How can the Content Strategy community rise to the goal of creating intelligent, adaptable content for an engaging Web site experience for visitors? Through Content Engineering and Content Architectures! Learn about how information architectures and the right content models and retrieval tools can improve the experience of visitors to your site. You've heard the talk; here is where you can learn about the walk! This presentation was given at Content Strategy Applied USA on November 17-18, 2014

1. Closing the Gap on the
Adaptive Content Challenge
Don Day
Contelligence Group
@donrday
donrday@contelligencegroup.com 1

2. Agenda
• Obligatory overview of Adaptive Content
• Crux: How do I do Adaptive Content?
• Roles of Technologies and Materials in Engineering
• Case Study: Analysis of a common object
• Take aways
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3. Why so much emphasis on
“Adaptive Content?”
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4. Content should be discoverable!
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5. Content should be reusable!
Photo credit: andreasmarx / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
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6. Content should be timeless!
Server and browser, ca. 1500
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7. Content should be delivery-agnostic!
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8. Spectrum of Adaptation
• Factors affecting what gets selected:
• Technical, cultural, religious, personal preferences
• Length of content vs time to consume it
• Reading level and familiar terminology
• Basis for access: news, curiosity, solution-finding
• Factors affecting importance/priority:
• Breaking news
• Urgency of task
• Bandwidth of stream
• Etc..
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9. Workflows Facilitation
for Adaptable Content
• Enabling Content to be authored and handled adaptively
• Semantic associations
• Scope of selection
• Methods of enablement
• Implementing the behaviors
• Rules and rule engines
• Flags (highlighting)
• Filters (including/excluding)
• Binding enabled content to those and other smart
implementations (content agility)
• Server side vs client side
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10. One small problem: How?
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines an Open Web
Platform
• But Open can also mean “anything goes.”
• W3C does not define concrete information types or specific
processing implementations
• As a result, there is no common toolkit for Adaptive Content.
• Many silos, no interoperability other than:
• Vendors
• Consortiums
• Communities of interest
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11. Investing Content with Value
• Pre-Web era:
• Content with long life cycle (product information)
• Ephemeral content (news, consumer publications, marketing)
• Sometimes the same publisher; push for standards and common
process; commonality of content and effort
• Web era:
• Content with long life cycle
• Ephemeral content (did we expect those cases to change?)
• Not often the same publisher; isolation of standards and
processes; duplication of content and effort
• Post-SEO era:
• Trending back around: Long form / long life content, multiple
deliverables, trimming redundancy, lowering cost of ownership
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12. What’s wrong with my content?
• Blobs vs Chunks: Definitions
• Blobs = Amorphous entities of text, usually presentational
• Chunks = Named, scoped, modular units of information that can
be manipulated; Structured content
• Blobs are merely human consumable; “chunks” are
computationally consumable.
• Web CMS often the culprit for creating the Lowest Common
Denominator of blob-like content:
• title and body with
highlighting
• For example…
We don’t need
no stinking
chunks! 12

13. Presentation ≠ semantics!
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14. Doesn’t RWD solve all this?
• RWD = Responsive Web Design
• A fluid grid, media queries, and image optimization
• Example: http://crushlovely.com/, http://www.starbucks.com/
• It really, really does put more stuff into more places.
• That said,
• Crap on a page now can be turned into crap everywhere.
• RWD by itself has a lot in common with a drug delivery device!
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15. RWD: Without the right content, it
can’t deliver a great experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_05a-1116x1492.jpg#filelinks
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16. Role of Adaptive Technologies
• Adaptive Design: Adds logic to Responsive Web Design
• Helps with intelligent resource usage (fonts, images, scope)
• Generally is not aware of content and context
• A robot in a museum can’t answer questions about the exhibits!
• Adaptive Content: Fills the divs on a page more intelligently
• Supports negotiation about its role and suitability
• For devices
• For subject matter
• For users (personalization)
• How? Structure and semantics
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17. Ya Need a Technology!
• Mark Boulton noted 3 common parts of responsive designs:
• sensors — things that sense the environment
• systems — tell actuators what to do with sensor information
• actuators — things that actually do stuff
• Responsive Web Design: Enables services in a browser to
interact with the presentation of content (CSS can move or
hide content)
• Adaptive Design: Moves the content interaction to the server
(e.g., can elide content delivered to the device)
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18. Ya Need Materials!
• Both technologies need to operate on content
• Not blobs; poor in meaning and scope (for computers, at
least)
• Chunks are okay for Responsive stylesheets, barely adequate
for Adaptive logic in servers.
• Adaptive Content (aka Intelligent Content): Content with
Scope, Meaning, and Value (semantically structured for reuse)
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19. What is Adaptive Content?
AnnRockley:
• “Adaptive content is
• format-free,
• device-independent,
• scalable, and
• filterable
• content that is transformable for display
• in different environments and
• on different devices
• in an automated or
dynamic fashion.”
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20. What is Adaptive Content?
KarenMcGrane:
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21. Who needs it?
• What can you do without intelligent content?
• Everything on the Web today
• (including siloed investments, content and tools that can’t be
leveraged widely)
• What can’t you do without intelligent content?
• Reuse content in place
• Adapt it to business requirements and audiences that don’t exist
today
• Ask specific queries, get back suitably scoped results
• Republish more easily into future formats
• And more! 21

22. Design a Content Factory by
Reverse Engineering
• Decomposing a real world example for insight into Content
Engineering
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23. What is content?
• A can of soup
• The soup itself
• A container for the soup
• A picture of soup
• A genre of soup
• A title
• A brand
• A logo
• A tagline
• … 23

24. But wait, there’s more!
• Description of the
content
• Related content
• How to prepare
• List of ingredients
• Contact info
• Terms and conditions
• Identity
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25. Included if you buy now!
• Nutritional info
• Feedback “form”
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26. Child structures
• Content can be like a
Matryoshka doll:
• Proper subsets
• New combinations
• New contexts
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27. Structure: Generic vs Semantic
Generic, bloggy, salesy
• Headline
• Lead
• Description
• Keywords
• Main image
• Body copy
• Call to Action
Semantic API reference
<api xmlns="http://www.ioexception.de/rest-api-doc" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/
XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ioexception.de/rest-api-doc ../xsd/rest-api-doc.xsd ">
<name>Foo Bar Example API</name>
<version>v2</version>
<author>John Doe</author>
<description>The following document describe the RESTful API of the
example service foo bar. </description>
<baseuri>http://myapipath/v2</baseuri>
<authentication>
<type>Basic Authentication</type>
<type>OAuth</type>
</authentication>
<resources>
<resource>
<name>User</name>
<description>This resource represents a user. </description>
<path>/user/<param description="user ID">user-id</param></path>
<operation>
<name>Create a new user account</name>
<description>Creates a new user account, if user registration is
enabled.</description>
<path omitResourcePath="true">/users</path>
<formats><format>application/json</format></formats>
<request>
<method>POST</method>
<authentication mandatory="false" />
•
https://github.com/berb/rest-doc-template/blob/master/example/example.xml
Note: One size does not fit
all content types!
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28. And speaking of semantic
content:
Recipe from http://www.happy-monkey.net/recipes/
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29. Intelligent Content, server side:
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30. Lessons from the Analysis:
• Web sites and the documents in them can be richly
structured, independent objects
• Objects within documents can be related to RWD regions
• Richly described content can be republished in multiple forms
• Voila, Adaptive Content!
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31. Tools vs Content in our books:
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32. Engineering the Renderers
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33. Engineering the Content
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34. Bbb… but! How do I create it?
• Ann Rockley: Stop handcrafting your content. Engineer it.
• Faux architecture approaches:
• “Content Choreography” is a RWD term for automated layout (long
solved for magazines/newspapers); doesn’t fix content
• “Mobile First” is a method of approximating a content architecture;
does not capture a repeatable discipline (yet)
• A Content First approach:
• “Content Analysis” or “Information Architecture:”
• discovering how parts of content relate to each other
• “Data modeling:”
• express those semantic containers in a repeatable way (ie, guidelines,
schemas or business rules)
• “Content Engineering:”
• build systems that use sensors (parameters, functions, user input) and
actuators (logic) to produce new content interactions (not just
renditions).
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35. Some authoring examples:
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36. Under the hood… NPR
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37. Under the hood… Web Platform Docs
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38. In “view form” mode
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39. Under the hood… microdata
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40. Under the hood… expeDITA
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41. GatherContent Editor Panel
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42. Under the hood… WordPress+
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43. Oh, the places you’ll go!
• Adaptive, Intelligent Content:
• Is future-proofed for uses and devices yet to be invented
• Is A business asset, not a storage liability
• Is An archive for business knowledge and culture
• Broadens the definition of Personalization
• Adds scope and handles for use in Adaptive Designs
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44. Anticipation!
• Adaptive Content with WordPress:
• http://www.cmsmyth.com/2013/05/rom-blobs-to-chunks-
structured-content-in-wordpress/
• http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/04/adaptive-content-
with-wordpress/
• http://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-content-templates/screenshots/
• http://simple-fields.com/
• http://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/
• And with Drupal:
• https://groups.drupal.org/node/51023
• Your tax dollars at work:
• http://www.howto.gov/web-content/technology/content-
management-systems/how-to-create-open-structured-content
• All around good stuff:
• http://meetcontent.com/blog/structured-content-an-overview/
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45. And they laughed when I said I
wanted to be a Content
Engineer…
• Congratulations!
We are done!
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