Supporting content compliance using Generative AI
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
6d ago
Content compliance is challenging and time-consuming. Surprisingly, one of the most interesting use cases for Generative AI in content operations is to support compliance. Compliance shouldn’t be scary Compliance can seem scary. Authors must use the right wording lest things go haywire later, be it bad press or social media exposure, regulatory scrutiny, or even lawsuits. Even when the odds of mistakes are low because the compliance process is rigorous, satisfying compliance requirements can seem arduous. It can involve rounds of rejections and frustration. Competing demands. Enterprises recog ..read more
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What’s the value of content previews?
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
1w ago
Content previews let you see how your content will look before it’s published.  CMSs have long offered previews, but preview capabilities are becoming more varied as content management is increasingly decoupled from UI design and channel delivery. Preview functionality can introduce unmanaged complexity to content and design development processes.   Discussions about previews can spark stong opinions. Are content previews: Helpful? Unnecessary? A crutch used to avoid fixing existing problems? A source of follow-on problems? All of the above? Many people would answer previews a ..read more
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Digital transformation for content workflows
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
3w ago
Content workflows remain a manually intensive process. Content staff face the burden of deciding what to do and who should do it. How can workflow tools evolve to reduce burdens and improve outcomes?  Content operations are arguably one of the most backward areas of enterprise business operations. They have been largely untouched by enterprise digital transformation. They haven’t “change[d] the conditions under which business is done, in ways that change the expectations of customers, partners, and employees” – even though business operations increasingly rely on online content to functio ..read more
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Orchestrating the assembly of content
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
2M ago
Structured content enables online publishers to assemble pieces of content in multiple ways.  However, the process by which this assembly happens can be opaque to authors and designers. Read on to learn how orchestration is evolving and how it works. To many people, orchestration sounds like jargon or a marketing buzzword. Yet orchestration is no gimmick. It is increasingly vital to developing, managing, and delivering online content. It transforms how publishers make decisions about content, bringing flexibility and learning to a process hampered in the past by short-term planning and ju ..read more
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Content models: lessons from LEGO
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
2M ago
Content models can be either a friend or foe.  A content model can empower content to become a modular and flexible resource when developed appropriately. Models can liberate how you develop content and accelerate your momentum. However, if the model isn’t developed correctly, it can become a barrier to gaining control over your content.  The model ends up being hard to understand, the cause of delay, and eventually an albatross preventing you from pivoting later.   Models are supposed to be the solution, not the problem Content modeling can be challenging. Those invol ..read more
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Making it easier to build structured content
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
3M ago
A quick note about an amazing UI from Writefull called Sentence Palette that shows how to combine structured content with prompts to write in a structured way. It nicely fleshes out the granular structure of a complex document down to the sentence level. I see broad application for this kind of approach for many kinds of content. The deep analysis of large content corpora reveals common patterns not just in the conceptual organization of topics but also in the narrative patterns used to discuss them. Writefull has assessed the academic writing domain and uncovered common text patterns used ..read more
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How to compare CMSs, objectively
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
5M ago
There are literally hundreds of CMSs on the market, possibly thousands. So much choice, but often so little satisfaction, judging by the gripes of end-users. Why is the right option so muddled? Old CMS vendors soldier on, and new ones enter the market all the time, promising a better future. How do we make sense of this? A large part of the answer is the CMS buyer, and CMS users, are different people. The buyer and user have completely different relationships to the CMS. The buyer has either budgetary authority or responsibility for implementing the CMS. The buyer decides what to buy based on ..read more
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Why content and design fall short of the LEGO ideal
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
6M ago
For many years, the people designing, managing, and delivering user experiences have pursued the LEGO ideal – making experiences modular.  Content teams have aimed to make content modular so that it can be assembled in multiple ways. UI design teams have worked to make user interfaces modular so they can be assembled in different ways as well.   More recently, vendors have embraced the LEGO ideal. The IT research firm Gartner labeled this modular approach as “composable” and now scores of SaaS firms endorse composability as the most desirable approach for building user experienc ..read more
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The content of evangelism
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
1y ago
I’m often asked about my job as a content strategy evangelist. What do I do? What’s the job about?   Very little has published about the role of evangelism within enterprises and there’s no standard way that evangelism is practiced. Evangelism can easily be confused with other roles, and not everyone who calls themselves an evangelist necessarily embodies of the principles of evangelism. In my experience at Kontent.ai as their content strategy evangelist over the past several years, I’ve been aware there’s no template for how to do this. Which is very fitting, because evangelism’s focus i ..read more
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Your markup is showing
Story Needle
by Michael Andrews
2y ago
Markup is supposed to make content better. So why does it frequently make content worse? Markup helps computers know how to render text in a user interface. Without markup, text is plain — a string of characters. That’s fine for simple communications, but plain text can’t express more complex ideas. Syntax enables words to become meaningful content. Markup is syntax for computers. But computer syntax is far different from the syntax that writers and readers use. HTML is the universal markup language for the web. Markdown is positioned as a light-weight alternative to HTML that’s used by some w ..read more
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