This list is organized arbitrarily by broad category. Hey, my blog, my rules. And what you can do, gentle reader, is add your favourite books to the comments section. More reading, more knowledge!

Planning and Design

Harnessing Complexity (Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen)

Managing Enterprise Content (Ann Rockley)

Content Management Bible (Bob Boiko)

Document Engineering (Robert J Glushko, Tim McGrath)

Content and Complexity (Michael J Alberts, Beth Maxur, eds)

Designing e-Learning (Saul Carliner)

Information Design (Robert Jacobson, ed)

User Experience

Understanding Your Users (Catherine Courage, Kathy Baxter)

The User is Always Right (Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar)

Paper Prototyping (Carolyn Snyder)

Why Software Sucks (David Platt)

Handbook of Usability Testing (Jerry Rubin, Dana Chisnell, Jared Spool)

Storytelling for User Experience (Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks)

Observing the User Experience (Mike Kuniavsky)

Subject to Change (Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer)

Rocket Science Made Easy (Steve Krug)

Simple and Usable (Giles Colborne)

Do Good Design (David B Berman)

Built for Use (Karen Donoghue)

Mental Models (Indi Young)

The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper)

Practitioner Guides

The Web Content Strategist’s Bible (Richard Sheffield)

Elements of Content Strategy (Erin Kissane)

Letting Go of the Words (Ginny Redish)

Content Strategy for the Web (Kristina Halvorson)

Creating the Perfect Design Brief (Peter L Phillips)

Business Process Mapping (Jacka Keller)

Request for Proposal (Bud Porter-Roth)

Managing Knowledge (Wayne Applehans, Alden Globe, Greg Laugero)

Managing Your Documentation Products (JoAnn Hackos)

Techniques for Technical Communicators (Carol Barnum, Saul Carliner)

Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog (Kitty Burns Florey)

The Accidental Taxonomist (Heather Hedden)

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte)

Envisioning Information (Edward Tufte)

Wordsmithing for Effect

Clout (Colleen Jones)

Neuro Web Design (Susan M Weinschenk, PhD)

Content Rules (CC Chapman and Ann Handley)

Get Content, Get Customers (Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett)

Content Nation (John Blossom)

Curation Nation (Steven Rosenbaum)

Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely)

Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh)

Branded Nation (James B Twitchell)

Call to Action (Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg)

Intercultural Communication (James W Neuliep)

A Practical Guide to Localization (Bert Esselink)

International Technical Communication (Nancy L Hoft)

Metadata and Delivery

Audience, Relevance, and Search (James Mathewson, Frank Donatone, and Synthia Fishel)

Search Engine Visibility (Shari Thurow)

Metadata Solutions (Adrienne Tennenbaum)

Killer Web Content (Gerry McGovern)

Wiki (Alan Porter)

Introduction to DITA (Jennifer Linton, Kylene Bruski)

User Engagement

Conversation and Community (Anne Gentle)

Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky)

SocialCorp (Joel Postman)

Sway (Ori and Rom Brafman)

The Thank You Economy (Gary Vaynerchuk)

Radically Transparent (Andy Beal, Dr. Judy Strauss)

Crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe)

Participating in Explanatory Dialogues (Johanna D Moore)

Content can be described as “everything” (Rachel Lovinger quoting Chris Sizemore) but let’s refine that definition to something more tangible, a definition that can be employed by practitioners and stakeholders for the purpose of designing user experiences.

Simply put, content is contextualized data.

A few years back, I read an anecdote about someone who would send the Google folks a period email with a number. That was the entire email, a single number. Eventually, the recipients figured out that the number was a comment on too many words on the Google home page. Was that email content or data? There is no absolutely right or wrong, but I would posit that without the context of the number, it wasn’t content, it was data.

The number 12 is an example of data. It may have a context in the sense that we know it is more than 11 and less than 13. But it doesn’t have meaning for a reader until there is a practical context:

• a dozen eggs
• December
• players on a team
• children on a schoolbus
• dollars to purchase a product

There is a different type of contrast:

• http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=abcat0101000&type=category
• http://hypem.com/artist/joel+plaskett

In each case, the commonality is that the context that helps with cognitive processing of content.

The practical application of this definition of content could be understood through the following example. A catalogue in a catalogue will have content attached to it: a product description, a photo, perhaps a video of the product in use. There will also be data that gets attached to the content – a SKU, a price. As soon as the data can be understood in context, it has become part of the content.

Content strategists understand the importance of managing content throughout its entire lifecycle, from analysis of business requirements and planning right through to archiving and forensic e-discovery. I believe that what differentiates us from the information management side is that we don’t treat information as data to be managed. For us, context is a critical part of designing the user experience. So while information management and content management is more consumed more with the technologies behind the management and delivery mechanisms, content strategy is closer to the contextual understanding of content, including contextualized data, for the benefit of the consumers of that content.

If you’re the type of person who likes to write, think, edit, and then publish , tink about the pain of re-using content from an article created in a word processing program to a blog entry. You had to go through and check things like apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes to make sure you didn’t end up with question marks in the middle of your carefully-crafted prose. That can be called “dumb work” – silly rote tasks that don’t add any value at all.

Now, multiply that dumb work by millions when content gets locked into a proprietary system. You may have a million-dollar content management installation, but what happens when you want to use your content elsewhere, or when you need to migrate content between your behemoth system and specialty systems, such as a component content management system?

Unless there is a vested interest by, say, a competitor in providing some sort of import wizard from a specific proprietary format into their own format, your content is now held hostage by the vendor’s system. This used to be considered good business sense, as it locked you into their system for long periods of time. In today’s world, however, it’s considered a pretty bad move on everyone’s part. The recognition that content is a valuable corporate asset whose value increases with its potential for re-use has changed the game.

Re-use is a concept that is often discussed at too low of a level within the corporate sphere. There are several kinds of re-use:

• Single-sourcing. This isn’t a particularly sexy type of re-use, but is the industrial workhorse of re-use that is the backbone of any product or service provider that produces technical content (user, installation, maintenance, and quick-start guides, training material, knowledge bases, and so on). The ROI on standards-based, re-usable content becomes critical, particularly in cases where translation are involved.
• Integration. Content among departments, divisions, or partner companies may need to be mashed together to create a cohesive whole. Saving troublesome conversion steps toward a common format is a huge time-saver, and eliminates the worries that the conversion process has eliminated or corrupted critical content that affects the quality and integrity of the end result.
• Convergence. This re-use case is bringing together content from various types of sources, such as mixing single-sourced content with user-generated content in a knoweldge base. The need to “round-trip” content relies on being able to get content in and out of systems easily and quickly, with as much automation and as little human intervention as possible.
• Syndication. Content flies (or should fly) outside of the organization, in the form of news releases, event announcements, and so on. If content doesn’t conform to the standards-based formats – microformats is the most common example – then the value of automating syndiations is lost, with a default position of cutting and pasting into multiple sites.

Having content that can “play nice” with other systems is a key component of a good content strategy. Because large-scale content projects are dependent on the technologies that manage the content, it’s critical to look at how the system treats the content, and how open the content is for re-use in strategic ways.

When the project budget starts to get iffy, what gets cut is usually the planning for after The Big Day. There seems to be a blind faith that either (a) the romance of the new system will make everything work just fine – I call this the starry-eyed bride approach, or (b) that staff will adopt the arranged marriage by edict – the bullying husband approach. We know the outcomes of these approaches; some of us have been subjected to them ourselves.

The good news is that now we have a name for the line item in the CMS project budget: web operations management. The bad news is that more organizations still prepare for a wedding than prepare for a marriage. With the wonky economic situation and a greater need for fiscal responsibility, will 2009 finally be the year of responsible coupling?

Don’t look for component content management systems (used to manage and aggregate chunks of content to create larger information products, such as help systems or technical documentation) to be shown in this metropolis, though – seems those systems must live in an off-the-map suburb, unlike the “Europolis” and similarly cleverly-named areas of town. Maybe, on a future map, we can anticipate an inset to this specific subset of content technologies?