Professional Interests
At any given time, I’m looking at a lot of things related to content technology. But here are some of the more enduring things I’ve been interested in over the last few years.
Editorial Scripting
I’ve investigated and prototyped several different options for allowing editors some level of programmatic control over their digital content. (See this blog post, or this library, or this talk.)
Distributed CMS
I’ve been talking about this for a long time. I think the future of CMS is…post-modern? The future of content is more about aggregation and homogenization, and less about monolithic repositories. (See this blog post from 13 years ago.) I love the idea of non-traditional (read: weird) content repositories being used to power content delivery architectures. (I just started playing with Notion and I’m sorely tempted to build a CMS out of it.)
Lightweight Markup Languages
I’ve worked with and extended Markdown extensively, but I’m more generally interested in the process of codifying content intention in text. Particularly, where are the intersections between IA, design systems, and LMLs? And beyond simple text formatting, where is the overlap between an LML and a full markup language. (I’ve done quite a bit of tinkering in this space for this website.)
Digital Quality Management
I’m curious how organizations can maintain content quality when their digital estates stretch into tens of thousands of content objects spread across hundreds of authors. How can you maintain consistency and quality at that scale? (To this end, I built a home-grown DQM system for this site. You can see the results of the last run. The active tests are listed at the bottom of that report.)
Creative Collaboration
What systems and processes allow teams to do their best work together? How do you balance human creativity and technological tools?
Intranets
These were my favorite projects when I was at Blend. I’m fascinated at the IA involved in organizational information distribution (see this blog post and this one).
Intellipedia and Diplopedia
The IC and the State Department both use MediaWiki for knowledge management. I’ve everything read that’s publicly available about these installations. As I mentioned above, I would have loved to work for either of these organizations, and I’m fascinated by their usage of content management in general, and bottom-up information aggregation specifically.
Business Fiction
This is rarely done well, but I enjoy Patrick Lencioni’s books, and Bob Boiko’s one attempt at it. I’d like to try this as a teaching tool. (I still watch this 30-year-old infomercial a couple times a year.)