Archives for the month "March 2008"

Content management/content strategy conference provides great breadth of expertise

March 27, 2008 · Posted in Content Development, Content Strategies, content convergence, content management  

So you’re being asked to structure your content in XML, perhaps DITA, so you can do more with it. Now you find out that the “more” part includes areas you’re not really familiar with. Maybe that includes providing traveling technicians with up-to-date technical data by syndicating your content so they get automatic downloads? Or maybe [...]

Finally, the CCM report we’ve all been waiting for

March 26, 2008 · Posted in Uncategorized  

CMS Watch, an agency providing vendor-neutral analysis of content management vendors, has just released the much-awaited The XML & Component Content Management Report 2008, meant for the technical communication and content translation segments, and anyone using XML for content re-use.
This report, authored by Ann Rockley and other consultants from The Rockley Group, has been in [...]

Eating your own dog food – an industry phenomenon

March 24, 2008 · Posted in management  

This is a post of thoughts that trigger some of the things that have been bugging me lately. Some of these were brought to my attention by colleagues of mine; others I stumbled upon on my own:
Eating your own dog food – Consultants aren’t immune from this lesson: the documentation experts who try to get [...]

Content Convergence and Integration 2008 post mortem

March 16, 2008 · Posted in Content Development, content management  

It’s the weekend after what turned out to be a wildly successful content Convergence and Integration 2008 conference. My measure of success was that by the time that delegates left the conference, their brains hurt. In other words, I didn’t want them to go away saying they’d found only a session or two or three [...]

Social network for content professionals

March 16, 2008 · Posted in Content Development, content management, professional development  

Want to know more about social networking tools but don’t know where to start? Can’t figure out why you might want to use FaceBook but want to understand the social media aspect of it? Want to connect with your content peers in a way that has more depth than a simple listserv? Now is your [...]

What content convergence looks like in the real world

March 7, 2008 · Posted in Content Development, content management  

It seems that content convergence has struck a chord in the industry. TechComm Manager has just published my article on the topic of The Why and How of Content Convergence and Integration. If you’re still wondering what this whole content convergence movement is about, this article is a good start.

Social media and performance improvement within organzations

March 7, 2008 · Posted in content management  

I don’t post much about social media because I don’t think of it as the core of what I do. Yet I’ve built my share of sites on blogging platforms and developed strategies that include various aspects of social media. So I was delighted to stumble across this post on the
21 days of wiki adoption [...]

Entering The Age of Content: a slightly different take on content convergence

March 6, 2008 · Posted in Content Development, content management  

Another article was published about content convergence, on the Data Conversion Laboratory blog, called The Dawning of the Age of Content – and why Content Convergence Matters to You.
This era reminds me of the late 1980s when the printing industry realized that the sludge they were paying to have hauled away was discovered to be [...]

Content as asset – and why its management is more critical than ever

March 6, 2008 · Posted in Content Development, content management  

Content producers are coming into interesting times, to adapt the popular saying, with the dawning of The Age of Content. Industry is discovering that content is not a liability, but an asset, and just like the assets that sit, like the inventory in their warehouses, but in their databases. These assets have value, and as [...]