A presentation at ContentEd in in London, UK by Mike Atherton
I wasn’t always a content strategist. For over 20 years I’ve messed about with computers, making things that go on the internet. Running UX teams in agencies and startups. Transforming the BBC with information architecture. Content strategy at Facebook.
When I reflect on that meandering career, I think about the connections. We often like to make distinctions between disciplines. Dirty, commercial, revenue-generating content marketing is one thing. Lovely, liberal, pious content strategy is something else. Basic tribalism at work, there.
The disciplines that make digital things are far more interwoven than they are distinct. They coalesce in workflows that bring them even closer. Design. Engineering. Research. Content. Playing as one orchestra. Building a latticework of content and interaction, itself interwoven into the fabric of a global network. It’s connections all the way down.
It’s made me think about other times in history where acts of meaningful connection, be it between people or knowledge, have left behind lessons for the future. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some of those stories with you now.
It’s the winter of 1854. Cardinal John Henry Newman becomes rector of the Catholic University of Ireland. What we know today as University College, Dublin.
Newman was a bit of a troublemaker. Intellectual. Reactionary. At 27 he got the dream gig of vicar at St Mary’s, the University church at Oxford. He quit after 4 years after falling out with the college head. He started the Oxford movement, defending apostolic succession. That got him banned from Oxford completely and caused his split with the Anglican church.
Newman crossed the aisle to the Catholic church. Before long found himself sent to Dublin to start their new university. He had ideas. In a lecture tour, which became a book in 1858, he laid down his Idea of a University.
Curriculum is always political. The church pushed theology, seeing the university as kind of lay seminary. Academia wanted, well, academia. Science in particular. The church didn’t think science sat too well alongside theology. Remember we’re also in the age of Darwinism. The Origin of the Species would come out a year later in 1859. Newman proposed what he called ‘the web of university teaching’.
By definition a ‘university’ would teach universal knowledge. Electromagentism. Gravitation. Classical Literature. Even Grammar and Composition. A rounded, liberal education. One where each student might educate their intellect and reach toward truth. To reason. To analyse, compare and discriminate. To think. He said the purpose of education was to prepare students for the ways of the world.
Newman believed in the interconnectedness of all knowledge. Many things as one whole, determining mutual dependence in the universal system. Subject-matter as one. For the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together.
The notion resonates today. Information, knowledge, content. Interconnected. Understanding comes from the connections themselves. The web of teaching giving us what John Henry Newman called a ‘clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things.’
It’s 1931, in the searing heat of the library at the University of Madras. Head librarian Siyali Ramamrita Ranganathan has been pulling 13-hour days. A tireless workaholic, dedicated to a vision of open access to information.
Not long before getting the job in 1924, he’d seen Gandhi imprisoned. Ranaganathan understood his responsibility of providing education to the masses. That could lead to more civil discourse. Even civil disobedience. Ranganthan was a creative visionary. A forefather of information architecture. Arguably an early practitioner of what we’d now call user experience design. His colon classification system improved on what he called the ‘intellectual laziness’ of the Dewey decimal system. He classified books based on the facets of Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time. Poetry in information architecture. And one giant leap for information retrieval.
And then in 1931 he published his 5 Laws of Library Science. They changed forever how we thought about information access.
Of course they are, but in the University of Madras library, they were literally in chains. For preservation. For storage. But not for use. Without access to the books, what’s the point of having them? A focus on use demands attention to the whole environment. Opening hours. Staffing. More comfortable chairs. An entire experience both useful and usable.
If books are for use, then the books available should address the needs of each reader. Give everyone access to the materials they need. With expert aid and advice. Neither judgement nor prejudice. The right content to the right person at the right time.
If you’re filling a library with books, where do you prioritise? Where do you stop? You make sure to map the catalogue to the needs of your customers. No matter how much space you have, there’s no sense in filling it with stuff no-one ever reads.
Cataloguing. Curation. Classification. Cross-referencing. Make information easy to find wherever people are. Give the library a central location, so that it’s easier to get to. Make an efficient experience.
It’s an organism. The content offered. The ways in which we offer it. How it gets used. The library must continue to grow and evolve to stay relevant.
Ranganathan’s five laws are the foundation of library science. Which is the foundation of information architecture. Which is the foundation of content strategy. Even now they show us the secrets of great content management.
Struggling writer Helene Hanff has fallen in love with English Literature. Her library won’t let her take the good books home. And the white, cardboardy pages of American editions just don’t feel right to hold the words of Austen or Dickens.
She writes off to a little second-hand bookshop. Marks & Co, located at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. And so begins a 20-year affair and a lesson in what it means to be a customer.
Letters cross the Atlantic. A relationship forms between Miss Hanff and the store clerk, Frank Doel. Helene’s orders become casual. “Send me a copy of Newman’s University if a one comes into stock for less than $5.” Eventually–sometimes years later–the order is filled. Frank learns Helene’s preferences and sends small gifts books he knows she’ll like.
Time marches on. New York starts to stock more English Literature. But still Helene prefers to write off to England for her books. The service and the relationship has bought loyalty far beyond convenience. Frank and Helene bond, not over the process of buying books, but a shared passion for literature. This is a true relationship, genuine and reciprocated. Rather than being defined by transaction, it is only punctuated by transaction. No sense of being a ‘former customer’ or alumni here. Once a customer, always a customer.
We’re at the CERN research lab in Geneva. Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wants to read some research papers. But he’s frustrated. The papers cross-reference each other, but they’re each held in libraries around the world. So he dreams up a common network of documents. What if everyone used the same markup format to publish? What if we had a common address format to identify and locate each document? What if there was a common way to link documents together?
He submitted a proposal. His boss read it and scrawled 3 words on the cover. “Vague, but exciting…”. The web was a gift to the world. Universal access to information. A decentralised, democratic way to connect content in useful and unexpected ways. Connection, for the betterment of understanding. Of society.
It’s beauty lies in standardisation and the concept of hyperlinking. Anyone can publish to this medium, connecting content to a rich web of learning. The world becomes the library, housing everything from genome research to cat videos. Documents, and now data. Content flowing like water though many channels. Web pages, mobile apps, even rich results on Google. Data about people, places and things. That machines can read and process.
Think of it. The whole web as one big database. What can we achieve when we connect the world’s research on cancer cells? Pandemics? Climate change? The cat videos remain popular however.
BBC product manager Tom Scott makes a natural history website. It showcases the BBC’s 50-year archive of documentary footage.
The BBC’s digital strategy was all over the place. Micro-websites popping up like tents on a hillside. Supporting a handful of the 1500 TV and radio programmes broadcast every day. Teams working in silos. Sites left to wither unloved once their show was off the air.
Cheap text content written for web, despite higher-quality video already bought and paid for. And sitting in the dusty vaults of the BBC archive.
Tom wanted to take that archive content and infuse it with the power of connection. A remix. Recombining content in new and useful ways. With help from 18th century botanist Carl Linnaeus, he built an abstract model. It showed how the things that exist in the natural world join up.
He sifted the archives, chopping up hours of complete programmes into atoms of content. Atoms about forests, deserts, herbivores, lions, tigers, and bears. Each atom mapped to the things expressed in the model.
You see, we’re not interested in documents or ‘content’ so much as the things that the content is about. People, places, animals, subjects, or ideas. Tom based his content strategy on a model of real-world things. That keeps the focus on what’s interesting. The fact that it’s a video isn’t exciting. But footage about an arctic fox diving through a snowdrift to catch a mouse? I’d watch that.
The model brings focus. Supports each valid concept through content. If it’s not in the model, leave it out of the product. But more than that, connect each concept using the relationships defined in the model. Build learning not only through the content itself, but how it’s connected.
Through links between pages, we can know that the Giant Panda is a herbivore and lives in a broadleaf forest. Linking is learning. Tom’s approach changed the way the BBC makes websites. Before they had thought in campaigns. Short-termist. Only the problem at hand. Now they thought at web-scale. Considering how content connects the things that matter. People, places, politicians, football teams - and stitches these into the very fabric of the web.
In showing how the natural world joins up, he showed how content connects to form a single, extensible network of knowledge.
Throughout history we find people frustrated by a lack of access to information. Particularly in times of political upheaval. In their own way, each of them sought to build connection. To provide value. Building bridges to people, and to knowledge. The earliest concepts of a web of learning. The birth of information design. Building meaningful customer relationships. Building the means and the practices to spread content across a global network. Meaningful connections, everywhere.
Content craves connection. Information architect Richard Saul Wurman said, “We can only understand something relative to something we already understand.” We build context to make sense of information. The learning is in the linking. But more than this, content wants to connect to the wider network. The web is a vast endless ocean. Knowledge resists constraint. It’s wild and untamed, a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought.
In 27 years of the World Wide Web, we’ve seen a total shift in how we publish and consume information. Maybe you’re old enough to remember when ‘going online’ meant dipping your toe in a different pond. Tying up your phone line, hearing the screech of a modem that signaled you’d arrived in this ‘other’ place. A place where websites dotted the landscape like ivory towers.
It was all content strategy back then. The first website I worked on had a reader’s letters page. They were online magazines. Brochures. We carried to this new media our most familiar models of the old.
Times change. Online is now our default state. We’re always connected to the network. The glass rectangle in our pocket is our window onto a world of information. We expect that information to come to us.
Search for movie showtimes on Google. You’ll get the information without ever going to the website for your local cinema. Flight information from your email pushed to you automatically when you need it most.When a friend shares a funny video, watch it right there on Facebook, never needing to visit the place it came from.
If not on our phone, then our laptop, tablet, smartwatch, Amazon Echo. An explosion of devices. And with it a publishing revolution.
Content is ever more separated from presentation. The old-media metaphor of the web ‘page’ is falling away. We publish abstract content resources, fuelling native applications, voice interfaces and third-party aggregators.
For content publishers, it’s a tremendous opportunity. People surround themselves with devices. Communication channels. They’re willing to have relevant, quality content pushed to them, wherever they are. You can hold their attention with stuff that’s easy to find, easy to consume, easy to share.
No longer is the website a disconnected brochure. It gathers together your free-flowing content resources. Content that’s consumable and shareable right across the network. We publish to the commons. We can be selective about the content we choose to invest in.
Consider this. When you publish, how does your content benefit your immediate audience? And how does it enrich the web as a whole? Be distinctive. Give people something they can’t get from a click away. As web advocate Jeff Jarvis says, “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
Being selective and focused takes great insight. Knowing what people need. Ranganathan recognised that access to useful information is a conscious design decision. A commitment to careful curation.
I’m reminded of this each time I see a business emptying their virtual filing cabinets of PDFs onto the web. Closed proprietary formats, not especially searchable or linkable. In some ways as inaccessible as those chained-down books in the libraries of old. Information that isn’t always useful. Doesn’t map to a user need.
As Ranganathan taught us, you need a reader for every book. We’ve come to recognise that our content might be about us, but it’s not for us. It’s not a personal fanzine. It’s not a mouthpiece for our CEO or vice chancellor to speak their brains to the world. Content, like books, is for use. We bring the right content to the right people at the right time. Our customer is on a journey across digital and physical spaces. Giving us their attention. Maybe even their money.
Building customer relationships is hard. But that’s nothing compared to stakeholder relationships. Sometimes it feels we spend most of our effort on persuading the people who hired us to let us do the job they hired us for. Digital transformation indeed. Who wants change? Everyone. Who wants to change? No one at all.
Is your institution thinking digital-first? Or could it be that here in the 21st Century, they still see it as somehow ‘other’ to business-as-usual. The exotic pet in the corner of the room. The pet that definitely won’t kill us in the night. A culture where ‘the website’ is a standalone item way down the meeting agenda, and treated as a one-off I.T. procurement project.
Stakeholders who oscillate between caring not nearly enough about digital strategy to caring way too much about the wrong details. Insisting that ‘their thing’ should be front and center on the homepage. I heard that someone invented those automatic carousels you get on home pages to end those stakeholder arguments.
In those environments, websites take on the structure of the org chart. A virtual voodoo doll of the business. Departmental silos, tensions, inconsistencies, or confusions surface in the website itself.
I still remember trying to structure local news on the BBC website. Having it make sense to people was tough. Not least because the notion of ‘local’ regions came from the physical location of radio transmitters.
The website is no longer the thing in the corner of the room. Your user interface is the interface between the business and its customers. All digital communications have a job to do. They’re accountable. Measurable. Driving conversion, reducing support channels, better qualifying leads, fundraising, improving the recruitment pipeline. Interfacing the customers to the business.
No one ever woke up and decided that what they needed today was to buy some content strategy. They don’t care how the sausage gets made. So we must frame ourselves, not as peripheral to business as usual, but as central to success.
Management is doing things right, but leadership is doing the right things. Well we already have (horrible) systems for content management. What we need is content leadership.
The business value of our work isn’t always clear. People still don’t get what we do. They don’t see the problem of littering the internet with all those PDFs. Because - hey, space is limitless and this stuff might be useful to someone, sometime.
Space isn’t the problem. Attention is. Our job is to manage that transaction of information for attention. So we can be teachers. Educate our stakeholders, our designers, our engineers. Teach the craft and the value of information management and content governance. Connect people to process. Drive a content-first culture. Set ourselves up for future success.
We live in a time where content is created, consumed, and curated. Everywhere. Where algorithms drive knowledge retrieval in ways almost indistinguishable from magic. So keep your content robust and your containers fluid. Separate content from presentation, and make visual designs easy to stay fresh.
Nothing will date you faster than an outmoded interface. Software ages like fish, but data ages like wine.
Now more than ever, our need for connected information should be obvious. An era tinged with phrases like post-truth and alternative facts. We must empower critical thinking. Educators have always had that responsibility, and that privilege.
As the poet wrote, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” We have the means to spread that fire across the world. An eternal flame to light even the darkest days.
The boundaries are blurring between marketing the value, and the value itself. It’s all one exercise in building a meaningful relationship. Everybody plays their part. Newman’s idea of a web of universal knowledge has come to pass. Developing the better angels of our nature.
You have the power to put that in everyone’s grasp. Give the next generation access to information, that passport to the future. By developing content and connection ready for whatever the future holds. In education, as in content strategy, tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
Let’s light that fire. Teach people to yearn for the endless sea. Connect to people to connect them to information.
Eventually everything connects. And no-one forgets a good teacher.
A brief history of those who changed the world by connecting content and connecting people. Their lessons can help us better understand how to design and structure our digital communications to better flow through the tributaries of the network and join an endless sea of information.
for free. You
can too.