 Hello Drupalcom. I've traveled a really long way to be here. I had seven hours sat in my ass in Newark Airport. It was rubbish. But I'm here now and I'm very excited. So let's get this presentation started, shall we? All right then. So, hi. My name is Raleigh Annette Baker. I am a content strategist. Things you should know about me. I don't really use Drupal. Not because I don't want to and we're going to get a little more into that. I like Drupal a lot when I do get to use it, but I don't get to use it very often. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. I'm going to talk a little bit about content strategy, the RPG, the role-playing game, and a little bit about where I see stuff going for you guys and for me in the future, which will sit somewhere between, if you were in here for Jeff Eaton's presentation, you'll have a little bit of that in there. And if you're going to attend Karen McGrane's keynote tomorrow, and you should, there'll be a little bit of that in there as well. But we're going to be talking about content strategy and practical terms for you guys. Okay. So, I currently work for the Ministry of Justice in London, which is a government department. So I deal with some really difficult content. Like on a scale of difficult to difficult, I have to go see the Lord Justice and present stuff to him for approval for the website. So I know about tricky sign-off. So what do I do when I'm not doing that? Well, I play games a lot. And so as a result of that, I use game analogies a lot. I also have two small boys who are six and three. So I play a lot of Lego and things like that as well, which we'll see. So I'm going to talk a little bit about games today, but not gamification, which is rancid bullshit. I mean, sorry, is I think a misguided way of attempting to solve difficult problems, but more about real puzzle solving. So games are a replication of interactions. Within a game environment, within that game universe, you have set rules and you know what those rules are and you know what the goal is and you know how you're meant to get to the goal. Even something as simple as a game of conkers or kicking a ball around lives within this small area that you're going to interact with and do things with. And part of the reason you know whether you're doing good or bad in a game is a thing called feedback loops. Feedback loops are awesome when it comes to content. Feedback loops in content are the sort of things that allow us to understand whether we've managed to input our credit card correctly and whether we've managed to buy something nicely. And those are the kind of feedback loops that really interest me in this kind of stuff because they're the conversation between you and the customer. And that conversation between you and the customer is what gets you paid. This is great because money is fantastic. I know we're in Portland and that's not a cool thing to say, but you know, for those of us that like to pay rent and stuff. Okay, so one of the things that I got into this when I was fiddling around with game systems and so on and thinking about the things that games did really well, was thinking about this interaction copy and error messages and things that went backwards and forwards a lot between you and the customer. And I thought, where has done this well? And I thought of RPG systems. Specifically, I thought of the Neverwinter Nights Aurora system, if any of you have fiddled around with game design at all, you've probably run into it. And playing around with that and thinking about the branching of decisions and the conversations that you have between you and a non-player character and you do something, they respond and how that's called up from that game system led me to this talk in a roundabout way, because essentially I'm an enormous nerd. Okay, and theoretically, if you follow me on Twitter, that's really AB, you should get footnotes from Twitter. I can't promise they'll be as useful as Jeff Eaton's. Some of them do just involve animated GIFs, but they're very cool. All right. So the other thing I should tell you is I have some lovely, gorgeous, cuddly, droopal best friends that is lullabot, eyesight design, and decent online, who all each chipped in $500 to have me come here and stand in front of you and give this talk, because they thought it was really important that more people from outside of Drupal, specifically related to content, had the opportunity to come say to you what it's like on the other side of the fence. So, yay then. Also, on top of that, I did have a range of friends and colleagues and old clients who all chipped in $10, $20 each to bring me up to the total amount that it cost me to come here. So, that was pretty awesome. Anyway, on with the RPG. So, does anyone recognize these characters? Okay? This is a very lovely watercolor-style fan art from Dungeons & Dragons, the TV show. And I sometimes think of that Dungeons & Dragons, the TV show and content strategy are closely related. So, why do I think it's because content strategy as a concept promises a lot? Or rather, if content strategy was as marvellous as it is spouted to be, it would be as good as Dungeons & Dragons, the TV show. Not least because in Dungeons & Dragons, the TV show, they got a baby unicorn in the first episode. If someone handed me a baby unicorn, that would be game over. Like, I have got everything I want out of life. Why would I ever, why am I going to go play this stupid walking around trying to kill things, right? I've got baby unicorn. I'm all good. We're fine. So, content strategy is not effortless, unfortunately. There is no button. I don't know whether Drupal 8 is planning to have one, but so far I have not seen a button in any CMS that's like, hit this content strategy. Boom, done. We know what we're doing. In fact, a lot of the difficult conversations about what we're doing with our content exists around this. It's not one size fits all. It's not easy to plan and work out what we're going to do. It's not infallible. It's not the smiling girl with a laptop on the hillside that agencies love to have sort of on top of their sites when they talk about doing content. Who, it's like, no, actually, I'm talking to the wrong audience because you guys probably have some top of a hillside and edited a site, but who generally sits on top of a hillside editing a site? It doesn't happen, right? So, I think content strategy is actually more like this. And more than that, I think it's better like this. It's still evolving. You can't know it all. You can get good at the bits that you like. You draw your map. You plan your campaign. You work out what it is that you want to do next. You test it. You try it out. You fall in a pit of acid. So, anyway, if I was Mr. Burns, I would be steepling my fingers at this point and saying, excellent, because content strategy is such a huge thing now. And there's no whether it can't be. It touches so many different topics that it means I can go, I'm really good at this bit, but I'm bollocks at this bit. So, I'm going to get someone in to do this. And it's still going to be a content strategy. So, while you have people like me who are general content strategist, I know exactly when I need to pull someone in and go, I'm not good enough at this data visualization stuff, and I need someone to come in and help me. So, because we've reached that point as a community, if you like, we're pretty free and easy to go, I don't this means nothing to me. I'm going to get someone to do it, which is really useful, because how many times have you been with a client and they've expected you to know everything about everything? You walk in and literally it's a case where they're going, so, I've just had an idea. I think we should do bollocks. And you're sure they've said words, but you can't pass what they are. And you're there with your mobile going, I'm just going to look and see in my calendar. No idea what that is. Okay, yes, I'm sure we can do that. Maybe we can just maybe talk about this on Monday a little bit. But that's okay for us. So, once we've accepted that we can't learn everything about content in one go, then we have to accept what are we going to do next. So, how has content worked so far? Well, I think so far we've had a pretty good grip on how this whole web thing works. So, a site is made and it's a repository of stuff. Someone writes up some more stuff, usually directly into the CMS, making full use of that WYSIWYG. Then they choose a snazzy typeface, check it out on the preview button, and an internet happens. And of course, that process is repeated over and over and over, until you have a website. So, this is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. And hopefully if you've got the Twitter, you'll get the link to the Wikipedia article. It's like incredibly bonkers. But the short version is that Sarah Winchester was the heir to the Winchester Rifles Fortune. And she felt a bit bad that lots of people have been shot with the Winchester Rifles in the time of her daddy and her husband. So, when she inherited all this money, she thought, hmm, I feel quite bad about this. What can I do? I could donate it to charity or I could keep building a big ass house for the rest of my life and remodel it and restructure it forever so that the ghosts of the Winchester Rifle deaths don't come after me. That's what she proceeded to do. So, she built and she built and she built. And she had a foreman whose job it was specifically to basically live with her and wake up in the morning and say, so, Mrs. Winchester, what should we build next? And so, they built this. And she was so obsessed with this concept of being chased around by ghosts that the house is literally built to be confusing. It's not just an accident that they reached this, although some of that is certainly due to the building and rebuilding that went on. But there is outside a door that is a road to nowhere. It even says it underneath, you can see it here. And so, you open it up and your four floors up and you would just sort of plummet to your death. Another one to join the ghost crew, I assume. So, the Winchester Mystery House is piled, higgledy-piggledy. It's remade, it's remolded, it's been made by multiple makers with little to no plan, no real measurement of success. Is this sounding familiar in any way, shape or form? Have I dragged this analogy out to its inevitable conclusion? Right. So, this is what our websites are currently like because we've built mainly for the desktop and now, you know, fine. And then someone, some absolute fucker, went, you know what, I've got a mobile phone. Why? You know what would be cool? Let's see the web on my mobile so I can be an asshole at weddings, on the beach, on a speedboat. Basically, you can be an asshole on the web everywhere now, right? And we like to pretend this has come as a big surprise to us. But I don't know about you, I had devices that would connect to the web and pull things up in about 2001 in a different variety of ways. So, it hasn't really crept up on us as much as we'd like to think. But, you know, the time for talking about it has passed. You know, we have inside car mounts in almost bricks. We now can see the web pretty much anywhere. So, where does that leave our content? Suddenly, this is our content. All these bricks and mortars that were made to build a singular house have to go all these other places. And our content creators and our content systems are not ready for this. We are literally shitting bricks. I misused the word literally there, but I thought it worked. It's okay, though, because the designer drew something up nice in Helvetica, threw together the Twitter bootstrap and created a mobile light version of the site. So, everything will probably be fine for the next few years, right? We've got loads of time to plan this, right? Yeah, maybe not. So, what happens next is the CEO gets out his crystal ball and decides he's going to work out or she's going to work out what's happening next. Good luck with that. If we based our thinking on previous predictions, we would have all made proprietary apps for our fridges to tell us when we're out of milk. Ah, the ubiquitous internet fridge. The internet fridge is a hilarious concept and it's one that's been touted for years. In fact, there is a tumbler called Fuck Yeah Internet Fridge which goes through different press releases and so on from decades back, pulling up stuff where you can go see this, including this, which is, this is actually taken from a talk that again I've linked to on Twitter and when you get the slides you'll see it by Tom Coats, a talk called Mind the Product and in this he has this picture from Fuck Yeah Internet Fridge that was taken from a expo, a technology expo that happened in California a few years ago and on it they were proudly displaying that you could pull up Epicurious and other bits and pieces like that and Twitter and someone has put on this note here that you can't see why the fuck does my fridge need Twitter, which is true at this point who buys an internet fridge and doesn't already own a tablet, who goes I've got an iPad but I'd rather listen to music on my fridge, just doesn't happen. Also the people that come up with the idea of internet fridges have not thought about people, presumably they've never cooked in their lives because you stand away from the fridge in front of the oven when you're cooking and turning around to look at the video the recipe paying behind you is just not how people work which is why they have an iPad sat in front of them right that kind of stuff. So we don't really know how things are going to go and if you want to see a real golden time capsule of that Google the phrase the iPhone will fail and you will see many many articles from around 2007 from technology blogs that have lived and prospered nonetheless predicting why the iPhone will fail because what they saw was an extremely expensive smartphone and what the iPhone is and other smartphones like it is a really cheap computer that people can carry around and do things on them and that's what they expect to be able to do all this stuff okay so that's given you a little bit of background to where we're going with this. So here's our designer again what I'd really like you to notice though is that he is a playmobil person a while ago I converted a playmobil school set into a design studio with some cunning tiny tiny posters and graphics like this because I was using it for a photo shoot for something else and also because I'm a huge playmobil nerd because it's so cute and tiny but the molding is set with playmobil there's no way you can build and rebuild with that there was and I couldn't pick up a zoo set and go right I'm going to turn this into a design studio I had to look at the closest thing and then what I could do to adapt it it was a fudge playmobil is highly detailed which is one of the reasons I'm a big geek about it but it is what it is Lego on the other hand is a smart structural system it is built to combine in infinite ways here's the patent drawing for the original eight stud brick filled in 1958 if you've ever wondered why Lego is so expensive compared to other toys it's because of their low tolerance for manufacturing glitches Lego was designed so that every piece of Lego would fit with every other piece of Lego in the world that had either been built before or would come afterwards that's a pretty ambitious project but that's what we need to do with our content so the Lego stuff means that kids can make this pretty much with no instructions there are instructions you can follow to build things in Lego but equally you know that if you pile enough Lego on top of each other you're going to create something like this which I think looks rather like the Winchester Mystery House actually so there we go around the circle but the point is this the molds and shapes are designed to fit together in multiple ways each piece is a discrete entity that combines and this is what our content needs to do if it's going to travel everywhere structured chunks that make packages I'm sure Karen is going to talk more to you about that tomorrow and how that specifically fits with what you do in Drupal I want to talk about the power ranges because power ranges how does this work with our content types though so imagine our power ranges are amazing elite fighting group in the fields of Kansas there or wherever else you get large amounts of wheat like that the power ranges combine together as one big mechanoid of awesome right you know shit's got real when the big robot trundles out I'm sure you remember this in Saturday morning but it's also worth remembering that the power ranges were elite fighting team all of their own so if you imagine our different content types like the red ranger he's the leader always around that's your text content then you've got video that's yellow then you might for infographic because you like her a bit more than the others that would be pink ranger you shouldn't like her more than the others but you kind of do because she's the one wearing the skirt so that's pretty cool and all these things come together in different units to create a page or a section or a whatever you want to turn that unit it's this coming together of things and then when you form your great big mechanoid of awesome that's when your entire site is finished that's all that stuff coming together now no one takes a great big mechanoid of awesome and goes how can I rip these things apart to form fighting kids that's not the way round things go okay so anyway back to our RPG so how do you get your content strategy chops then you can see where we're going with content but how do we get to a point where we can do this well first of all you have to be a ninja I mean specifically she was a thief but we're just ignore that because thief is a rubbish class we're just going to call her a ninja much easier so you need to audit a section take a bit look at it think what can I do with this don't make the problem too big look at what you can solve in one sprint or one section or one blob whatever you're happy to do look at the microcopy go down into real details work out what's in your terms and conditions and why are they there and can anyone understand them take the smallest unit you can and look to fix it mostly because you can seek forgiveness rather than ask permission this is really useful when you're starting to look at content because as soon as you tell people you're going to change the navigation the response is whereas changing the navigation usually has a response of no one noticing for six months it's useful and it's generally how I get things done so I start tracking a particular analytic number I start looking at a particular thing that I can assess you have to be prepared to accept that you were wrong and some of your assumptions because they will be assumptions at this point because you won't be in a state to do great solid research but you can generally go on a gut feeling and look at something that you can change and this becomes the thing that you use the wedge that you use to start the process so as an example higher education I've done some work with higher education by the way I noticed in the program they put this under like government higher education and non-profit I'm sorry if you're massively disappointed that this is not really that I have done work in these areas if that helps it should have been user experience but still so some work that I've done with higher education they tend to be really good at having the sort of drop downs on the homepage that are 20 things down and 13 across because everyone needs to be represented on the main page it's very important so that you understand our place in the university there's no way that you manage these could not be represented you understand right and I work with British universities it is very much very much people talking like this okay thank you very much and I always feel like I'm back at school with all of them so instead of asking permission because that was scary and I got a lot of nodding and well you understand the humanity is very important to the future of the university I just started offening pages from the nav because it was easier to do and I would take the pages never changed they bookmarked their own page and they went to them and they sent those bookmarks to other people in that field that wanted to see that particular stuff they would email the link out to students for particular course notes I just made sure they didn't appear on the main homepage record amount of time for someone not noticing was 19 months I'd actually left the project at that point and the project manager had to email me and say do you know what happened with this link no idea put it back on if you think it's useful so the point of this is to start self assigning yourself tasks that you think will make a difference with the content because no one is going to give you that job it's always someone else's job and it's never your job and that goes for everyone therefore it's no one's job so start self assigning stuff that you think is going to make a difference because then you can start making a difference makes sense right I mean that's literally how I got into this job of being content strategist and originally a web copywriter so my husband was a web designer he was the lead designer of Harrods of Knightsbridge which sounds very posh until you know that it was 2001 and so websites at that time were pretty rubbish especially when they didn't really sell anything online and they sent out a print catalog that was this big and the website was tiny anyway that was what he did and so it was very exciting when he left because he was able to put on a CV that he was you know lead designer at Harrods of Knightsbridge so some work came in brilliant but it was the sort of work that was like 800 pounds for an entire site you know what it's like when you first get going right and so he would build these sites they'd be okay he was kind of learning about how to do CSS and stuff like that so he didn't really mind that it wasn't bringing in too much money what I really minded about though was the fact that the content on these sites was so dire I wouldn't let him put them in his portfolio as they were so I started rewriting the content for free I didn't realize people would pay me for this I didn't realize that was a job so I just did this for about 10 sites and then in the meantime he went on to go and work for an agency Clear Left and they went huh you've got some skills doing this let's bring you in and do it so there you go that's how it turns out I got into this job by self-assigning because no one was going to pay for that then they will do now oh why they pay oh yes they pay all right then so we've we've achieved level one we're moving on to level two we've leveled up now you are a ranger so you are now the one person that knows content strategy congratulations you've joined the crew you now officially have to know everything about content strategy you know what I said at the beginning about it being okay to not know everything not with your clients they now expect you to know everything and all the people in your organization as soon as you dabble you're the content person so the good news is that we're pretty much all of us making it up there is no map for this there's no way of knowing what the right thing to do is or the best thing to do there's some good things that you can do and some things we definitely recommend but we are essentially all just making it up so we're all on this path with no map just some of us have cut further through the undergrowth or we have more oil in our lamps if you like the reason I bring this up with you is that our clients and our colleagues are terrified about this new world there's a great opportunity there for them but they didn't necessarily get into this to be publishers on the whole so an example of this is I've worked with a quite famous pottery company in the UK they've been making pottery for about 200 years they've been making a website for approximately four I can tell you which one they're much better at because they didn't get into this to be website makers but what they're really passionate about is their pottery so when you go and talk to them about the specification for the project and bits and pieces their eyes kind of glaze over and you know they kind of think they know basically they bought you in as a full service agency to fix all this stuff right but as soon as you start talking to them about the pottery and why they're into it their eyes light up they start telling you about how they select designs about how they go about glazing things and I went back to their site and none of this stuff was on their site they just weren't telling the story and that was what sold you on why you would pick their pottery over and above other pieces why would I have this you know 700 pound dinner service over a 70 pound one I can buy in the department store why would I invest in buying these pieces because it is an investment not very few people can go out and go brilliant let's put the 700 pound dinner service down on the wedding list and expect to get it right and what usually happens is you get you know three dessert bowls and a soup terrine that you're never going to use and none of the other pieces they go in a cupboard to die that's kind of by the by so the other thing we have to relate to these clients at this point is that content is not just this one amorphous blob you don't sort of trowel this layer of content on the top of the site and have it seep like sediment into all the empty boxes you've left for it to fill it's individual parts it's contents not content like the contents of a book so publishers see parts and consumers see the whole the consumers understand that there's one offer to a site now they know there may be a range of voices but they see that as one voice of a brand or whatever but that doesn't necessarily have to be how that's created so at this point I am taking my clients through things like page tables now page table is a way of assessing what a piece of content is going to be not necessarily where it's going to live or whatever else but what's the message of that piece of content what's the method we're going to deliver that is it going to be text in bullet points is it going to be a video guide is it going to be audio is it going to be a combination of things and then what's the call to action what do we want them to do with that and so you might design this piece and alongside that you're saying who's responsible for that who's going to update it who's going to own it what's the dependencies for that so if you need to get source content out of someone in the pottery design department over there but they're away for the next three weeks and your budget your timing means you have to do this in four there's a problem there and these are the kind of things that you're trying to sort out at this point before anyone goes ahead and commissions any content so I do audits with them as well audits are character building they are very good things for clients to do I don't tell them about the tools that let them do it automatically at least not a first because I think it's really important that they see that their shit stinks that they have produced this crap and it is live on their site so that they are burning with fervor to make sure this never happens again that they do design a workflow to mean that they get to take stuff off that's six months out of date and so on and I break things down into smaller units as possible so there's individual one Lego pieces and show them how they come together I actually literally take Lego in to show how that works we label the pieces of Lego we connect it together and we say look this is how it's going to work on a mobile this is how it's going to work on a tablet and then this might be how it works on your desktop but equally we could strip all this crap back because look it looked quite well in the mobile version right so why don't we focus for what's going on there it depends on the client and what we're doing but that really helps them get their head around the fact that these content bits come together and we're not looking at a singular page that there's like a page table and then we flick over to the next page and so on but page table I mean I could really rename it a unit table or something but it allows us to think about a discrete piece of content okay so message method call to action is what I'm doing there right fantastic we're going to level up again look at us so now you've got into this kind of thing about talking about well we're going to create pieces of content and they're going to slot together and they're going to be able to be reused in multiple places and this is really important you are now leading a team into organization or change because that fundamentally changes the way a lot of businesses work they usually sat in big silos where marketing is doing one bit accounting is doing something else and what you might need is to have representatives and teams from all these places and ideally a multidisciplinary team working on it to bring about this change it's a substantial change to a lot of organizations to think in this way once clients can see content on a small level then you start building the pile and then they're suddenly publishers and that means you have to maintain a level of stuff and at this point you need to be stepping up and defending the people that make this stuff the content creators that have to work with in this case Drupal day in, day out ask them what they need ask them what you can do to make that experience better for them make an environment for them that they can create the best stuff in and you might find that the writing environment that they want to create things is not in Drupal but they want to bring stuff in I'm a firm believer that most content management systems are excellent at managing content and shit at making it because that's not where people do their best work they do their best work stripped away from those distractions that you find when you're working on a screen you want them to be able to work in the way that they work best now if they do work best in a whizzy wig or whatever well fine I'm not going to stop them but that shouldn't be the assumption that that's the way writers work best and that's just something we force on them equally if you're going to give them a number of different fields like short, medium, long titles or so and explain what those fields are for otherwise they'll just leave the fields empty because if you got presented with 21 different fields that you had to fill in and you didn't know why you wouldn't bother filling them in either because that's what humans do so at this point you have to lead the cavalry it's a big ask but content strategies are organisation changes essentially I spend 20% of my time working with content and 80% of my time in meetings explaining what I'm doing with the content it's not a great balance for me but it's one that has to exist at the moment but once people see the results of level one and level two they'll trust you you become sort of their consultant as well as their employee they go to person to go and ask stuff content often has to be more than the things that we think of it often has to be the customer service the sales, the marketing, the voice and the board and lots more things get pulled in and out of this content ecosystem people that want to be involved and people that you have to talk to and even the raging Orkin accounting who doesn't want you to spend money on making extra stuff you need to go and talk to them about why these changes are necessary what's coming in in the future why do you need them to push through this idea of paying for monthly subs for services that they're so resistant to doing because it makes what you're doing better so when I say it touches every part of the organisation I have literally sat in accounting departments explaining to them why I really need a subscription to Trello that we have to pay monthly for and why we can't just have it as a purchase order and why there isn't anything suitable to replace that and why it's so important once you get everyone on board to see the vision that's easier but you're never going to get everyone on board even there'll be some point people when you fully integrated the system you're pushing it out will be going but I just preferred the way it was the last time we had it fine that's the problem that's why we had to I have that now in my job currently regularly you know and that's just something I have to live with that I know the long-term goal will make this short-term pain better all right level four wizard so we're getting into the deep stuff now this is where you have to feature proof your work content is no longer sign off push out it's orbital it exists beyond your control to a certain extent I mean obviously we have stuff that we'll host and have in Drupal but there'll be things that people put on YouTube and put on Twitter and so on and these are all things that we have to consider there's never just the one you know one system to rule them all it's never going to be like that again creating an editorial process means that you can do magic things like repackage content because it becomes platform-agnostic searchable, findable, templatable, measurable at this point if you've tackled the other things and your organization is ready to roll with that kind of stuff you'll start you'll already start pushing at some of the really difficult questions that we're going to tackle now so Aaron Consane an amazing content strategist I created this list that I'm going to talk about now in about 2010 it's still the kind of Bible go to when I talk to clients about what I'm aiming to do with their content they often think that I'm going to say make it friendly and short and chippy and exciting and engaging and it's not it's not any of those things I hope those things come out of it that would that would be useful but the things that I'm really looking to do with their content are the things you'll find in this list so accessible accessible for us as designers and developers comes with a certain amount of weight I know but in terms of accessibility as well as the usual things we think about I'm thinking of things like a Bible in your language a set of instructions at the literacy level that you need as a user a design created for all audiences to use and also access in a physical sense and something that's able to adapt your needs based on location so as an example for that when I did some work for the UK government on Gov UK the single domain site we were thinking about what to do if you lost your passport which is quite a common task that citizens have to do and can only do via government and so one of the things we knew is that you had to fill in a form and usually take that to your local post office where it's ratified sent off to the passport office so what was currently being presented was a drop-down list of all the post offices in the UK we're a bit obsessed with post offices it was quite a long list so what we did was post code look up to present you with the nearest post office to you you could still access all the post offices that offered the passport service but the default that it would give you as far as it could was the nearest post office to you and here's the Google walking directions to it because people are usually within walking distance of their post office if they live in a town but if we couldn't recognize where they were we would then default to giving them that list which was kind of useful I thought and it seemed pretty popular with our users so searchable is another one so a book has a table of contexts and an index and things like that web stuff is searched if we're really lucky search within a page internal search is one of the most neglected areas for content and it's a massive frustration when you're trying to find one thing quickly I think we've all been in that situation where you're like I know it's on this damn page somewhere but it's not picking up and this goes hand in hand with findable so we have in information sciences things like the Dewey Decimal System and Libraries Bibliographies and other library sciences like that have defined how we list and record information in all formats on the web we have trustee URLs but we're starting to make a hash of those and the follow-up is some slightly arcane tricks to play on search engines cracking this stuff the findable is the next nut and the answer might lie in open link data and the concept of orbital content which I advise you go look up maybe you haven't come across it before desirable desirable content is pretty important to us as well see people need to want it but they also need to know that they want it so so far we have on the web we have app stores over here and thrashing it out on search engines for places over there but sharing via social media is picking up pace and if curated collectively trusted sources to use can find us the content we want so presenting well selected collections is important and knowing the psychology behind those there's a reason that Apple on their screen even when they went to the iPad didn't start they could have fitted six groups of icons on there but they went for four because four is easy to scan and understand it's the same with curated collections of books one of the things that Amazon has done is tested pages and numbers of books if you put things in groups of four people will scan across and make a selection they also know if you if you put them in the middle to you're more likely to buy those creepy but it does work so presenting well selected collections is important and it's why I can spend hours in an actual good physical bookstore right it's the idea of walking around in the potential of finding stuff that you didn't know was there is one of the hardest things for us to do shareable so back when Erin made this list in 2010 the wired iPad app had recently launched in the previous five months and she was asked to do some research about it because it hadn't done as well as they hoped initially the iPad app for the wired magazine was free and then reduced price for the next three and after that they were expecting subscriptions to drop off but not completely flatline as they did so they did some research people kept describing it as dead isn't that a weird word to use to describe an app but it's because the content was literally trapped under the glass at the time you couldn't select or copy and paste and you couldn't share it was like a golden PDF on a $400 device that's actually less useful than the magazine like the magazine you can like rip out a page and post it you can fold it up and hit it over the top of the head of the editor that decided making it non-searchable would be good if your content can't travel as easily as sending something by snail mail what is the point of it you've kind of lost the grip of what you should be doing with that content selectable so encyclopedias are in multi volumes chapters of a book we have anchor points in a recording newspaper clippings and selectable sections of computerized text our current technology has a disconnect between the person creating and pushing live the content and the receiver so it's easy to forget this is actually a relationship between two people and Drupal and other CMSs like it are the intermediary that should assist with those conversations one to another if the CMS is getting in the way of people being able to do that that's where we run into problems so the other point is the receiver is the point of that content and they should have the freedom to repurpose save and annotate you know within fair use stuff as they wish so when Kindle introduced annotations I did a little dance not unlike my thank you dance I did earlier because it makes it massively useful to someone like me who reads lots of textbooks because not only can I annotate my own stuff but I can see what other people have annotated which again helps make a connection between you and other people in a way there wasn't there before do you know what's also awesome about that if you're prepared to spring the two dollars and a copy of Twilight you can see all the things that teenage girls moon over it's so cute because they don't realize you can see all the public annotations it's really adorable and then Fifty Shades of Grey came out and it got creepy self-aware so within the history of the book and its content self-aware probably meant cross-reference so you think of dictionaries and references in encyclopedias that can push to other sections of the book and biographies that cite bits they are aware that those things exist so on the web our content can also do this it's not called the web for nothing but beyond that it's really about ensuring our content is tagged linked and generally available to other sources now when I said I don't know a lot about all the areas of content strategy this is one that I don't know that much about and I'm just exploring but so for me as a content strategist the things that I went to go look at as a start is the work of Rachel Lovinger at Razorfish who wrote a thing called the Nimble content report a couple of years ago that's excellent and also checking out their main hub of linkeddata.org which again has lots of ideas and this is a new area and things that we're looking at but the idea of content talking to other content and being aware of what that is stuff around recipes and sites being able to pull in recipes of particular lengths and things like that it's exciting interesting stuff so portable content totable carry aroundable up until now we've been really limited by that damn physics stuff it's like really got in the way of carrying around the whole of the British library hasn't it but now with handheld well I guess the first step down from that was when you had like stone tablets and it was like bloody hell these stone tablets are really hard to carry around I'm going to invent a scroll I'm like oh my god these scrolls burn quickly I'm going to invent a book and then I'm going to invent this huge book that has to be copied out by hand because that will work no I'm going to invent a handheld bible that can be printed and so and so it goes on and increasingly to we get to this point where we now have a small physical disk that allows us to take pretty much everything with us there was an article I read recently saying that within three years at this point this storage will be cheap enough that for about 50 pounds you could carry enough around enough storage for every movie ever made so then we get to the licensing issues ownership of that digital space and access is a whole other question that we're going to have to tackle and we're going to have to talk to our clients about who owns that content and who can do what with it what's fair use what does copyright mean now what happens if someone copies all our stuff how do we deal with that as a response and these are the kind of questions that clients are now going to come at you with because you do the content management system right so this comes under your domain welcome to my world flexible so we've defined that the content could be infinite but the conduit must adapt so that we can select what we want on any device anywhere I want you to pack that whole library up for me and put it on this disk our limitations are now in the repackaging of that data where we're going to present it it's like the space elevator it's the hardest job you ever have to do once it's formatting all that content stripping it out and making it as pure as you can so that you can add chunks around the side to put it where it needs to go rather than that being inserted into the content so our job now is to strip out all that stuff and have this content that's as pure as the driven snow and not have people come walk over it with muddy boots the moment it starts snaring okay well done us we've achieved level five that's as far as we're going today I'm afraid I'm not taking this all the way to level 30 so now you can make small changes big changes organizational scale changes and even perform magic moving content from one device to another you are a commodity congratulations you are valuable you have valuable transferable flexible skills you might start looking for bigger challenges and Drupal I think in particular really needs some strong content advocates to talk more about this stuff so I'm here Karen's going to be here tomorrow we're going to talk about this stuff now what I really don't want is for the daughter Slamriss and for you guys to go well that was academically interesting wasn't it I thought so too either like the way they talked about chunks and blobs yeah that's how I thought that was very good this stuff is coming and it's going to come slap you in the face now here's the thing not very many other CMSs are ready for this either I actually think Drupal's in a pretty good position in terms of structured content but it just needs to be more widely known within the community as to what the goals and aims of that are so if you guys can get this right you will be light years ahead of any competition that's can only be good right that's what we want so I would really beg you that even if you don't think this is something you need to know that much about invest some time in learning a little more because your clients really need to know a lot more about it it's their content that's going to get you know stuck basically and they're going to blame you for for recommending Drupal if Drupal can't handle this and then you won't get the work again okay so this is the bit where you start forming your own party congratulations you're now the dungeon master so when I said that there's there's people that know different areas of content strategy we come together as teams like we're like left for dead the CS edition so we have like our library scientist and our data visualization girl and our editor extraordinary we come together as a power team to create all this amazing content and we travel in packs you should hire us we're really good at this but more than that you should have these little packs going in Drupal as well someone that can join each project each bit that's going on each movement and go so how does this affect people in terms of the actual content that we're managing and the making of that content the maintaining of that content and the success of that content for the business it's really important solving these big problems again puts you light years ahead of the competition I'm here in part because I want to know more about what Drupal can do for me because I very rarely get to recommend Drupal to clients because it's really hard for me to show that Drupal does the things that I wanted to do because out of the box it doesn't and I understand why that is but I really wish there was a way that I could do it as a non-technical person I understand launching Drupal and getting it going is not like a it's deliberately not like WordPress and I completely accept that however the people I have to sell it to are not developers I have to show that it can do the stuff I wanted to do with the content and I am happy to talk till the cows come home about the problems that I face if people want to either catch me afterwards or catch me tomorrow to talk about it okay so I think we've pretty much come towards the end so I should tell you I do teach online classes on content strategy I also do in-house workshops for businesses where I come in for a day or two days and go through some of this stuff that we talked about and also do some practical stuff like show you how to do a content order and what I want to get out of that and the courses basically you can then apply into your own projects you get handouts or presentations tasks we have a little chat room all that kind of stuff and yes you do get a unicorn in the first episode I made very clear of that so I'd like to say thank you for coming to my talk and just before I finish there's something really important I want to tell you which is not related to me but is related to this so there's going to be a FEMA rep is that did I say that right yeah and they're going to come here to brief you guys about the Oklahoma Tornado disaster response they are looking to create a site with several sites in fact and they want your help and they want to move on this fast so at 7.30 tonight there is going to be a meeting to discuss this initial stuff it is in the Coders Lounge in the Double Tree Hotel and it says here we will be working to help the victims and emergency responders on the ground we want to develop a website that will coordinate the transportation and help deal with housing issues we want to want to organize four teams of the goals of creating apps that will help with these problems and that will drive people to our website portal so that's tonight at 7.30 in the Double Tree Coders Lounge if you want to find out more information bit.ly slash Drupal for OK and the hashtag Drupal for OK and that's pretty much we done so yeah see you at the table top okay I think I have time to take some questions but equally if you want to come grab me afterwards and ask questions that's cool I would ask that you don't ask me anything too specific about Drupal because you'll just get this look there we go I have a question so you're talking a lot about content strategy within an organization and a lot of us do a lot of us here do work for organizations but a lot of us here work for agencies and what I found is that a lot of Drupal agencies are very programmer centric I'm a user experience person and I have to fight to even get to be able to do user experience and it's only been in the last year that I think like Drupal has been like oh yeah user experience we gotta think about this for the last few years so it's really hard to get our programmer people who are like I want to build this feature and build this feature and code this to think about the content so I just I was wondering what's your experience in in the agency world at what point in the project do you say we need budget for this to write the content we need to get these people involved and so on so I guess the thing with this as a conversation let me think so when I get involved it's because someone has recognized a problem right usually it's because the shit has splattered all over the fan and right back in their face so there's usually some cleaning up to do on that front but the other thing that I try and do is work in multi-disciplinary teams so I try and sit with a designer on one side of me and a developer on the other and we work together on a problem because the developer can usually fix stuff that I'm trying to fix with like writing out content and he's like well you know we can just make that work at the back end and I identify this and make it work that is the best way to solve that problem so the first thing to work on I think is getting parity within your organization of the amount of people on each thing as far as possible the other thing about content in that thing is I often talk about the fact that developers and designers to a certain extent have computers on their side to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them I just have my brain and it doesn't do a lot of heavy lifting so in terms of like working in sprints and stuff like that I try and work as far forward in a sprint as possible so that so if they're working on sprint two I'm already thinking about what's going on in sprint three and have delivered the content that I want them to play with in sprint two now I might iterate on that content as we go I keep half an eye on it but I try and keep myself as far ahead as possible so they're dealing with real stuff and I'm not trying to fix those problems the reason waterfall development existed is that it was easier to go one step at a time so you kind of have to accept that actually trying to write the content and develop the content and design the content all at once that's a hard way to start so giving everyone a little stagger within that so everyone keeps within the sprint times but they're not necessarily within which I know goes fundamentally against the way that agile is meant to work but it's the only way I've ever got good content out of that situation so parity in giving the content creators and the UX people enough space to do the stuff they need to do in terms of getting budget for it again it's a case of try and start small with a thing that you can demonstrate the value of show how much it costs and show the return on investment and keep hammering at home to everyone so when you do show and tells and the programmers are saying I've just built this and it's fantastic your show and tell is I've just done this and it saved us this amount of money because we we ran over this era and slowly over time it comes in the other thing I do is I try and put as much of the content and designing stuff I'm doing in with the developers tools so whereas if they're using a bug tracker I also use the bug tracker I will put all my stuff in there and so it also means in terms of typos and mistakes rather than it just being my pair of eyes looking on that I've got however many people in that team going because everyone spots typo right but they don't necessarily know if it's their right to change it or if it's going to be changing a different version or something again put it in the bug tracker exactly the same as you would do with any coding error and that really helps cool thank you hi we can do a duet so my understanding is that we have assets business logic and then a display layer and in the assets we have the content and it seems to me that the content is pretty close to plain text in the context in which we're speaking no it'll be all content so does that extend out to then image assets video assets and also cooked eggs like pdf files and power points I'd say all of the above and more okay that was actually my question that's okay I'm glad to answer it so conclusively it's not very often I can be so firm okay go on one last question go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go yay ladies and gentlemen it's mr javid I was actually just wondering if you've considered converting your talk to d20 seriously though okay so one thing that we're dealing with is trying to do like the first initial just inventory stage on sites with like literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of content the purist in me says that I want to develop I want to like use automated tools to go through and like scan stuff at what point do you just make the judgment call and say when we're figuring out what we've got here you know we're just going to pick representative examples yeah when I see 10 10 or so repeats of stuff like when I'm going cross seeing the same sort of thing over and over and over that tends to be the point in which I'm going okay I understand what this content type is and what it's doing the other thing I do if I get something that I'm not sure whether it breaks down into individual assets too easily is I look at the individual units so a good example for this is a recipe you can look at a recipe as a whole and all the things that are going to a recipe are what make it a recipe it's not a recipe without all of these things but there are discrete units there so there's here are the list of ingredients here's the step by step instructions here's the temperature you need to set the oven here's the equipment that you'll need to do that and then that might also have accompanying it video assets or photo assets or a gallery or even audio any of those things all those things together form that particular recipe now some of them are necessary for it to be a recipe and some of them are extra to the recipe and so that then helps us work out what that structure is and what we need to prioritize finding out but so with an example of a recipe site I wouldn't go looking at 500 individual recipes I would look at what goes to make up a recipe page and what assets I'll be managing and then I'll go into the content order and go okay so I've got 500 recipes and a hundred of those from these files I can tell of videos that accompany recipes I don't necessarily have to see all those individual videos but again it's the sort of thing that I then put into the bug tracker so if someone spots a recipe file that's got a video and the video is not working they can tell me that that asset is not working and I can go in and then try and work out what we're going to do and fix that did that vaguely answer your question awesome all right I really need a beer anyone else so I'd just like to say thank you very much to to Drupalcon for having me come here it's been really cool and I look forward to learning more from you over the next few days thanks