Beast Nature

I swear I heard this 10 times in one week while commuting in Seattle. Well, the entire mixed song, but it made me strike up conversations about the raw vocal track. I just can’t decide which part is my new ringtone.

"Who’s a better guitarist: Eric Clapton or a squirrel with thimbles on his paws?"

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:51:14 -0700

“Who’s a better guitarist: Eric Clapton or a squirrel with thimbles on his paws?”

- My wife

I Thought We Were An Autonomous Collective

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:54:00 -0700

It’s always great when your friends keep you in check. Especially when you’re Content Strategy.

Consider this scenario: You’re being singled out to be “king, pope, and president”. Considering you’re being betrothed to Context (who’s cute and comes from a good family), you don’t put up a huge fight. Your buddy, a noble knight and user experience professional, doesn’t get how you could fall for the messianic rhetoric. Meanwhile, folks like Dan Saffer, the Interaction Design principal at Kicker Studio, post a well-reasoned counterpoint to all of the newfound fame you received lately:

Content: Not Always King

It’s paradoxical, because he had write to a blog post full of content to discuss it.

When the article was first published and passed around, the tone of the tweets were a little incendiary. You know, classic trolling - someone lobs out a statement and stands back, waiting for a schoolyard fight to break out. At first blush, you would expect a vehement return volley from the Content Strategy camp, defending their sovereign right to demand “Content First”!

But that didn’t happen. Why?

You’ve been around the block long enough to know….

It’s not worth a big fight. The glory is short-lived in web time. As soon as the dust clears, CS will be seen as a marginalized and common - yet vital - requirement, like web standards are today. But the vigilance and quick wins from here on out will help save the web.
It’s not that you’re too classy to avoid a scuffle - you’re not. It’s just that practitioners of content strategy, deep down, don’t believe in the long-term viability of a monarchy on the Internet.
Content strategy is not a regal existence. It sometimes requires hours of digging through, well… crap. It’s an honest days’ work and, in the long view, something worth doing.
And there are those that have been doing it, unsung, for over a decade while the next platform or paradigm made the front page. It was time for a revolt. If you couldn’t tell from the teeming masses with their Little Red Books, it is a bit Maoist, isn’t it? Everyone has the right to good content, and a better experience with it. If the push to get the word out sounds like propaganda, the hype will out over time.
And, finally, Dan brought up some great points. At first, he frames the discussion with “Content is a type of container into which meaning can be poured”. That can lead us into the same hierarchical turf war we were trying to avoid in the first place. However, it resolves to a place where we can join hands again:

“What content is not, however, is an accessory or bolt-on to experience”.

Friggin’ group hug! User experience and content strategy are a symbiotic and integral existence. This is the time for complimentary skillsets, not a semantic land grab for the kingdom of the web. There is just too much of the web to fix.

To quote the author of the Little Red Book, “Let’s just get it done.”

Until next time, here’s a little example I roll out when the well-designed tactics get built before anyone asks about the strategy:

Soon, The World!

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:05:40 -0700

And the entire time I didn’t think we were rolling....

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:11:49 -0700

And the entire time I didn’t think we were rolling. That’ll learn me. Thanks to Drew Graham and the team at Varvid for covering the event.