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Exploring the information space

Category Archives: Content Management Systems

What you see is SMUC

6 Comments Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2013/06/05

A few weeks ago, Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) posted an article on A List Apart (WYSIWTF) about the challenges of separating content from presentation, and the need for something that brings semantic mark-up into the picture without the overhead of authors needing to be taught to add formatting tags.

James Deer (@jamesdeer) of GatherContent picked this up, batting around a few ideas about finding the balance between author-unfriendly chunking and non-semantic blobs. As I have been sitting on the simply solution to this for some time, I figured I had best share…

Tempting Shakespeare

Opposing demands

Within the content management world, there are two major camps. On the one side, those who understand content structures, especially the need for fine-grained chunking to allow wide-ranging reuse. On the other, we have amateur authors (though perhaps professional marketers) who are accustomed to the simplistic Bold and Italic in a word processor, the absolute-on-page positioning of DTP – who want to write, style and publish, without thinking about some complex internal structures (otherwise known as “I want WYSIWYG editing!”) Read more of this post

Complexity, Content Management Systems, Content strategy, Context strategy, Functionality, Information Architecture, Metadata, Structured content content modelling, end of WYSIWYG, semantic content, semantic editing, WYSISMUC

Your taxonomy is brokned

2 Comments Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2013/05/06

I was in a meeting with a client discussing how to store material they produce for their end clients. While I advocated one pattern, a colleague proposed the more common format: a first node is the end client the content is for, and beneath that, sub-divide based on date, probably using a year-and-month approach.

“If that doesn’t work,” he said, “your taxonomy is broken.”

I paused a moment, for effect (as one does), and replied flatly: “Your taxonomy is fundamentally broken.”

Let me explain this raw statement. How can I be so certain this structure – this approach – is not suitable? There are several practicalities relating to the client and the content being produced, which are symptomatic of a greater taxonomical malaise. These arguments apply to just about any typed content.

Who is our structure for?

The cynic

From my perspective, the most important question to be asked – and answered – pertains to the audience. We have thousands of documents; what information does our audience need to see in the URL? Do they really need their own organisation to be named? Do they need to know that this piece of content is syndicated? Do they need to know the date the article was written? Or when it was published? Do they perhaps want the name of the author? Or any combination of the categorisation axes applied to the piece of content? Read more of this post

Business process, Content Management Systems, Content strategy, Functionality, Information Architecture, Information strategy, Metadata, Ontology, Taxonomy, User experience broken, findability, page management system, structure

What does your CMS actually do?

10 Comments Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2012/06/26

You’ve shelled out the money – six figures very likely. You have the license. The wonderful CMS they sold you is yours to use. So, what are you going to do?

In other terms

I am no musician. My fingers do not obey my instructions when it comes to evoking the melody. But, I wanted to learn. The piano is supposed to be a fairly basic instrument; maybe not the easiest, but the notes are all laid out in front of one is a fairly obvious way.

I went into a music store and asked a salesman which piano I should buy. I was honest about not having a clue; not knowing how to play. But I have a good ear for sound. I know if I like the tone of something. All smiles, he took me to one special piano he had; I closed my eyes and listened while he played. The piece was hauntingly beautiful – a minute and a half of lively bounce. Chopin, he told me; Étude Op. 10 n. 5. A piece that demonstrated no lack of skill.

Sold. I handed over my money and awaited delivery.

Maestro
Was I ever in for a shock? A week later, the very piano the salesman had played me that demo piece on arrived and was set up in my living room. I lifted the lid to see what my new toy sounded like in my home – and discovered that half the keys were missing! On the right half of the keyboard, there was only the single white key; an F. Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Information Architecture, User experience CMmess, customisation, not fit for purpose

Separating content from presentation

2 Comments Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2012/03/26

Just about every CMS vendor claims to separate content from presentation. While I cannot claim to know every CMS out there, I have yet to encounter one that truly divides these aspects of communication.

What is content?

Content is a somewhat vague catch-all term. It refers to the information available to be presented. It may be words, images, video. Any granular element of communication is content; it is in this definition that the problem so often occurs: how granular is a granular element?

Is this post an element of content, or is it an aggregation of content elements? It contains both text and image; it has a defined order to the flow of headings and paragraphs. One content? Two content? More?

What is presentation?

Presentation is the wrapper around content: the structure that holds the elements in place so their sequence makes sense to the audience. Presentation is the container. But how deep should our definition of what is a container go? How pedantic should we be about what is presentation layer, and what elements are part of the content? That line above that asks “What is presentation?” – should the fact that it is a heading, that renders as an <h3>, be a part of the content, or is that the presentation layer?
Separating content from its container
Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Context Management Systems, Context strategy, Information Architecture, Metadata context, contextualisation, dynamic conversation, loss of control, ruleset

Dependency awareness (content’s identity crisis)

3 Comments Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2011/10/27

Is your content having an identity crisis? Does it know what it is?

Content's identity crisis

When elements of content become individual entities, separate from the environment in which they are presented (which is the whole point of a CMS, but that’s another story), the need for awareness of these dependencies becomes critical to the “management” part of the CMS.

Most vendors will tell you that their systems are aware of content dependencies: if you create a new page, with an image in it, publishing the page will also publish the image. Hey, the page is aware of what its dependencies are; what more could you want? Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Content strategy, Context strategy, Information Architecture CMS, dependency awareness, identity, self-management

The Quantum of Content Management

1 Comment Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2011/10/10

Content management, if done right, bears parallels with quantum physics. (Please stick with me: I will keep this high-level, and only maintain the analogy for a paragraph.)

The uncertainty principle of content The principles of quantum physics are confusing. Basically, though, they relate to the smallest elements that can be described, which have a subtle property: their actual state (where they are and what they are doing) can only be determined – is, in fact, only realised – by the presence, the contextual forces, of the elements around them; those they interact with. A single particle can be in multiple places at once, in different phases, until something needs to react to its presence (e.g. it is observed).

When developing (or customising) content systems, we need to give our information structures the granularity of quantum particles, and the flexibility of uncertainty.

Why quantum content?

One of the base principles of any CMS worthy of the name is that content is separated from its presentation. An element of content is reusable. In order to achieve proper reusability, elements of content need to be the smallest that can be formed whilst maintaining identity. Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Content strategy, Information Architecture, Information strategy

Bubbling knowledge in business

Leave a Comment Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2011/10/03

Businesses have a problem: there is a disconnect between the people with knowledge, and those in customer-facing roles. Whether the communication is pre- or post-sale, those charged with providing customer interaction are, by and large, operating half-blind. The salesman lives in the sales silo; the customer service rep lives in the service silo; the technician with the answers lives in a dark cellar.
Siloed communication

So what? We know our message.

“Marketing departments know the customers, they have product spec-sheets to educate them; they can craft appropriate messages.” “Service centres have customer profiles, case histories, and Q&A filtering methods that allow monkeys to find the right answer; what more does the customer want?” Somehow, this model is still hanging on. Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Context strategy, Information Architecture, Information strategy business communication, business departments, contextualisation, inter-silo communication, knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer, reuse

The Enterprise as the Context

1 Comment Posted by Michael Sadler on 2011/09/26

Rick Yagodich asked the question: How do we manage this Context thing, anyway?

He identifies that context has two main purposes:

to provide a baseline for understanding, the assumptions of meaning
to make the choices to communicate the appropriate message to the other party, in the best possible way

By focusing on the latter, he identifies a gap in current CMS technology and suggests how we might begin to deal with this problem. It’s an excellent starting point, but I would like to throw the net much wider; I would like to suggest that context is so important that it requires us to rethink the entire enterprise.

We are only at the beginning of the digital age; postulating about the digital future is much like asking a monk (in the Middle Ages) what the impact of the printing press will be on ecclesiastical affairs. Enterprises are faced with a similar question: what does all this mean? What will all this mean?

Monks' Mead
Ultimately, what Enterprises are dealing with is an explosion in the variety of people, experiences, products, services, geographies, societies, and markets they must cater for simultaneously. Compounding this is the accelerating emergence of new markets and communications channels. Context management is critical, and will only become more-so in determining the success or failure of enterprises online. Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Context Management Systems, Context strategy, Guest post, Information strategy

How do we manage this Context thing, anyway?

2 Comments Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2011/09/19

When people discuss content, another word is bandied about with impunity: context.

context [kon-tekst] n. the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.

dictionary.com, based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2011.

Everyone is in agreement that we want and need it. When we communicate with others, it is vital that we take context into account. Context serves two purposes:

to provide a baseline for understanding, the assumptions of meaning
to make the choices to communicate the appropriate message to the other party, in the best possible way

I am going to deal here with context in the second of these forms: the process of determining how to communicate with another party. Most people do this instinctively in person (a salesman reads his customer’s body language and responses, and adjusts his pitch accordingly). But when we move context management into the digital realm – when we have to hand these decisions over to a computer – things get tricky.

It’s complicated

Context is a big problem; it is convoluted.

Read more of this post

Content Management Systems, Content strategy, Context Management Systems, Context strategy, Information Architecture C3IA, complexity, context, context manager, context strategist, digital context

Which came first? The CMS or the failure?

Leave a Comment Posted by Rick Yagodich on 2011/09/12

I thought I harped on about it enough myself, but earlier this week, the theme was repeatedly brought up at Content Strategy Forum 2011: Content Management Systems are selected too early in the process.

Which came first? The CMS or the failure? (current process)