Browsing Tag 'data'

Back in the spring, when I first sowed the seeds of this open project, I had no idea how things would play out. I really shouldn’t have been so worried.

Let me begin by extending a huge and sincere thanks to everyone who played their part in this, particularly those who responded to the survey, encouraged others to do so, and remained patient as I worked out what to do with the results, and to the attendees of CS Forum 2011 who offered such kind words following my sole destroying (you had to be there) attempt to squeeze the last six months into 20 minutes. I can’t deny it’s been fun.

Though the finished diagram is by no means perfect, I can say with a measure of confidence that not only are these the six commonest paths today’s practising content strategists have taken to reach the discipline, but that they demonstrate the extent of our varied skills and approaches. It only serves to emphasise how much we need to continue sharing a little of what we’ve picked up along the way.

It’s just shy of eight months since I charted the number of delicious bookmarks tagged with ‘content strategy’ and found that there’d been a significant increase in bookmarking between the back end of 2008 and the first half of of 2009.
The data available to me at the time only went up as far as June, but we now have an additional seven month’s worth that takes us up to February of this year. Well, if that’s not an excuse to plot some more points on the graph then I don’t know what is.

If complimented by sufficient summaries and visual highlights, infographics can maintain the reader’s interest and, crucially, let them get on with the task in hand. But the options for visualising data don’t necessarily have to start and end with the usual bar charts, pie chart or scatter diagrams – there’s always room for a little imagination.