Any type of publication involves a planning stage, during which details are worked out, executed, and smoothed; and a publishing stage, which stamps the final version for distribution. In doing online content, we add another stage: governance.
Planning
Determine your content type (is it a research brief? an occasional news item? a whole bunch of information on the activities of your research program?). The type determines the proper format, language, perspective, storage platform, outlet platform, and life span of your content.
Stitching. Whether yours is a single simple content type or a subsite, you'd need to find interconnections between it and content from other subsites or from within the site you are part of. This is what we call stitching, and is implemented in embedded links (i.e., hyperlinks, embedded video or photo), contextual links (e.g., the gadgets you see down the right hand of this blog), and metadata (metatags, metadescription, which pander to the search engines).
Writing. Content prep needs a lot of text—non-text elements need captions and metatext to go with them—and involves research, actual writing, editing, and gatekeeping. If you do any or all of these, you must realize the power you wield in influencing the performance of your content. IOW, different types of writing are needed for different types of content.
Publishing
Format. If you are maintaining a blog, for instance, your post has the same basic parts as a news item—title, text, image/video—but the difference would be in the type of language you use (informal), perspective (professional opinion), platform (Blogger), and life span (depends).
Platform. Simple and frequently updated content types that can exist more or less on their own, can reside on blog platforms such as Blogger or Wordpress. If you have several types of inter-related content surrounding a project, program, or organization, you may need your own subsite, which will need its own information architecture (IA) or structure. Platforms for this could be Google sites, Wordpress, or a customization of other platforms. Huge collections of multiple content types may need a hard-working and heavy-duty content management system (CMS), such as Joomla! or Drupal.
Governance
Nurture content. Maintenance, in other words. Updating information, making sure links work, and redoing tags or metadata as needed.
Assess usefulness. Is my content connected to anything else on IRRI.ORG? Do other content link to mine? Does my content get reposted on Facebook or Twitter? Does my page at least get hits? Do I need to repackage it, or has it outlived its usefulness?
When to let go. An iffy concept, for many of us, because it implies that our content is not immortal. Of course your content will always be useful to some person in the world, including you. But at some point, we have to decide when a particular content can finally rest in peace in an archive somewhere. #
No comments:
Post a Comment