Bloggers and Bowerbirds

Earlier this spring, two well-known bloggers—Maria Popova of Brainpickings and Tina Roth-Eisenberg of Swissmiss—introduced the Curator’s Code, a proposed convention for attributing credit to bloggers and other link-finders. The initial discussion that followed mostly skipped over rational critique and went straight for sneering and overheated bluster: it was, apparently, intolerable cheek for these “self-proclaimed curators” to want their efforts as digital gravediggers to be recognized when others passed their work along. Read more ⇒

Announcing Contents magazine

The conversation about content strategy, online publishing, and all the subfields and specializations that surround them is flourishing. Wonderfully, it’s no longer possible to keep track of the posts, comments, talks, and events that take place every week within our world. And it’s not just that we’re voluble: our community is extraordinarily generous with knowledge, help, and professional support.

After benefiting from this conversation in so many ways, we’d like to give something back. A bounded collection of ideas and connections. A place to catch up with the movement of our fledgling industry and the much older fields from which it emerged. An editorial lens. Read more ⇒

Now Out: The Elements of Content Strategy

I wrote The Elements of Content Strategy because as the internet worms its way further and further into our lives, digital content becomes centrally important to the ways in which we live and work. And it follows that content strategy—the practice of planning for, designing, and managing content—is also getting closer to the center of both web projects and entire organizations. Read more ⇒

The Forecast is Awesome

That was a hell of a year. It has been a ridiculously wonderful experience to participate in and learn from the giant, piñata-studded, slightly tipsy party that has been content strategy in 2010. (On the personal side, I’ve had a lot of wonderful conversations and read a lot of spectacular things. And rather miraculously, the members of my immediate family are ending the year alive and in good health.) Read more ⇒

Ch-Ch-Ch Changes

A few weeks ago, before the snowpocalypse, I visited the lovely people at Brain Traffic in their Minneapolis lair. A visit to Brain Traffic central is a lot like walking in on the planning session at the beginning of a heist movie, except that you don’t expect everyone to get shot in the end, and the fridge is full of cupcakes. Read more ⇒

Cognitive, Schmognitive

A few weeks ago, while in the throes of manuscript editing, I wrote a quick post about what I was doing that week. I did so to help demystify content strategy to people who want to know, as the NYC CS Meetup group would have it, what content strategists do all day.

In the post, I mentioned something I’d made for a client project: a diagram that traces the mental path we want to encourage a particular group of site visitors to take. Not specific interactions, pages or tools, but a process of gradual engagement with ideas, eventually leading to the decision to act. I’d never made this particular thing before, and I’d never seen anything quite like it elsewhere. Read more ⇒

What Do Content Strategists Do?

In real life, content strategy falls somewhere between traditional editorial leadership, communication strategy, and information management, all of which have their own distinct connotations. It’s easy for discussions of terminology to float off into abstraction, so instead of talking about “content strategy” or what “a content strategist” does, I’m going to say what this content strategist does. Read more ⇒

The Scholar-Curator as Storyteller

Simply holding up three or four objects—virtual or otherwise—is no more telling a story than dumping flour, sugar, and eggs onto a table is baking a cake. You have to do the work of contextualization if you want the objects to signify. Read more ⇒

A Content Book Apart

Yes, content strategy is a real thing that real clients and employers really need. But beyond that, we’re in the infancy of a ubiquitous internet—one fully integrated into our lives and environments. The publishing world has been bitten by a radioactive wombat, and we don’t know if journalism’s going to die or mutate into something speedy and awesome. Our brains are changing in ways we don’t understand. Content work matters—yes, now more than ever—and as this thing spins faster, we’re going to need every advantage we can find. Read more ⇒

Curation Conclusions

In the previous posts in this series, we’ve looked at “curation” in two ways: as a term for the filtering and mosaic-style storytelling bloggers and other web writers do by collecting links, and as a way of thinking about long-term content stewardship. Read more ⇒