Get Abstract?

Since launching their service in 1999, }getAbstract is one of the world's largest provider of business book summaries. Using this service could be the way to keep up with information from an endless number of business books hitting the market. I do have a list of books that comes and goes and often I don't get to every one on the list.  Of course, I'd rather read them, but if I had a reliable summary — that could be a helpful service.

According to their own advertising content, 10,000 business books were published last year. Assuming that it takes about 10 hours to read each —that's close to at least 100,000 hours of reading. And that would be about 11 and a half years of reading. Ouch. When I realized that I couldn't fathom what I may be missing.

You can go to the website and get two free summaries to see what the process would be like.  Those summaries can either be a five-page summary in an appropriate printed format or an eight minute audio summary. Part of the service fee also covers TED Talks abstracts as well, which also can be read or listened to in under ten minutes.

There are three service types and fees:

1. Silver for $89.oo, for 12 months allowing you 30 summaries.
2. Gold for $179.oo for 6 months, or 12 months for $299.00 for 12 months — unlimited
3. Platinum for $999.oo for 12 months unlimited usage and you get complete access to the key economic reports you need to make financial decisions. Reviewed by experts and compressed into easy-to-digest summaries, our texts can be read in 10 minutes or less. What's more, the Compressed Knowledge Collection includes a full library of over 10,000 business books featuring relevant categories such as Finance, Economics and Global Business.

And believe it or not, these guys offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

To get your two free summaries you can go to: http://www.getAbstract.com/bbw

Defending Content Strategy

All throughout my professional life I have been captivated by how specific communication can be changed by the right or wrong choice of words. Words are important; content is important, and yet they don’t the credit they are due — particularly from the design field. Personally, I try to communicate effectively in my writing and speaking. And when the Internet came along, I guess you could say this all became even more needed and important to achieve— self-publishing became another way of achieving self-branding. 

Christina Halvorson, nationally known content strategist and author of the awe-inspiring book: “Content Strategy,” says about web copy: "It’s not copy. It’s content.” And that means that the information should be thought thoroughly through with enough time to revise it before it needs to be published, and it needs to come from a base of organized data that is minimally scrubbed through a business strategy (marketing plan), information architecture checklist and an appropriate interface design (secondary to the content, or the words).


And this often does not happen in web development.  In fact, it is often done "bass—ackwards” from the above perspective. I suppose this is because web development is a visual endeavor, right? And we have more visual cells in our brains than any other type.   It could be as simple as the fact that the content portion of the effort is not as exciting as the visual. 


Legendary Harvard marketing professor, Theodore Levitt, once said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. What they want is a quarter-inch hole.”

I say, “You don’t want a lot of content, you want content that matters.” Less is more. How much ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial data) does your website have? Shouldn’t you care?  Don’t you want to get rid of it, or at least develop it correctly and in a meaningful way? Wouldn’t better SEO* help your cause?
Henry Ford once said, “If you need a machine and you don’t buy it, you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”

I say, “If you don’t attend to your content to ensure it meets your business plan, then you will pay for it through its inefficiency.”

Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” said, “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit.  If you haven’t asked the question, then the answer has no where to go.” Ultimately, your client will be asking you those questions, and a good marketing program and content strategy always answers those questions before they are asked.

* search engine optimization or strategy-enriched omnipresence, hah, sorry.

_______________________

Some great resources for those of you who either need a content strategy or  want to learn more about content strategy is as follows (in the order of importance): Books:

• "Content Strategy" (Second Edition)," Kristina Halvorson, New Riders Press, 2012.
• "The Web Content Strategist Bible," Richard Sheffield, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (March 4, 2009)
• "The Elements of Content Strategy," Erin Kissane, A Book Apart, 2012.
• "Content Strategy for Mobile Web," Karen McGrane, A Book Apart, 2013.
• "Clout," Colleen Jones, New Riders Press, 2011.
• "Mobile First," Luke Wroblewski, A Book Apart, 2013. 
• Letting Go of the Words, Second Edition: Writing Web Content that Works (Interactive Technologies) [Paperback], Janice Redish, 2012. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; 2 edition (August 28, 2012).

Articles:

•  "Your Content, Now Mobile," Karen McGrane, Nov. 5, 29012. http://alistapart.com/article/your-content-now-mobile
• "Content Modeling: A Master Skill," Rachel Lovinger, April 24, 2012 http://alistapart.com/article/content-modelling-a-master-skill
• "Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist," Rachel Lovinger,  April 24, 2012, http://alistapart.com/article/tinker-tailor-content-strategist
• "Future Ready Content," Sara Wachter-Boettcher, February 28, 2012, http://alistapart.com/article/future-ready-content
•  "Testing Content," Angela Colter,  December 14, 2010 http://alistapart.com/article/testing-content
• "A Checklist for Content Work," Erin Kissane, March 2011. http://alistapart.com/article/a-checklist-for-content-work
• "The Discipline of Content Strategy," Kristina Halvorson, 2008, http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy

_______________________________

Words, words and more words

It's amazing how things work out sometimes. Recently, one of my past students (Jim Ryan) triggered in my head a book I once read called, "Cultutal Literacy — What Every American Should Know." (CL-WEASK)

And the conversation that brought it up was one of idiomatic language. CL-WEASK is all about language and how it evolves. The author, Ed Hirsch, Jr., states that much of language gets lost from one generation to another and one of the things that is hastening this process is the influx of other languages and the Internet's effect on how Americans speak.  The issue is that idiomatic language does not translate well from one language to another, and new terms that try to integrate into current language take a while to be either accepted or rejected (unless the derivation is Shakespeare!).

One of the first things that goes, or is lost to posterity, in terms of language, is idiomatic phrasing, such as "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." (circa 1670) Now these 11 words represent much more than could be explained as long as you know what it means.  But if you don't, or it needs to be explained to you, then it fails.

My favorite idiomatic author is Ben Franklin, and one of my favorite phrases of his is, "Fish and visitors stink after three days."  If you've ever had anyone stay with you for more than three days, well . . . this doesn't have to be explained.

Anyway, the point of this is that idiomatic language keeps fading from generation to generation. And new things prop up, like "slash." Some of this may be due to texting and a lack of true conversation, and I think this is truly a shame. There is another point to this, I suppose.  I was having a conversation with Jim on the web and that led to me reviewing this book again (CL_WEASK ^).  I think I've read this book twice, maybe three times and I totally forgot that this is where I first encountered George Miller's "Seven Plus or Minus Two" theory. This is basically about how much information you can store in your short-term memory before you can't remember it, or ultimately — nine units.

The interesting thing about this is that we all read, many, many words in a string — well beyond nine (the limit of 7+/- 2), and even though logic would say that you shouldn't remember any of that; that's not the case. Our minds have the capability to turn short-term memory into long-term understanding.  But that is also why it is so important to set-up online screen views so that they are easy to read.

Anyone who has sat in my classroom knows about "7+/-2," and the importance that I give this theory in trying to discern language.  Language is a tricky thing, and cognitive science is still being studied every day, so if you are a logofile (lover of words) then you must read this book.  It is a great read.

Here's a beautiful quote from the book that I'll leave you with:

"From an evolutionary standpoint it is much more desirable that we forget the literal words we encounter, and remember their meanings, than that we have an absolute memory for both the words and their meanings."

 

And the fact that our wonderful brains can do this is      a m a z i n g ! (7 letters)

Mobile Web, Part IV

So, after all of the "splaining" I've been doing about mobile web, I thought I'd show you some great examples of different mobile efforts.

First, and foremost, this is how my blog looks from desktop to mobile:

My own personal website looks like this:

 

And WordPress nicely re-configures it as mobile web, like this:

I think that you get the importance of this. Who would want to look at the first version on a mobile phone?  The mobile version is set up to take all of the content and scroll it for you with a shade of weight to its importance.

Obvisouly, if you have a top, left or right-sided navigation on your original site the mobile version will give you a scroll-down.

I just finished working on a website design for Marie Flahive, a water color artist in Western Massachusetts and the variance from desktop to tablet to smart phone has three different versions.

Below, you'll see her desktop version, which is beautiful (even if I say so myself) and not too complicated.  But the area where things get dicey is the fact that she has many, many versions of water color artwork that is in many different formats (in terms of display) and also many different categories.

It is a very nice format for this type of website and it looks great in a large-scale, desktop portrayal, and yet, when you look at it on tablet and smart phone, if you can believe it — it looks even better!  Her artwork is gorgeous, as you can see, but even at the smart phone level, it is very appealing.

Below you'll see the smart phone version of it, and even though I can't show you this here, this version in so many ways is better than the original.

I guess that this series of blogs has been about the fact that we have to
think about web design in many different ways than we have in the past. I feel like it is  yet another turning point for all of us.  And it is happening silently, or without much warning.

As a group, we are all designers based upon our own background and culture.  We bring that with us. We can't help it. But we have to adhere to certain design concepts that are unavoidable.  As I said in one of my blogs, it's like the smoke after the volcano — it's unavoidable, and when we try to avoid it — we look silly, stupid and uninformed.

So, go on, and remember: "Not only do we have to know who our target audiences are — we have to know where they are and what they are doing."

Mobile Web, Part III

Mobil Web, Part III.

This is #3 article of 4 that I am writing about the importance of MOBILE WEB, in terms of online brand development.

If you’ve missed them, you can see the two previous articles.

Mobile Web, Part I.
Mobile Web, Part II.

All (PARENTHETICAL STATEMENTS) are mine. Ha!

Why have I been harping about Mobile Web? Well, it’s becoming an epidemic in the development news trade, and let's face it — most Americans (more than 50%) sleep with their smart phones.1  So, basically it’s the last thing they touch at night and the first thing they touch in the morning [ barring significant others ;-) ].

So, as Brad Frost (http://bradfrostweb.com/) says, “As web creators, we need to embrace these trends to create worthwhile experiences that respect user’s time, or risk getting tuned out.” 2

Sara Wachter-Boettcher (SWB) says, “The future is flexible, and we’re bending with it. From responsive web design to future friendly thinking, we’re moving quickly toward a web that’s more fluid, less fixed, and more easily accessed on a multitude of devices." 3 A multitude of devices, wow! How do we deal with that? Think about all of the devices that are out there that need to get this right. The good news is that we can break it down into four types of devices, or:

D_L_T_SP (pronounced "deltsop")

Desk top, laptop, tablet and smart phone. As SWB continues to say, “. . . you have to know what each type of content is intended to accomplish before you can make decisions about how you need to treat it in different contexts."4

Content x Context x DLTSP = Mobile Web

We have to then ask the question: Do we need to hire a content strategist to help us “funnel” the right content to the right context?  My answer to that, of course, is yes. You want to avoid “forking5” your content, or have “forking” content.

And it’s true that you have different needs in different contexts, for example: if I am at home on my desktop or laptop, and I Google “Tanglewood” — I may be presented with a variety of results, such as sponsored links, or a Wikipedia article about Tanglewood, or the main site for Tanglewood.  If I go to search Tanglewood from my smart phone, you get a prompt asking you if you want to go to the Tanglewood mobile site? Makes sense, doesn’t it?  Maybe I want to buy tickets on the fly, or get directions that I can automatically "click on" from the mobile site to my smart phone.

 

It’s our job now to not only figure out WHO our target audience is, but we also have to figure out WHAT they are DOING.

Different needs in different scenarios is nothing new, but the devices are. So context affecting content will be ruling the roost for a while. In the above “Tanglewood” scenario you could also add “ advertising sponsors” to the mix by having The Red Lion Inn, be the Tanglewood mobile sponsor, as this is a place many people go to before or after concerts.You just have to keep on thinking through the scenarios.

The options are endless and will obviously help the client get over the fact that they are paying even more money to you to develop a more involved process.  The issue — all of this is unavoidable, like acid rain after a volcano — you have to do it.


So, how do you begin to do this?  Well, you have to look at the the experts, and to date: it’s National Public Radio’s (NPR) COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) Process.6  Think of content in a different way — more like expandable “info-chunks” rather than specific information that is placed in a specific place.  NPR dices it up into four specific info-chunks: title, short slug, longer description, and date line.

One of the biggest projects that I ever worked on was the development ofHometownstores.com (now sold and defunct).  It was based upon a Boston South Shore Ace hardware chain (See current shot in Figure 1). We had 56,000 products where we had two different product descriptions: short and long. We had to figure out how to use this as it came directly from Ace, and we also had to add product images, pricing and inventory into the mix.  It was amazingly complex, but we did it without thinking too much about it.  We did it because we had to and really didn’t know better.

FIGURE 1 — Current Hometownstores.com derivative

I guess the point of all of this is that it is all hard work.  But it matters. It matters very much.

As Cameron Koczon says, “...as users spend more time on consumption-oriented devices (another story) like iPads and mobile (smart) phones — new demands are being put on content.”7

You betcha!

You also may say that this is going to be a big pain in the butt, until we figure out which way is North. How can we do this? How can we add more time to the development cycle? Well, according to NPR they have “...a small staff and limited resources.”8  The below diagram represents NPR’s content management pipeline.  It is a thing of beauty to study, like a Monet.

NPR states that the COPE method incorporates:

•    building or integrating CMS (content management systems), not WPT (web publishing tools)
•    clearly separate content from display
•    ensure content modularity
•    ensure content portability

Integrating CMS 

The purpose of a good CMS is to allow you to present content in variable presentations formats on-demand. WPT’s are often dependent upon plug-ins to the native code to allow for alternate platform destinations, which often don’t make them scalable the way you’d like.  A true CMS should be able to be captured and delivered to any existing or future destination. (WordPress has issues with this with it’s ability to “granulate” information; Tumblr does it well.

Clearly Separate Content from Display

In separating content from display the presentation layer should know how to pull content from the content cache to where it is needed. “But to truly separate content from display, the content repository needs to also avoid storing “dirty” content. Dirty content is content that contains any presentation layer information embedded in it, including HTML, XML, character encoding, micro-formats and any other markup or rich formatting information.”9

Content Modularity

Content Modularity is more than just normalizing a database, it’s about ensuring that discreet data is stored in a distinct location to be retrieved for specific contexts. For a full description of this, go to http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/10/21/content-modularity-more-than-just-data-normalization/.

Content Portability

Content Portability is crucial to this whole process as it often contains important markup language that allows it to relate to other content — but unfortunately, this makes it “dirty.”  Daniel Jacobson says, “No matter how modular the content is in the database, if it is sullied (love that word) by markup, it is not truly portable.”10 Just building an application programming interface is not enough — it needs to be able to distribute the content to any platform in a way that each platform can understand it.

See (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/11/11/content-portability-building-an-api-is-not-enough/) for a full article about content portability.  If you are a coder, you’ll enjoy this.

Stay tuned, folks, for Mobile Web, Part IV, the fourth and final entry to this subject matter.

__________________________


1   http://alistapart.com/article/for-a-future-friendly-web
2   Ibid.
3   http://alistapart.com/article/future-ready-content
4   Ibid.
5   McGrane, Karen. Mobile Web Content Strategy. A Book Apart Publishers, 2012, page
6   http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/10/13/cope-create-once-publish-everywhere/
7   http://alistapart.com/article/orbital-content
8   http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/10/13/cope-create-once-publish-everywhere/
9   Ibid.
10 Ibid.

Posted by Rob Griffin at 10:21 AM   

 

No comments: