

• Roles of Technologies and Materials in Engineering

• Case Study: Analysis of a common object

• Take aways

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Why so much emphasis on“Adaptive Content?”

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Content should be discoverable!

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Content should be reusable!

Photo credit: andreasmarx / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

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Content should be timeless!

Server and browser, ca. 1500

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Content should be delivery-agnostic!

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Spectrum of Adaptation

• Factors affecting what gets selected:

• Technical, cultural, religious, personal preferences

• Length of content vs time to consume it

• Reading level and familiar terminology

• Basis for access: news, curiosity, solution-finding

• Factors affecting importance/priority:

• Breaking news

• Urgency of task

• Bandwidth of stream

• Etc..8

Workflows Facilitationfor Adaptable Content• Enabling Content to be authored and handled adaptively

• Semantic associations

• Scope of selection

• Methods of enablement

• Implementing the behaviors• Rules and rule engines

• Flags (highlighting)

• Filters (including/excluding)

• Binding enabled content to those and other smart implementations (content agility)• Server side vs client side

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One small problem: How?

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines an Open Web Platform

• But Open can also mean “anything goes.”

• W3C does not define concrete information types or specific processing implementations

• As a result, there is no common toolkit for Adaptive Content.

• Many silos, no interoperability other than:

• Vendors

• Consortiums

• Communities of interest

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Investing Content with Value

• Pre-Web era:

• Content with long life cycle (product information)

• Ephemeral content (news, consumer publications, marketing)

• Sometimes the same publisher; push for standards and common process; commonality of content and effort

• Web era:

• Content with long life cycle

• Ephemeral content (did we expect those cases to change?)

• Not often the same publisher; isolation of standards and processes; duplication of content and effort

• Post-SEO era:

• Trending back around: Long form / long life content, multiple deliverables, trimming redundancy, lowering cost of ownership

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What’s wrong with my content?• Blobs vs Chunks: Definitions

• Blobs = Amorphous entities of text, usually presentational

• Chunks = Named, scoped, modular units of information that can be manipulated; Structured content

• Blobs are merely human consumable; “chunks” are computationally consumable.

• Web CMS often the culprit for creating the Lowest Common Denominator of blob-like content:

• title and body withhighlighting

• For example…

We don’t need no stinking

chunks! 12

Presentation ≠ semantics!

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Doesn’t RWD solve all this?

• RWD = Responsive Web Design

• A fluid grid, media queries, and image optimization

• Example: http://crushlovely.com/, http://www.starbucks.com/

• It really, really does put more stuff into more places.

• That said,

• Crap on a page now can be turned into crap everywhere.

• RWD by itself has a lot in common with a drug delivery device!

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RWD: Without the right content, it can’t deliver a great experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_05a-1116x1492.jpg#filelinks

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Role of Adaptive Technologies

• Adaptive Design: Adds logic to Responsive Web Design

• Helps with intelligent resource usage (fonts, images, scope)

• Generally is not aware of content and context

• A robot in a museum can’t answer questions about the exhibits!

• Adaptive Content: Fills the divs on a page more intelligently

• Supports negotiation about its role and suitability

• For devices

• For subject matter

• For users (personalization)

• How? Structure and semantics

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Ya Need a Technology!

• Mark Boulton noted 3 common parts of responsive designs:

• sensors — things that sense the environment

• systems — tell actuators what to do with sensor information

• actuators — things that actually do stuff

• Responsive Web Design: Enables services in a browser to interact with the presentation of content (CSS can move or hide content)

• Adaptive Design: Moves the content interaction to the server (e.g., can elide content delivered to the device)

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Ya Need Materials!

• Both technologies need to operate on content

• Not blobs; poor in meaning and scope (for computers, at least)

• Chunks are okay for Responsive stylesheets, barely adequate for Adaptive logic in servers.

• Adaptive Content (aka Intelligent Content): Content with Scope, Meaning, and Value (semantically structured for reuse)

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What is Adaptive Content? Ann Rockley:

• “Adaptive content is

• format-free,

• device-independent,

• scalable, and

• filterable

• content that is transformable for display

• in different environments and

• on different devices

• in an automated or dynamic fashion.”

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What is Adaptive Content? Karen McGrane:

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Who needs it?

• What can you do without intelligent content?

• Everything on the Web today

• (including siloed investments, content and tools that can’t be leveraged widely)

• What can’t you do without intelligent content?

• Reuse content in place

• Adapt it to business requirements and audiences that don’t exist today

• Ask specific queries, get back suitably scoped results

• Republish more easily into future formats

• And more! 21

Design a Content Factory byReverse Engineering• Decomposing a real world example for insight into Content

Engineering

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What is content?

• A can of soup

• The soup itself

• A container for the soup

• A picture of soup

• A genre of soup

• A title

• A brand

• A logo

• A tagline

• …23

But wait, there’s more!

• Description of the content

• Related content

• How to prepare

• List of ingredients

• Contact info

• Terms and conditions

• Identity

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Included if you buy now!

• Nutritional info

• Feedback “form”

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Child structures

• Content can be like a Matryoshka doll:

• Proper subsets

• New combinations

• New contexts

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Structure: Generic vs SemanticGeneric, bloggy, salesy

• Headline

• Lead

• Description

• Keywords

• Main image

• Body copy

• Call to Action

Semantic API reference<api xmlns="http://www.ioexception.de/rest-api-doc" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/

XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ioexception.de/rest-api-doc ../xsd/rest-api-doc.xsd ">

<name>Foo Bar Example API</name>

<version>v2</version>

<author>John Doe</author>

<description>The following document describe the RESTful API of the

example service foo bar. </description>

<baseuri>http://myapipath/v2</baseuri>

<authentication>

<type>Basic Authentication</type>

<type>OAuth</type>

</authentication>

<resources>

<resource>

<name>User</name>

<description>This resource represents a user. </description>

<path>/user/<param description="user ID">user-id</param></path>

<operation>

<name>Create a new user account</name>

<description>Creates a new user account, if user registration is enabled.</description>

<path omitResourcePath="true">/users</path>

<formats><format>application/json</format></formats>

<request>

<method>POST</method>

<authentication mandatory="false" />

•

https://github.com/berb/rest-doc-template/blob/master/example/example.xml

Note: One size does not fit all content types!

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And speaking of semantic content:

Recipe from http://www.happy-monkey.net/recipes/

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Intelligent Content, server side:

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Lessons from the Analysis:

• Web sites and the documents in them can be richly structured, independent objects

• Objects within documents can be related to RWD regions

• Richly described content can be republished in multiple forms

• Voila, Adaptive Content!

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Tools vs Content in our books:

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Engineering the Renderers

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Engineering the Content

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Bbb… but! How do I create it?

• Ann Rockley: Stop handcrafting your content. Engineer it.

• Faux architecture approaches:

• “Content Choreography” is a RWD term for automated layout (long solved for magazines/newspapers); doesn’t fix content

• “Mobile First” is a method of approximating a content architecture; does not capture a repeatable discipline (yet)

• A Content First approach:

• “Content Analysis” or “Information Architecture:” • discovering how parts of content relate to each other

• “Data modeling:” • express those semantic containers in a repeatable way (ie, guidelines,

schemas or business rules)

• “Content Engineering:” • build systems that use sensors (parameters, functions, user input) and

actuators (logic) to produce new content interactions (not just renditions).

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Some authoring examples:

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Under the hood… NPR

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Under the hood… Web Platform Docs

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In “view form” mode

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Under the hood… microdata

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Under the hood… expeDITA

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GatherContent Editor Panel

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Under the hood… WordPress+

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Oh, the places you’ll go!

• Adaptive, Intelligent Content:

• Is future-proofed for uses and devices yet to be invented

• Is A business asset, not a storage liability

• Is An archive for business knowledge and culture

• Broadens the definition of Personalization

• Adds scope and handles for use in Adaptive Designs

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Anticipation!

• Adaptive Content with WordPress:

• http://www.cmsmyth.com/2013/05/rom-blobs-to-chunks-structured-content-in-wordpress/

• http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/04/adaptive-content-with-wordpress/

• http://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-content-templates/screenshots/

• http://simple-fields.com/

• http://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

• And with Drupal:

• https://groups.drupal.org/node/51023

• Your tax dollars at work:

• http://www.howto.gov/web-content/technology/content-management-systems/how-to-create-open-structured-content

• All around good stuff:

• http://meetcontent.com/blog/structured-content-an-overview/44

And they laughed when I said I wanted to be a Content Engineer…• Congratulations!

We are done!

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