Still, it would be a shame to let an annus nowyourejusttakingthepiss get in the way of a seasonal tradition around these parts. So with more than a nod to the previous four annual recaps, I’ve rounded up a few inspiring things my friends wrote on the internet in 2013. Thank you one and all.

Erin Kissane on turning the ‘how are you?’ question back on ourselves:

“We ask each other how we are, how we’re doing, sometimes how we’re “holding up.” When someone asks it in a formal, professional context, it means little more than “hello.” When our friends ask, they usually want to know a bit more, if not every single detail of recent lives. Weirdly, I suspect most of us aren’t in the habit of asking it of ourselves.”

Corey Vilhauer on becoming the audience again:

“The larger the audience, the more I withdrew. The riskier the subject, the more I held back. Which brings us to where I am today: I’ve stopped saying what I want, and I’ve started being afraid of being wrong.
I am afraid of being wrong. I am afraid of being trivial. I am afraid of publishing something that will be seen as unsatisfactory.
So I publish nothing at all.”

Sara Wachter-Boettcher on embracing your imperfectionist:

“Putting our least polished selves out there for our peers to see—admitting, without shame, that we struggled through rough patches and that not everything turned out exactly the way we’d hoped—won’t expose us as impostors. Instead, it’ll make our work feel that much more real—and, in turn, that much easier for others to be inspired by.”

Nicole Fenton on starting small:

“There are so many days when ‘the work’ is remembering you can do the work. You have to start small. It’s okay, just get the facts down. Say what you know, one word at a time. Take a walk when your chest gets too tight. Be around people who make you happy to be alive. And when you sit down to work and that voice starts shrieking, give it a moment to wear itself out — and then do the work anyway.”

Rebekah Cancino on the other side of insecurity:

“I can promise you this: when it gets tempting to let my own crippling insecurities come crashing down and bring everything to a halt—it’s going to be a lot harder to let them stop me. I don’t have any more excuses to hide behind, and the ugly, purpose-robbing blob of narcissism that self-doubt really is, now lies exposed before me.”

Lisa Maria Martin on using our feelings productively:

“I want to be better – not at hiding my feelings, but at using them productively. And when something goes wrong on a project, I want my first reaction to be generous. I want to give clients and coworkers the benefit of the doubt instead of the kneejerk defense. I don’t want to operate from scarcity.”

Jonathan Kahn on creating safe spaces:

“In a safe space you believe that you are enough. You have value as a person, irrespective of the choices you make and other people’s opinions of those choices. Consequently you’re worthy of love, respect, and compassion—from yourself as well as from others. People accept you for who you are, and so do you.”

Karen McGrane on integrity:

“Integrity comes in the hard choices, from saying no to things you wish you could say yes to. It’s refusing to take a project you might enjoy and that would pay well, because you don’t respect the values of the organization. It’s walking away from a business partnership that offers you significant benefits in terms of exposure and collaboration, because you learn your business partner is not a man of integrity. It’s ending a friendship with a person you genuinely like, because you realize she doesn’t truly have your back.”

Update #1: thanks to the magic of Readlists, this collection is now available in handy ebook form. Go grab it for your reader of choice.

Update #2: I’d also like to politely nudge you in the direction of Ahava Leibtag‘s own list of favourite content strategy articles from 2012.

The Audience You Didn’t Know You Had

Angela Colter, Contents magazine, January

“Accommodating low-literate adults does not come at the expense of more adept readers. In fact, crafting your content to accommodate this audience has the added benefit of making information easier for everyone to read, understand, and use. Everybody appreciates clarity.”

The tiny description that would fit snugly into a tweet: Creating content for people with low literacy skills (or anyone under stress) doesn’t mean “dumbing down” anything, you’re simplifying it.

Structure First. Content Always.

Mark Boulton, The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton, February

“It is unrealistic to write your content – or ask your client to write the content – before you design it. Most of the time. Content needs to be structured and structuring alters your content, designing alters content. It’s not ‘content then design’, or ‘content or design’. It’s ‘content and design’.”

The tiny description that could pass through the eye of a needle: A ‘Content first!’ approach mustn’t be interpreted to mean everything has to be lovingly prepared and finalised before it can be designed.

Future-Ready Content

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, A List Apart Magazine, February

“We may never be able to anticipate each user’s personal preferences, but the more we understand the relationships between information, the more the compromises inherent in any design decision will be clear—and the better prepared we are to make tough calls.”

The tiny description that would make a pair of pygmy marmosets nod in unison: As we continue to hurtle towards a more flexible future, we need to free our content from the shackles of the traditional web page. Look, book!

Content Modelling: A Master Skill

Rachel Lovinger, A List Apart Magazine, April

“Since the content model serves different audiences, at several different stages of the project, treat it as a living document. It’s never really complete — you just stop updating it when the project is over.”

The tiny description that has never been sold liquor over the counter: Robust content models can help support communication and collaboration between UX designers, developers, and stakeholders. A powerful tool.

Accessibility Considerations for Web Content

Georgy Cohen and friends, Meet Content, May

“We need to work diligently to build up an infrastructure that supports accessible publishing. We need to choose and use tools, including authoring tools, that support accessibility; we need to provide accessibility training to everyone involved in the publication workflow from authors to designers to developers; and we need to designate specific individuals or groups to acquire a relatively high level of accessibility expertise so they can provide support to the rest of the community.”

Terrill Thompson, Technology Accessibility Specialist, Information Technology University of Washington

The tiny description that still requires a stepladder to reach the biscuit barrel: It’s great to hear web professionals working in higher ed talking about planning for accessible web content, particularly their successes.

Writing in the Dark

Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine, May

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a night owl. As a kid, I read in bed until hours that would have horrified my parents, had they known. I can recall staying up until 2 a.m. to finish (of all things) Ballet Shoes—a cliff-hanger, apparently, when you are 8 years old. A few years later, I stayed up past three reading The Mists of Avalon, my usual late-night alertness enhanced, no doubt, by the sex scenes. I pulled my first all-nighter halfway through sixth grade. I was 11.”

The tiny description that always got on fine with those fiddly calculator watches: When a good book or prolific writing spell takes you well past the witching time of night, why stop there? You are far from alone.

No Longer No Sense of an Ending

Dorian Taylor, Contents magazine, May

“I’m tempted to claim that hypertext empowers us to represent more complex conceptual topologies than older literary technologies, but I’m not completely convinced of that myself: consider the subtlety, nuance, and explosive range of interpretation embedded in your favourite poem. It’s more accurate to say that hypertext enables complex conceptual structures to be explicit—baked into the artifact, rather than emerging through reading.”

The tiny description that’ll never exceed the carry-on limit: Nothing else this year made my heart soar quite as much as this brilliant exploration of the promise and potential of hypertext. Savour it.

How to Kill a Troll

Erin Kissane, incisive.nu, July

“Civility isn’t fancy-talk for ‘being nice.’ It’s the essential quality we require to live together in complex social structures built on our jumpy, irrational primate brains. Online, where we increasingly live, we need it more than ever.”

The tiny description with a big heart: Finding it within ourselves to love and understand those who commit senseless acts of hate might be our only hope.

How words should be

Elizabeth McGuane, Mapped., July

“If we’re ever going to have the stability to focus on the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’, we need to get more involved in the design conversation, the roots of how digital things are made, not just managed and kept alive. We can do this by looking to other worlds making their work digital-first, like parts of the art world, and see what they’re trying – we don’t have to settle for reflexive, skeuomorphic text formats, much as our nostalgia for paper and ink might tug us in that direction.”

The tiny description that is proud to call Rockall its home: As content strategists, we have a duty to look beyond predefined formats; to explore the potential of our ideas; to get closer to designers.

Appetite for (Creative) Destruction

Melissa Rach, Contents magazine, September

“Despite its fiery name, creative destruction is often a slow burn. It’s not an event, it’s a lifestyle. We will be creating these changes to our organizations and content for years to come. It’ll be painful. It’ll be exciting. And, someday hopefully, it’ll be called progress.”

The tiny description that requires no introduction: As customer demands for content increases, we content strategists are well placed to guide organisations through this process of change.

Meet the neighbors

Margot Bloomstein, Appropriate, Inc, September

“The strength of community requires two things: participants and connection. There are no communities of one; we need others. Individuals working in isolation, even when their numbers are great, also cannot benefit from community; we need to interact.”

The tiny description that once received a bear hug from a tardigrade: We can only learn so much on our own. Reaching out to our peers through meetups and conferences can grow ourselves a great support network.

Empathy and Content Strategy: on Teaching, Listening and Affecting Change

Corey Vilhauer, Eating Elephant, October

“Your job isn’t to make the change happen – only your client can do that. Your job is to present the change, understand the issues that will serve as barriers to that change, and walk a bit in their shoes. This will be weird – those shoes might not fit and they might have sweaty feet and seriously can’t we all just get a pair of Dr. Scholl’s inserts up in here? – but you’ll learn more about their needs than you’d have ever picked up by doing a competitive analysis of other websites.”

The tiny description that once provided the motion capture for Jiminy Cricket: Not everyone will understand or respond to our efforts to facilitate organisational change. This calls for bravery, patience, and empathy.

Strategy on the Inside

Rachel Lovinger, Scatter/Gather, November

“Structuring content requires synthesizing a swath of sources, designing usable systems, changing organizations, training personnel, soothing egos, adjusting priorities, allaying fears, reallocating resources… all while trying not to disrupt an existing content production process that cannot just stop while you sort out all this stuff. Does that sound easy? It shouldn’t. This is big ‘S’ strategy, and it requires understanding, insight, diplomacy, negotiation, and persuasion.”

The tiny description that has long disputed the term ‘pocked sized': The success of any organisation’s content strategy can only really be determined by how well it is implemented, and how much it is embraced.

Universal Design IRL

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, A List Apart Magazine, November

“The web’s ability to connect people, facilitate understanding, and amplify ideas has enabled us to build incredible things. It’s also given us a wealth of lessons in how to design thriving, thoughtful communities. Lessons it’s time we turn toward ourselves—toward reaching this more personal, more intimate goal.”

The tiny description that regularly makes a single drink last a whole evening: If we’re truly serious about universal design then we need to work harder to provide every voice with a safe and welcoming environment.

Subcompact Publishing

Craig Mod, craigmod.com, November

“You shouldn’t have to hire a famous actor to show readers how to use the app with his nose. Much like a printed magazine or book, the interaction should be intuitive, effortless, and grounding. The user should never feel lost.”

The tiny description that uses a teaspoon as a shovel: A thoughtful essay on the rise of small, tailored publishers working to deliver an experience that best reflects today’s multiscreen world.

Your Content Is Giving You A People Problem

Erin Scime, Forbes, December

“It’s no longer possible to be a deep expert in one functional area. Digital requires employees that are more cross-disciplinary and able to adapt to the demands and challenges of varying platforms and understand how communication needs shift between channels.”

The tiny description that still has recurring nightmares about roly-poly puddings: How we can better prepare organisations adapting their existing content processes for coping with those inevitable political challenges.

Honourable mentions

• Allen Tan on highlighting and focus… by Allen Tan, Readmill blog, May
• Bloggers and Bowerbirds by Erin Kissane, incisive.nu, June
• Beyond the page by Nicole Jones, Readmill blog, June
• 10 Timeframes by Paul Ford, Contents Magazine, June
• I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result. by Lycerius, Reddit, June*
• Growing up in words by Nathan Ditum, sarahditum.com, June
• Summer Reading… and Programming by Robin Sloan, robinsloan.com, July
• Testing Websites in Game Console Browsers by Anna Debenham, A List Apart Magazine, September
• Content strategy scares the hell out of me. You too? by Jonathan Kahn, lucid plot, October
• Your Content, Now Mobile by Karen McGrane, A List Apart Magazine, November
• I Want a World by Nicole Jones, Swell Content, November
• Translation is UX by Antoine Lefeuvre, A List Apart Magazine, December
• Participation by Mark Boulton, The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton, December

*ok, so I’ve allowed myself one glaring anomaly

From as far back as I can remember I’ve enjoyed lifting the lid on things to expose its hidden mechanics.

When, as a child, any household appliance or toy had broken beyond repair I’d jump at the chance to perform one of my directionless and inconclusive autopsies. Whether I knew what I was looking for, or at, mattered little, I was having too much fun to care.

But while I’d consider myself a keen and committed dismantler and occasional repairer, I’m no natural builder of things. What I mean is that I often lack the skills and knowledge to build something beyond prefabrication. To say, for instance, that I’ve built a working personal computer by sourcing and assembling the separate component parts would be perfectly true, but this was only achieved by carefully following instructions that I had no desire or reason to contradict or doubt. These step-by-step guides meant this layman didn’t need to understand in great detail what these components were and why they were needed.

This isn’t to belittle this kind of activity. I believe the assembly of a prefabricated system that works as intended is a more creative operation than pulling something to pieces. While the latter schooled me in the art of classification and labelling the former taught me an even greater lesson: that it’s not the separate component parts that matter, but the evolving system as a whole.

This lesson is something I think we can all take something from, particularly when trying to help an organisation or a group of content creators make that daunting leap from thinking and working in whole ‘pages’ of content to a system of smaller, dynamic modules, which could fly off in all manner of directions and co-exist with content from other groups and departments.

In nature, evolution happens not in isolation but in combination. To survive and thrive in an environment requires sharing it with others, not just simply demonstrating ruthless efficiency and aggression. It goes without saying that these departments and teams must be allowed to compete with one another to push through their own agendas and secure budgets, but I’m a big believer in encouraging people to take some shared responsibility for this organisation-wide adaptation process. To make this work there needs to be unity, co-operation as well as smart and sensible delegation; where the right people from the right departments get to work on the right things. As obvious as this sounds, it still amazes me how often a clash of egos or lingering frictions from a past episode manages to hamper such progress.

Working together in this manner also breeds a collective sense of responsibility for the future. When more people are encouraged to branch out from their own areas of influence and acquire a deeper understanding of the overall interconnectedness of a system the more they will help establish a culture of healthy restlessness. So even when faced with the challenge of supporting an increasing amount of devices, platforms and standards–fuelled by a fiercely competitive mobile marketplace–the system continues to evolve with widespread support, care and appreciation.

[Image credit: green circuit board by Peter Shanks]

When you’re engrossed in a good book nothing else matters. You could be chilled to the bone, within earshot of a cacophony of noise, or being tossed around like a rag doll in a train carriage, but it’s still not enough to disturb that bubble. That’s one of reading’s many beauties: the opportunity for escapism.

But what’s it going to take for you to pick up that book? You know, the one that might help you finish that essay, broaden your horizons, or increase your earning potential? The one we make elaborate excuses for not reading?

I believe this where an online book reading platform like Readmill has huge potential.

Picking up the book you know you should be reading

Buying or borrowing a book on a subject may seem a significant rung up the ladder, but acquiring it is just about the easy part. The real test is when it’s sitting neatly on your bookshelf or desk, or loaded into your Ebook reader, and has been for some time. Who or what is going to push you to prize open that cover?

Learning amongst others, particularly in an academic setting, should be just about ideal. But how often did our required reading largely consists of big, heavy textbooks laden with hundreds of pages with tiny type and an equally uninspiring cover? This coupled with an unfortunate feeling that many of your contemporaries weren’t taking things as seriously as they could was enough to cause that initial late summer buzz to wilt by late autumn.

Frustration and panic can provide short jolts. If you work yourself up into a mood you can do just about anything, but that’s hardly the ideal frame of mind for taking in information. This often feels more like some sort of punishment.

Waiting for a chance to question a book can work. Instead of moving from cover to cover you use it as a reference; relying on the strength of its index to dip in and out when the time arises. But how do you know if the real solution you’re looking for is not on the page you’ve already read and understood but on a page you haven’t?

It matters not that this book may make a great deal of difference to your circumstances. It’s hard work reading when your mind wants to wander off in search of more appealing and safer subjects; when your focus and concentration drifts in and out, causing you to revisit whole passages you’ve failed to take in.

Making time for reading–particularly if it follows a regular pattern–obviously helps. Half an hour once a day is a good deal better than three and a half late on a Sunday. And being good to yourself afterwards can also provide the motivation to attack unappealing text with added vigour.

But how about sharing these issues and your book-reading progress with others trying to do precisely the same thing? Discussing a book amongst people with different views, backgrounds, and experience can enhance your understanding of a subject. And, by the same token, sharing your highlights and insights can alert others to things they may have missed or didn’t consider important at the time.

They’ll help push you just as much as you’ll help push them.

[Image credit: book sale look by ginnerobot]

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

Paul Ford, Ftrain.com, January

“The days of the web as all-purpose media emulator are numbered. Apps on mobile are gaining traction; the web browser, despite great and ongoing effort, will not become the universal platform for everything ever. Apps provide niche experiences. People apparently like niche experiences enough to pay for them. This is serious.”

The summary comprised of exactly 140 characters: When the web’s fundamental question is Why wasn’t I consulted?, we must create a service experience around the product, whatever it may be.

Series: Context in Content Strategy

Daniel Eizans, danieleizans.com, January

“Web sites need both context and content strategy because there is a world of difference between “attention” and “engagement.” Getting people to the site and getting attention is step one of the process. Engagement is what creates meaning for users and is ultimately what leads to metrics that matter: ROI, return visits, brand trust, potential word of mouth, etc.”

The summary that just about passes for one: An excellent 5-part series explaining some of the ideas and principles behind tailoring content to different user situations and behaviours.

Series: What do content strategy deliverables look like?

Rahel Bailie, Intentional Design Inc. blog, January

“If you were thrown off a boat into a lake, you would figure out how to swim. For the pioneers of content strategy, this was certainly the case. We reasoned out the processes and deliverables based on what we needed to accomplish by the end of the project. It’s still that way, for much of the practice. It has to be. You need to respond to existing situations, and work within the infrastructures and plans in place. It’s basic consulting practice: understand the current state, anticipate the future state, find the gap, and figure out how to fill it.”

The summary that always reads the small print: Though varied in form and purpose by a project’s individual requirements, there’s a lot we can learn by studying the deliverables of others.

The Content Strategy of Product (Parts 1 and 2)

Jeffrey MacIntyre, Arc90 blog, March

“A genuine product strategy for a content offering must consider the business model, remembering always that content is expensive. Free, paid or otherwise on the one hand, and the possibilities of licensing and syndicating content on the other, a complete content strategy must take a position and rationale on the business case of its recommendations.”

The summary that believes it’s better to be heard and not seen: Jeff tells us that when the content strategy is the business strategy, it requires an approach that envelopes the whole infrastructure.

Orbital Content

Cameron Koczon, A List Apart Magazine, April

“In the traditional business model, consumers vote with their dollars. If they like something, they buy it. If not, they don’t. In the orbital content model, users vote with their content. If an app offers something interesting, they’ll share their content with it. If not, they won’t. Because the content is in orbit around the users, they directly determine who has access to it. Applications will no longer ask for our credentials to other services; instead, they will ask you directly to lend them the content they want to make useful.”

The summary that can only be read under a microscope: Cameron explains how bookmarking content at the element level, rather than whole web pages, can foster closer connections with an audience.

If the internet gave free back rubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs were sore

Charlie Brooker, Comment is free at guardian.co.uk, June

“In 1986, when I was 15, a 12in single cost roughly £2.99 – the equivalent of just over £6 today. And unless you were loaded, you didn’t just buy records willy-nilly. You chose carefully and coveted what you had. … I’m not claiming five quid a month [for a Spotify subscription] is insignificant: it’s more than many can afford. But in this case it’s bloody cheap for what it gets you.”

The summary that could never been used as an acceptance speech: When Spotify imposed further restrictions on its free usage, Charlie noted some rather unfortunate human traits that such changes arouse.

Why even introverts should mouth off online

Gabriel Smy, SmyWord, June

“On the web, consumer purchasing is not the only economy. Attention is the resource so many artists and businesses are competing for, or, more to the point since social media exploded, approval. That’s why a positive review on Amazon or TripAdvisor or Checkatrade means so much to the author, hotel, or tradesperson. There are people whose livelihoods literally depend on your rating.”

The summary that sold its last Oxford comma to buy food: Gabriel’s right. Lurkers like me should put aside those niggling doubts and let others know when we’ve enjoyed or benefited from a service.

Waving not drowning: or how I gave in and learned to love the content strategy flood.

Relly Annett-Baker, rel.ly, July

“I don’t know anywhere near everything there is to know about content strategy but here is something I do know: it takes a lot of confidence to say those words out loud, to a client, in a meeting. The difficulty is that content strategy is so big and covers so many aspects that I think we will have to get better at saying it. Before long we might increasingly need to band together in small mercenary tribes to cover the range of skills within CS, especially for larger projects.”

The summary that has always wanted to ride a roller coaster: Does that feeling of being left behind leave you knotted? Never fear, you’re not alone in trying to catch a runaway train on a pump trolley.

Damon Green’s account of *that* Ed Milliband interview

Damon Green, via TwitLonger, July

“If news reporters and cameras are only there to be used by politicians as recording devices for their scripted soundbites, at best that is a professional discourtesy. At worst, if we are not allowed to explore and examine a politician’s views, then politicians cease to be accountable in the most obvious way. So the fact that the unedited interview has found its way onto YouTube in all its absurdity, to be laughed at along with all the clips of cats falling off sofas, is perfectly proper.”

The summary that weighs the same on the surface of Mars: British politician offers interviewer glimpse of a nightmarish dystopian future ruled by robots with a limited supply of phrases. Observe.

Domain Knowledge: What You Need – Or Don’t Need – To Know

Corey Vilhauer, Eating Elephant, July

“Remember: we are not hired for our knowledge in the domain. We are hired for our ability to communicate that knowledge in a way that’s both usable and useful for that domain’s audiences. And we do this by relying on our relationships, not by diving into a project all guns a’blazin’, all the answers predetermined and worked out.”

The summary that even the old woman who lived in a shoe found room for: Often, it’s better to know where to look and who to consult for knowledge, for it rests easy in the hands of the passionate individual.

Structured Content, Shifting Context: Responsive Design, Content Strategy & the Future

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, EndlesslyContent.com, August

“It’d be easy to leave [responsive design] to designers and developers. But content strategists and others who care about content still have a big job to do in making responsive design possible. After all, it’s rather hard to know how each element associated with a piece of content should respond to changes in display unless you know what that piece of content is intended to do.”

The summary that could be carved onto a pencil tip: A design approach that optimises the web for different users and devices is fascinating. There’s much to do to aid its widespread adoption.

Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web

Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare, A List Apart Magazine, August

“When we learn, we move from sound to word, sentence to paragraph. Linguistic units are literally the building blocks of our engagement with the world. And there’s no reason why the increasingly modular nature of web content should diminish our understanding—rather, it may have the capacity to increase it, prompting us to make inferences and create stories ourselves, rather than passively engaging with static texts.”

The summary that was once a flea circus ringmaster: Elizabeth and Randall show us why storytelling elements are necessary to build content frameworks that flow with a user’s imagination.

Babies and the Bathwater

Mandy Brown, Contents magazine, November

“We can no longer think of publishing as a broadcast medium. It isn’t, not anymore. The web requires that we listen and converse as much as (if not more than) we ship. In fact, we cannot assume that publishing of any kind is a distinct activity from belonging to a community. Part of the job of a publisher today is to facilitate discussion—and that means being a part of it. It means that we publish for people, not to them.”

The summary that could be carried by a miniature gold llama: I dare you not to emerge from the other side of Mandy’s masterpiece inspired, uplifted, and thankful that you work on the web for a living.

Some honourable mentions

• Review: Infinity Blade—J. Nicholas Geist, Kill Screen Daily, Pre 2011*
• A Simpler Page—Craig Mod, A List Apart Magazine, January
• Series: Tags are magic—Martin Belam and Peter Martin, guardian.co.uk, January
• The Value of Content, Part 2: Nobody’s Perfect—Melissa Rach, Brain Traffic blog, June
• Information Infrastructure as a Process—Dorian Taylor, doriantaylor.com, June**
• Visualizing Paths Through the Web—Dorian Taylor, doriantaylor.com, July**
• The Things We Make and Do—Erin Kissane, Brain Traffic blog, July
• The End of Client Services—Khoi Vinh, Subtraction.com, July
• Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change—Jonathan Kahn, A List Apart Magazine, August
• Consuming Content vs. Loving Language—Sara Wachter-Boettcher, EndlesslyContent.com, September
• The web professional’s choice: linchpin or cog—Jonathan Kahn, lucid plot, October
• The poetics of interfaces—Elizabeth McGuane, mapped blog, October

*too epic to exclude

**last updated

After having to disappoint literally ten people who asked if I had any plans to sell prints of my diagrams, I’ve finally bowed to the pressure.

One of the primary reasons for my long-standing reluctance was the thought of organising the printing, handling and distribution of the prints myself. Reaching a point where I’d be on first name terms with all the Post Office cashiers as I negotiated weekly shipments (arrogance?) of thundersticks to far flung lands didn’t exactly fill me with much enthusiasm.

So when I stumbled upon those fine folks at Society6 and realised I could get away with placing any would-be customer in their capable hands, I finally got excited by the whole idea. You see, when you or I buy a product from Society6’s stable of ridiculously talented artists from around the world, they handle the production, packaging and shipping on the artist’s behalf. I know. I’ve rubbed my eyes a few times now and it still reads the same.

Society6 Stretched Canvas – a day in the life from Justin Wills on Vimeo.

What’s on the end of your stick, Vic?

What indeed? So far there are three diagrams available to order from my Society6 studio: Partners for the content strategist, Get a firm grip of your web content … and Web content in perpetual motion. I’ve put together this handy table detailing the size and price (in US Dollars) for each diagram print.

Size and price for each diagram print

Diagram	Mini		Small		Medium		Large		X-Large
	in	US$	in	US$	in	US$	in	US$	in	US$
	10×8	19	17×13	25	22×17	35	28×22	40	37×28	60
	8×9	19	13×15	25	17×19	35	22×25	40	28×32	60
	10×8	19	17×13	25	22×17	35	28×22	40	37×28	60

These diagrams are also available for a little extra as stretched canvases if that’s what tickles your fancy. However, baring an absurd and unlikely deluge of requests, I will not be offering T-shirts, hooded tops, iPhone cases or any other fruity device skins emblazoned with my diagrams. The mere thought of someone going about their business with a Venn diagram of how to approach a web project from a content perspective etched across their chest – expertly, I might add – would be enough to make me consider a drastic change of career. I have standards. You may not.

Crikey! Those prices have made my eyes water …

I could attempt to make you feel weak in the knees by revealing that your prints will be produced on fancy paper using fancy ink and topped off with a light sprinkling of fairy dust. But, essentially, what you’re really paying for is the privilege of not having me involved at any stage. Bargain.

That said, there may be a few non-US residents lamenting my choice of handler. I can sympathise. I mean, it’d probably be quicker for UK residents to visit my potting shed one afternoon and coax me into drawing one for them. We could even find time to shoehorn in a pathetic pseudo sword fight using various garden implements. En Garde!

And have I truly considered those of you lucky enough to possess or know someone with a printer the size of a Datsun Cherry? What about those of you with a burning desire to run off a few hundred copies of a diagram on your office network printer in a bizarre multi-departmental fly poster campaign?

To you I say this: consider downloading these hulking great versions of the diagrams instead. I won’t mind a bit.

Partners for the content strategist (2.9 MB)

Get a firm grip of your web content … (1.5 MB)

Web content in perpetual motion (2.9 MB)

At least you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you won’t be funding my questionable taste in knitwear.

As you’ve probably gathered, that lad was me and until earlier this month that occasion was the last time I had done any speaking in public. You see, I’d long considered public speaking to be a domain other people inhabited; those who could tell captivating stories laced with wit, suspense and meaning; those with something interesting and intelligent to impart; those who looked as though they were *enjoying* themselves up there in front of an audience. Not for me, thank you very much. I was more than happy having the option of sinking into my seat on those odd occasion when audience members were invited to take to a stage.

That was, however, until the beginning of this year when I drew up a longlist of things that would take me out of my comfort zone, only to find that speaking in public occupied no less than three items. I waited until the very last hour before submitting a talk for CS Forum 2011 before gasping in an equal measure of delight and horror weeks later upon seeing my name and mugshot amongst some of our industry’s most informed and celebrated pracitioners. My mind rapidly turned to the question of how I was going to close that 18-year speaking gap between a school production and an international conference. No amount of quirky mock Victorian attire would be able to mask my monotonous delivery this time.

So imagine my relief when the chance arose to deliver a 5-minute lightning talk at the inaugural London Content Strategy Meetup event “Wrapping up Confab, unwrapping CS Forum”. I now had an excellent opportunity to put myself through the ordeal of speaking and see how I react under the pressure. Would every other word be an expletive? Would I start referring to myself in the third person? Would I somehow lose my trousers? Pleasingly, whilst I’ll happily admit to being a little overawed at the prospect of sharing the bill with seven excellent speakers, I felt I didn’t do too bad a job of blowing the cobwebs away.

The cake was no lie

The subject of my talk was Confab 2011 and in particular a session led by Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design Studio. At the time, I was in the middle of conducting my survey of today’s content strategists. So when Erika briefly took us back to the life of a content strategist during those halcyon days of the mid-to-late 1990’s my ears immediately pricked up. Such was her experience, it was was also interesting to hear Erika’s take on the recent rise in interest in content strategy and how she believes it sits alongside the other design sub-disciplines. I’d heartily recommend flicking through her slide deck.

With a few seconds left to spare I ended my talk by (energetically) paying tribute to Confab’s dedicated army of live tweeters. With the brain-to-finger speed of a court reporter and the anticipatory skills of an air traffic controller, they helped keep the #Confab hashtag competitive at a local to national level throughout the duration of the conference.

To finish, I must thank everyone who made it past the heavy police cordon to be with us that night. Thanks also to Jonathan and Elizabeth for organising, all the brave souls who spoke as well as the event sponsors for making it happen. Let’s do it again soon.

Maths teachers are forever drumming it into their pupils that showing their workings out are nearly as important as the answers themselves. Neat rounded totals without the scribbled meanderings and eraser dust shed no light on a pupil’s process and progress.

Because my diagrams are almost always born out of a desire to solve a problem or an attempt to align certain things in my own mind, I’m more than aware that a diagram such as ‘Partners for the content strategist’ is unlikely to sit comfortably with everyone. So, to help you understand why I came to certain conclusions and shed a little light on my process, I thought I’d show you my workings out. Think of this, if you will, as akin to the last ten minutes modern natural world documentaries tend to reserve for a behind-the-scenes look at how a film crew captured a particularly challenging scene; except I was sat in a comfortable chair throughout, rather than going toe-to-toe with one of Mother Nature’s finest.

The problem

I wanted to find a way of mapping the tasks/deliverables associated with a mid-to-large organisation’s typical (as typical as any can be) content lifecycle with the practitioners who may be directly involved in their conception and completion. Faced with the problem of how to visualise this I did what any content strategist worth their salt would do and retreated to a place of immediately safety and familiarity: the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet

Though I feared ending up with something resembling a bird’s nest I decided to begin by linking each content project task/deliverable with one or more practitioners who may benefit from the presence of a content strategist to consult or partner with – no matter how tenuous that link may be. I then repeated the same exercise again, only this time concentrating on essential links between the tasks/deliverables and each practitioner. Each essential link was highlighted by a darker cell colour and denoted with a ‘1’ to keep an automatic running total. Have a look at the spreadsheet for yourself.

After an inordinate amount of time consulting various books and recalling past experiences the table was complete. It was only now I realised I still had to find a way to visualise it. Step forward that six-sided king of regular polygonal tiling: the hexagon.

The prototype

Honey bees and content strategists? In truth I’ve yet to make that connection stick myself, but don’t forget I managed to wrap a game of snakes and ladders (did anyone actually play it?) around the trials and tribulations of an in-house content strategy advocate. I have, so they say, ‘form’ in this respect.

Though these rather crude scribbles of honey bees and honeycombs did not provide me with the theme I was looking for they did, at least, inadvertently guide me towards the hexagon – a shape I’d used to decent effect before.

It was now time to make the switch from paper to the screen. At this early stage I opted for OpenOffice.org’s Draw, due in no small part to its ability to successful manage the incessant fiddling that would come to characterise the piecing together of this diagram. Using Draw would also prevent me from getting too precious over how it looked – though, as you can see, I couldn’t help taking full advantage of this afforded opportunity to pay homage to a certain hexagonal-based television game show.

The use of tiled hexagons turned out to be something of a troublesome blessing. Having only six edges meant that any single task/deliverable or practitioner had a fixed limit as to how much weight in links they could carry. On one hand this was advantageous because the last thing I wanted was more arrows flying around than in the opening sequence from ‘Gladiator’ but, at the same time, I was acutely aware I could be doing a particular discipline an injustice by not considering their involvement to be important enough to mention. Thankfully, following extended bouts of head-scratching and blank gazes into the middle distance, I had a prototype ready for beautifying.

The snazzy Photoshop bit

Working initially in greyscale enabled me to find a suitable contrast balance between the tasks/deliverables and the practitioners before the fiddly aspect of colour was applied, but there remained a niggling problem differentiating between the two groups of hexagons. In a bid to counter this I considered offering an obvious size difference between the two but as this would adversely affect the tiling it was quickly ruled out. I also briefly entertained ideas of changing the font (Lucida Sans Unicode) to one which allowed for a heavier weight option and using upper-case lettering. After consideration I decided to keep the size and the font, plumping instead for changing the shape of the practitioner’s hexagon to that of a circle.

With the colours for each project stage already predetermined back when I compiled the spreadsheet all I had to do now was find legible variants for each. Though as a colour-blind individual I can’t say I’m overly fond of mixing certain shades of blues and purples, greens and yellows, and reds and greens. Thankfully the colour wheel and my only brother with no colour vision deficiencies to speak of (and a man who knows his colour theory) rode to my rescue.

The final diagram

And that was that. Save for a bit of indulgent nudging, preening, and slicing the diagram was complete. Maybe some day I’ll do one of these in the style of an open project and get the wider community involved in its conception. I mean, there’s nothing quite like trying to reach large-scale consensus, right? On second thought, I think I could quite easily talk myself out of that one …

Partners for the content strategist (827 KB)

Note: This diagram is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence. By all means bend, shape, and prod it.

The poor sods. Not only do they have to contend with such sweeping generalisations on top of being regarded as life’s great water-carriers and spoilers, bureaucrats frequently find themselves being used as a collective political punchbag — one which everyone, regardless of their political leaning, is invited to take a free swing at. Indeed, pre-election posturing by the major political parties wouldn’t be quite the same without bold attention-seeking promises of huge ‘slashes’ and ‘cuts’ to public service administrative procedures^[1]. I think this quote from British Liberal Democrat leader-turned-coalition-government-stooge Nick Clegg back in March last year demonstrates perfectly the kind of knocks bureaucracy has to endure^[2]:

“Something has to give. If it’s a choice between doctors, nurses and beds and bureaucracy, I know what I will choose.”

Now I don’t know about you but that sounds to me like being offered a straight choice between eternal life, world peace, a healthy planet, and free piano lessons. It seems bureaucracy, with its plain, unglamorous, papier-mâché-esque features, often has to assume the role of the fainting goat, while more divisive subjects with the potential to split an electorate (be it economic, environmental, or foreign matters to name but a few) hightail it to safer pastures.

The problem, I believe, is this modern toxic image that bureaucracy conjures up in our minds: one of dull, overly-fastidious drones stifling genuine and blindingly obvious progress, safe within the confines of their ivory towers of power. We like to imagine everyone involved in this whole sorry business is unproductive, unhappy, frustrated, and gorging on copious amounts of our biscuits. Probably.

But wait: wasn’t it bureaucracy and systems of government at their most pure and infantile that helped elevate human civilisation from the laborious rigours of jabbing one another with sharp sticks and trading nothing more than furrow-browed stares? No, not really, but looking back through history we can confidently point to bureaucracy as one of the chief reasons how one empire (say, the Ottoman Turks) could outlast another (the Inca Empire) by centuries. Financial and military might could only take them so far; they also needed to master the art of maintaining a sense of organisation and continuity — where the power in the centre is properly deployed at the outermost edge — to sustain their empire through testing times and incompetent hereditary rulers^[3].

And that’s precisely when bureaucracy reveals its signature move: its complete and utter disregard for snap emotional decision-making. When things go wrong for large-scale organisations or governments (be it: natural disasters, hygiene alerts, successful hacking attempts, wardrobe malfunctions, and so on), when people in positions of power begin to entertain rash thoughts of possible reactions and reprisals, when their every move, statement, or victim’s story is played out in the public arena by an, often equally, hyperbolic media, they’ve come to depend on rigid semi-automated bureaucratic systems developed in less giddy times to steer them somewhere approaching the right direction^[4] — like a master villain’s big red button rigged up to the escape hatch.

Putting aside our contemporary prejudices for one moment we can (I think) roughly compare a lean bureaucratic system with that of a multi-departmental organisation’s internal content workflow: the organised and (at its best) automated act of delegating content tasks, responsibilities, and authority. A place where content is written and structured consistently according to pre-defined standards and reuse rules are applied to help ensure little time, money, and resources are lost re-creating the same content^[5]. I don’t think this sounds overly fussy, constipated, or inefficient does it?

So come on, let’s take a moment to celebrate this impartial, metronomic, and measured inhabitant of the ‘expert machinery of mankind’^[4]: the humble bureaucrat …

… right, I’m jolly glad that’s over. Can we all go back to disliking them again?

References

1. Simon Jenkins for The Guardian, Lord, make me slash back bureaucracy. But not yet
2. Aditya Chakrabortty for The Guardian, Why we need bureaucrats
3. A History of the World in 100 Objects – Episode 71
4. Peter Preston for The Guardian, Bureaucracy is fine for them, not us
5. Managing Enterprise Content, Ann Rockley, New Riders 2003

In Defense of Lorem Ipsum

Karen McGrane, karenmcgrane.com, January

“Lorem Ipsum doesn’t exist because people think the content is meaningless window dressing, only there to be decorated by designers who can’t be bothered to read. Lorem Ipsum exists because words are powerful. If you fill up your page with draft copy about your client’s business, they will read it. They will comment on it. They will be inexorably drawn to it. Presented the wrong way, draft copy can send your design review off the rails.”

This was exactly what was needed to blow away that lingering new year haze. Karen took a wrecking ball to the increasingly established perception that anyone caught using adapted passages from Cicero’s treatise on the theory of ethics on website mock-ups or wireframes should automatically be subjected to unbridled howls of derision from the rest of the project team.

The month of October also saw a curious, but welcome, translation into Belorussian. Still no word yet on a Greek version (sorry).

Want to read this article? Then enter your password

Charlie Brooker, guardian.co.uk, February

“In this age of rampant identity theft, where it’s just a matter of time before someone works out a way to steal your reflection in the mirror and use it to commit serial bigamy in an alternate dimension, we’re told only a maniac would use the same password for everything. But passwords used to be for speakeasy owners or spies. Once upon a time, you weren’t the sort of person who had to commit hundreds of passwords to memory. Now you are. Part of your identity’s been stolen anyway.”

I’ve long since lost count of the number of times this year alone I’ve had to grudgingly admit to forgetting passwords for web-based tools I frequent such as Dropbox, Goplan and Remember the Milk. But when, at the point of registration, we’re openly challenged to reach their high score of ‘strong’ by adding a random string of numbers, letters, and symbols on the end of our otherwise perfectly memorable password it’s hardly surprising we reach for the “Forgotten your password?” link. Charlie captures this virtual jousting effortlessly in his own inimitable style.

From the hallowed pages of the (now sadly folded) computer games magazine PC Zone to the Guardian’s resident angry man, I’ve grown up enjoying Charlie’s razor-sharp observations. Some people need a stiff coffee on a Monday morning, all I need is Brooker’s column.

The King is Dead! Long Live the King!

Peter Miller, Tetherd Cow Ahead, February

“Consider this: You can play Chopin and Schubert, Brahms and Bach, Greensleeves and Blow the Man Down for absolutely nothing. You can record that music, and sell the recording to your friends. You can perform it in front of thousands and charge them $90 apiece for the privilege of hearing you play it. Does any of that seem like a bad thing? Not at all, in my opinion. And yet, aside from playing it for your own personal use on your theremin, you cannot do any of that with the latest song from Lady Gaga!!! How absurd is that? In a fundamental way, we’ve decided that Lady Gaga is more valuable than Beethoven. We have made music an expensive and gaudy fashion item, and it is time that we restored it to its true value.”

Early February saw the culmination of a mighty legal clash between two of Australia’s most recognisable musical exports. It was ruled that, for a small portion of the song, Men At Work’s worldwide hit “Down Under” had used the same “note sequence” as the popular (well, I had to sing it) children’s song “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”. This immediately gave the estate belonging to the Kookaburra song’s late composer a sizeable share of “Down Under”‘s past and future royalties. Such a curious ruling (because even some trained ears couldn’t hear what the fuss was all about) naturally provoked debate over the way we value the creative arts. I don’t happen to agree with every point Peter makes but this a thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking read—just promise me you’ll sit comfortably first.

News flash: Social media won’t fix your content problems

Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic Blog, March

“The relevancy of our corporate websites is not dependent whatsoever on which social media widgets have been deployed throughout the site. Its relevancy is driven by our site content, no matter who is creating it. And that content requires as much, if not more, strategic planning and consistent oversight as do our social media initiatives.”

Now and again Kristina dons her boxing mittens for the good of all humankind on the web. Back in March we saw a particularly impassioned response to a popular, but ultimately flawed article on social media intergration by Altimer Group Partner Jeremiah Owyang. His stance that “static corporate sites” laced with “hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content” can have new live breathed into them with “products that allow thriving communities of buyers and prospects to connect” seemed to suggest that applying lipstick to a pig makes all the difference in a dimly lit room. Rarely do words on a screen exude this level of raw passion.

This Is Content

Erin Kissane, Incisive.nu, May

“Here’s the thing. Most people who do content work have had a difficult time selling it, even to clients who desperately need it. We are just beginning to get mainstream companies and organizations to care about ‘Content Strategy’ thing. This is not the time to go on a vision quest in search of a perfect, non-buzzwordy neologism to describe what we do.”

For some reason we humans can’t resist the urge to pluck a low hanging fruit from one of life’s trees and play a crude game of “catch” amongst ourselves for pure pleasure. Sure, all that running about seems healthy at first but soon enough that once firm fruit will resemble a gooey mess; it’s as if we’re waiting for someone to catch it while it’s still edible and tell us off for being so bloody stupid.

In May the web content community decided to pick such a fruit by debating the use of the word “content” as the all-encompassing buzzword that helps describe our skills and output. On occasions such as these I like to hang around long enough for Erin to have her say and then we all toddle off home for tea.

Letter to a Content Strategist

Dan Brown, Greenonions.com, June

“Content strategists are designers, just like I am. And like me, the information architect, the ‘stuff’ content strategists design is somewhat more abstract, somewhat less defined than a couple million pixels. But, aside from the composition of content, content strategists haven’t (to my satisfaction anyway) defined what it is they design, what’s the output of their work.”

Dan Brown, a prominent user experience designer and exponent in the science of information architecture, thought aloud in the form of a blog entry in a bid to help himself, and others in a similar position, clarify the project role and skillset of the content strategist. To do this he outlined what he needed from a content strategist to help him do his job better and, in return, told them what they can expect from him. Both camps ended up learning a great deal about one another, sparking scenes of wild celebration across the land (unconfirmed).

Real Editors Ship

Paul Ford, Ftrain.com, July

“I get very sadpanda when I see someone spend $500K plus deployment, development, and licensing costs on a Java EE-based multilingual platform incorporating a JSR-238 repository with a custom workflow/process approval engine. Because they could build out something for about 20 percent of that (or sometimes 1/2 a percent of that), and hire a few editors to wrangle the content. The content, were it approached strategically, could be of far higher quality—better SEO, more durable, consistent voice, vetted for legal compliance, primed for re-use.”

When Paul Ford blogs momentous things happen: Comet Tuttle chalks up another perihelion approach, a common hen is seen sporting a complete set of choppers, and shoulder-padded newsreaders return to our screens to frighten small children once more. As far as I’m concerned Paul could blog about anything and I’d read it with the same level of attention and intrigue; including such stuffy subjects as hairline fractures in suspension bridges and peculiar cloud formations. Thankfully on this occasion he stuck to a subject of greater interest to me: the role of the editor.

Content & Curation: An Epic Poem

Erin Kissane, Incisive.nu, July

“To people who aren’t already neck-deep in things like enterprise content strategy and document management, digital curation may seem intimidatingly technical or unwieldy. But until we routinely leave our clients and projects with a solid understanding of long-term publishing and content management costs, needs, and processes, we’re glossing over a really important part of content strategy.”

If I disappeared into the woods for a few days clutching a MacBook Pro all I could hope to acheive would be a collection of twigs in my hair and a few encrusted pieces of deer dung lodged in the USB ports, but when Erin Kissane does the same she manages to compose a five-part series on content curation.

I guarantee you’ll look, feel, and smell smarter having read this.

Content Lifecycle: Closing the loop in content strategy

Rahel Bailie, Johnny Holland Magazine, October

“Recognizing a content lifecycle means recognizing that the business of creating and publishing content follows a recognizable, predictable, repeatable process. While the sub-processes may be subject to variations between content genres, as well as situation-specific variations, the overall process is consistent and stable. The content lifecycle describes an organic system, and is system-agnostic.”

This for me was the stand-out article from Johnny Holland’s week-long content strategy binge because it forced me to re-think my own interpretation of the content lifecycle to such an extent that I decided to visualise it later in the year. As a compliment to this article I’d also like to give a polite nod in the direction of Rahel’s five myths about the content lifecycle on her company blog.

The Chokehold of Calendars

Mike Monteiro, Mule Design Blog, November

“The problem with calendars is that they are additive rather than subtractive. They approach your time as something to add to rather than subtract from. Adding a meeting is innocuous. You’re acting on a calendar. A calendar isn’t a person. It isn’t even a thing. It’s an abstraction. But subtracting an hour from the life of another human being isn’t to be taken lightly. It’s almost violent. It’s certainly invasive. Shared calendars are vessels you fill by taking things away from other people.”

Ah, the curse of the open-access personal calendar; hijacked by people intent on sucking away the most creatively potent hours of your day with needless invites to round-table focus groups for bad coffee and stale biscuits. Mike instructs us to start saying no and instead suggests scheduling goals, with time for meetings only factored in when they are suitable for everyone involved and necessary for its progression and completion.

Some honourable mentions

• Words that Zing—Colleen Jones for A List Apart Magazine, February
• Ironclad Contracts: Tougher Than a Pinky Swear—Whitney Hess for UXMatters, February
• The 7 ½ Steps to Successful Infographics—Sarah Slobin for Mix Online, March
• Ugly Babies and Planned Parenthood—Nicole Jones, March
• Maintaining Your Non-Text Content—Clinton Forry, July
• Strategic Content Management—Jonathan Kahn for A List Apart Magazine, September
• Language be complex, Randall Snare for Mapped blog, December