Archive - Jan 2007

Michael Priestley

MP: Day 2 at Content Week 2007 (Web 2.0 stuff)

Day 2 was a Web 2.0 summit - lots of Web 2.0 yesterday as well, one interesting feature is seeing everybody go through an intro slide defining it in subtly different terms.

Here starteth the sessions:

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Information architecture for Web 2.0

Presented as a two-hour workshop at Content Week 2007:

  • Learn about information architecture and why you need it
  • Find suitable structures for content and content delivery
  • Manage document types with DITA XML
  • Navigate and find content in new ways: the role of wikis, folksonomies and adaptive content
  • Define content management strategies from the users' perspective

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Michael Priestley

MP: Day 1 at Content Week 2007

Just finished day 1 of Conference Week 2007, in San Diego; the first day consisted of pre-conference workshops, including one by yours truly. Here are some quick impressions:

  • I started off by giving a two-hour workshop/presentation on information architecture, DITA, and Web 2.0; I lost track of time and skimped on the final demo, which is unfortunate, but still think it went generally okay. The audience was small (15 or so) but engaged, and we had some good discussions about information architecture, the reusability of topic-based content, and the changing roles of information architects in the Web 2.0 space. I'll aim to get my slides uploaded later tonight.
  • Next workshop I attended was on Web Globalization meets Web 2.0, by Simon Mathews from Ion Global. Some excellent examples of places where translation is either made possible by Web 2.0 technologies (such as user-provided subtitling for shared videos) or made a priority by them (such as the success of Web 2.0 web sites across many different languages and cultures). Also a nice nod to DITA as a key architecture that is making a lot of the pain of translation more manageable (DITA: we help you tolerate your pain).
  • After that was a presentation by Shaun Walker of dotnetnuke, who presented on content management strategies. Some good practices summarized, providing a checklist of questions to ask of a content management vendor. I'll admit to being disappointed that source format, or at least interchangeability/portability of content, wasn't mentioned. I definitely see DITA having an important role to play here as a cross-CMS interchange standard, even where it isn't playing a more central role as primary source format.
  • Finally we had a workshop from Ty Baysinger at Autodesk, presenting on their DITA-like content management case study. Autodesk was one of the early adopters of the DITA model, although not technically a user of the standard. They're seeing generally good results, although I wish there were a business case for them to converge back on the standard now that DITA is formalized- I think they may be missing some opportunities on the DITA map front in their reuse architecture, for example.

Off to dinner now, hopefully I'll have time to post again tomorrow.

DITA 2007-West Conference 10 days away (San Jose, CA USA)

The DITA 2007-West second annual conference is happening in San Jose, CA from February 5 through 7.  The schedule is online here: http://www.travelthepath.com/conf/schedule.shtml.

This conference provides attendees wih three days of DITA, three tracks per day! Check out the great list of speakers lined up...experts, peers, real-world users, gurus.  Presentations range from introductory topics through specialization and case studies.

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