LinkedIn Posts

Contact information for Deane Barker

Well, this is long overdue. Here’s what’s happening in general –

A blog about technical issues maintained from 2005-2019. Formerly called “Gadgetopia.”

I’ve been at Staffbase for three weeks now, and it’s lovely. Great company, wonderful people. I’m really enjoying it. But I’ve noticed something interesting – There are a weirdly high proportion of sellers at this company with a background in film, television, comedy, improv, or theater. I’ve…

Here’s a service story for you – One of the headlights in my Jeep Grand Cherokee was burned out. I went to Advance Auto Parts and parked in front of the store. I turned my lights on and off a couple of times to check which light I needed, by looking in the reflection in their window. By the time I…

Continuing my questions about how scritable should software be, and to what extent editors should understand logic, I present a case study and proof-of-concept.

This article highlights a way that AI is changing the web that’s both subtle yet monumental. To date, search engines crawled your site, and you allowed it, because it was mutually beneficial. You let them – even encouraged them – to consume your content, and in return they sent you traffic. You…

I did a webinar the other day with my friend Jill about the usage of AI. (Recording available sometime soon, I hope.) A point that occurred to me – AI can wraps a message in context. AI can also unwrap that context and reveal the original message. So, what are we really communicating? I saw a…

I’m struggling with how much a really like AI-generated music. A lot of time, I just have music on in the background while I work., Instrumentals are great for this. Lately, I’ve been listening to “Spy Jazz” which is some moody stuff that sounds like it’s from the 60s. It’s… mindless. It just plays…

Yesterday, I opined that we should extend the concept of “preview” to show how AI might interpret our content. With responsive web design, we’re exposing our content and design to variable VISUAL containers, so we preview in different configurations. With AI, we’re exposing our content to variable…

AI might have an unintended effect on content preview. Stick with me for a second here – Optimizely tools have supported in-context preview for a long time. Our CMS will let you see what your content looks like in any channel or device, and more recently, our CMP does the same thing. But I’m…

Successfully incorporating AI into our editorial process requires us to identify and consider all the risks. Here are six of them.

So, here’s an example of how AI might affect expectations around search – Yesterday morning, had a running discussion over Snapchat about good music and new songs with my daughters. Afterwards, I wanted to listen to everything we talked about, so I just copied the entire thread and pasted it into…

Last week, I listened to Shafqat Islam, Optimizely’s CMO, talk about how the Opti marketing team created some of our customer case studies. What we did was interview a customer for 30 minutes about their project. Then we gave Opal – our built-in AI tool – the transcript along with all the other…

I’ve found one very practical use for AI on my personal website. I have a LOT of content out there, and I haven’t written summaries for it all. When showing this content in lists, I usually just extract about 300 characters to use as a summary, but that’s not perfect. So I bounced a bunch of…

We need a new word to describe when you’re interacting with… something, and you’re not sure if it’s a bot or not. I just rescheduled a furnace service appointment at 1 a.m. via text. Awake for no particular reason, I had filled out a web form, not expecting a response until a normal hour. But then…

Look at this picture. It’s funny – I get it, and so do you. Now, mentally catalog all the different things a computer/AI would have to understand to “get” this picture – to understand this picture the same way your mind does. It’s …sobering. Humans have a background and context of knowledge that’s…

I’ve started using AI quite a bit to interpret documents. I’ll have some document within which is some nugget of information I want, so I’ll upload it to ChatGPT and say, “Read this and tell me [the thing that I want]…” These feels lazy, but it’s got me wondering if maybe this is a reflection on…

I was fascinated by this article that explains one reason the global air travel system is so safe. Many countries have been able to steadily improve safety because they don’t try to hold anyone at fault for incidents anymore. Put another way: we’ve decided that when so many lives are at stake, it’s…

Here’s an esoteric question for all IAs or content strategists – Assume we have a hierarchical set of categories, naturally progressing from from broader to narrower. For example, one branch goes: Vehicles Wheeled Vehicles Motorcycles Should software provide “assumed ancestral assignment”? Meaning,…

I’m old enough to remember when the technology book section at Barnes and Noble was almost overwhelming. It was both sides of a long aisle, just teeming with books. For a while, it would even spill over to another aisle. The other day, I took a picture of what’s left. At my local Barnes and Noble,…

Linked below is a very sobering article about how the publishing industry works. The author read all the transcripts from the antitrust case stemming from Penguin Random House trying to buy Simon & Shuster (it was blocked). From the testimony, the author draws out some statistics: The industry is…

“Zooming” a web browser was always weird to me. When you made everything bigger, it often broke the design. I also felt weird controlling the designer’s experience. I felt like I was selfishly imposing on their website, somehow. And zoom always felt temporary to me – you zoomed in order to make a…

Digital properties grow a lot like buildings do. Studying the latter can help us understand the former.

I enjoy business fiction, though so much of it is written badly. Below are some titles I’ve read (or am reading) that I enjoyed. The key for me is verisimilitude – it has to “feel” right. We all know when a story feels contrived, and I’ve read more than a few of those too. But all four of these…

One Sunday every month, I make the coffee at church, which means I spend a couple hours in the church kitchen. For years, I had looked right past this sign, but yesterday morning, for whatever reason, I suddenly realized what a masterpiece of technical documentation it is. It shows how to fold a…

To continue the theme from yesterday : to what extent does a software vendor need to fix or improve their customer’s internal issues, just to keep their business? When I was at Optimizely , we’d see a pattern: a customer would implement the software themselves or use an inexperienced partner, and…

Do you see thought leadership being done on a corporate level? Or is this solely the province of individuals? I’ve been wondering a lot about this lately. Is there a company you associate with leading (and publishing) innovation? We all know PEOPLE like this, but is this ever done well on a…

Employers, stop asking for educational credentials that you don’t need. If you don’t absolutely NEED a four-year degree for that job posting, DON’T REQUIRE ONE. I’ve spent time working with youth, specifically middle and high school boys. I’ve seen them panic in their last years of high school…

I’ve gotten weirdly obsessed with command line interfaces (CLIs) lately. I’ve always liked the speed and precision of them, and I have a strange love affair with plain text (markdown 4 life, yo…). In the last couple days, I wrote a CLI for Staffbase user management. There’s a video below, if you’re…

One of the great cliches of marketing is “Sell the benefits, not the features.” The problem is, when you take this too far, then no one knows what you do. I’m at a Gartner conference, and walking around the vendor floor is just confusing. Everyone is “selling their benefits” so well that I have no…

A while back, I sat around and tried to think up all the ways the same content could be turned into varied artifacts. Like, if you had the same basic message, what dials could you turn or switches could you flip to turn it into different artifacts for different formats and channels? This is what I…

All apologies to Disney (don’t sue me), but this promotional image from Fantasia has been speaking to me lately. In my head, this is what content managers aspire to – commanding vast power over their content wherever it is, able to publish to a dozen channels with a click of their mouse, able to…

I’ve been spending some time with content preview lately, and I have a thought – Do we always want perfect preview? Don’t get me wrong – Opti CMS has been able to do pixel-perfect preview for a decade. Since v7 or so, you can edit content in-context, looking more-or-less exactly like it’s going to…

I’m still dealing with my annoyance at the lack of a “content update protocol.” Or maybe I’m just annoyed that RSS has lost support over the years. Someone mentioned Visualping when I posted before, which I’ve been playing around with (they were gracious enough to give me a free account). It’s very…

I’m still experimenting with the idea of copy-and-paste as a valid integration method. This is what I have so far – I can pop a modal on any page that gives me a bunch of configurable copy options for the current content (envision this on an admin UI, though my site doesn’t really have one). You…

I saw something today that got my mind wandering –

Let me follow-up my post from yesterday with a little history – The prefix “cyber” was popularized in the 1984 novel “Neuromancer.” That book contained one of the first usages of the word “cyberspace.” However, “cyber” originates from the word “cybernetics,” which was coined in 1940s to refer to…

Without a whole lot of forethought or planning, I just straight-up deleted my entire Facebook account last night, after 18 years on the platform. I did it on the spur of the moment, from a gate at O’Hare, between flights. To be clear, I didn’t just delete the app , and I didn’t just “deactivate” my…

I’m not much for “productivity hacks,” but there’s a technique that Oliver Burkeman has referred to in two different books that I enjoy – Today is Saturday. I’ve been traveling a lot (I’ve worked for Staffbase for 13 weeks and have traveled 10 of them). I have a backlog of stuff I need to do around…

I was in New York City for about 24 hours this week, and I got to wondering what it would look like without any construction. The scaffolding, in particular, is kind of insane – sometimes entire blocks will be covered in scaffolding (I suspect that part of this is property owners just not wanting…

I’m tempted to write a book (or a website?) called, simply: “How to Build a CMS” It would be a comprehensive, ground-up discussion of how to build a CMS from scratch, detailing all the things you need to think about to build a system to manage and deliver content effectively. (We wouldn’t be…

Several times last year, I gave a conference talk called “Palaces of Innovation,” where I talked about a creative team’s need to have a home base – a digital lab, a virtual studio – where they could collaborate. I discussed our need to externalize information. I used the examples of Leonardo Da…

I have two daughters, both in nursing school (one is 19; the other, 22). I realized the other day that they have no concept of a full-size keyboard and monitor anymore. They both have laptops, and they never connect them to external keyboards or monitors. They have desks, but they just use the…

Logical decisions often affect how our content is consumed. Therefore, some functional logic should be captured and managed as content.

I have never managed anyone (well, once; briefly and poorly). I’ve specifically avoided it, in fact. I regret this. My wife had a manager in her history that was foundational to her success, and she still speaks of this manager with great affection. I would like to be this for someone else someday,…

My research into Harry Nyquist continues. The last time I posted about him , someone recommended a book called The Culture Code which had a bit about Nyquist. I ordered it immediately. To recap, he was a scientist at Bell Labs in the first half of the 20th century. An internal study revealed that…

I’ve become fascinated by a guy named Harry Nyquist. He was a Swedish scientist who immigrated to the US and worked for Bell Labs for three decades from the 1920s on. He’s known for multiple breakthroughs – lots of things are named after him. However, it’s this quote that has me really interested….

Back in 2019 (I’m told), I coined the term “race to the middle.” I don’t actually remember doing this, but lots of people have said I encapsulated the idea that coupled (traditional) CMS and decoupled (“headless”) CMS were on a collision course. They were each adding features to become more and…

There’s a chain in the Midwest called Dunn Brothers Coffee . They have 48 locations. Each one is an independently owned franchise. Best coffee I’ve ever had. Just spectacular. Sioux Falls had two Dunn Brothers. They had different owners. I say “had” because one of the locations closed last week. I…

I’m reading a book on the philosophy behind structural engineering. I was struck by this quote (also in the image): While engineers can learn from structural mistakes what not to do, the only thing they learn from success is to repeat what led to the success without change. The idea is that failure…

Today is my last day at Valtech. I was only here for six months, so I want to stress a couple of things – First, this is an entirely mutual decision, and that’s not a euphemism or code for anything else. Allison Abraham and I had some big dreams for my role, and after some very honest discussions,…

The older I get, the more I realize that I don’t “learn” life lessons as much as I just finally “accept” them. Everything I’ve learned on whatever path to wisdom I’ve been on is really just conceding that something I was told earlier is true. Put another way, I have all the advice and lessons I…

This article doesn’t go too deep, but I’m always interested in figuring what people “want” from LinkedIn. I’ve struggled with this for a long time. A lot of people post a never-ending stream of pseudo-motivational content that they probably copied-and-pasted from somewhere (OpenAI?), and present it…

The Lytics acquisition by Contentstack just reinforces a point I’ve made before: the large-scale headless/composable vendors are becoming the same full-featured DXPs they swore they were created to “solve.” While there are smaller vendors that are still “true” headless (what does that even mean,…

One of the things MarTech is plagued by is a lack of common standards for communication. Every tool has its own API, and trying to fit them all together usually means writing a bunch of glue code. Common standards have always been elusive. In the CMS space, there’s been the Java Content Repository…

I saw this sign on a door of a local diner in the Catskills, and it just resonated with me for some reason. I love the idea of an employer… defending (?) their employees, especially newer employees. We all want young people to get jobs and be productive members of society, but some customers can…

Since starting at Staffbase , one thing I’ve noticed is that the platform has to accommodate narratives , not just content. So much of internal comms isn’t just “publish this thing” – it’s more, “how do we get people to understand and relate to this thing over time?” So, this might be half-baked…

Here’s a hot take – What I find most frustrating and annoying about LinkedIn these days is that people present their opinions and theories with utter conviction that they’re correct. And of course they write this in “LinkedIn style.” Using lots of dramatic sentences. Separated into paragraphs. Like…

Here’s a thought that’s bouncing around in my head this morning. I’m not sure where to go with it, but this idea won’t leave me alone. I could probably write an entire book about this (someone no-doubt already has).

It occurred to me that someday people aren’t going to associate pixelated, 8-bit graphics as nostalgic, but just…odd. People my age look at images like this and warmly remember marathon sessions of “Final Fantasy” on the NES. But we have a new generation that no longer has that context. They’ve…

I’ve been thinking about the ineffable concept of “thought leadership.” This is the idea that, “you should hire us because we are smart, and here is proof” or “I am going to stay top-of-mind for you, because I keep producing content that proves I’m smart.” How do you handle the attribution of this…

When people talk about generative AI, I think they’re often just kind of lumping all the usage patterns together. I feel like organizations are doing an actual, tactical examination about how they might get AI to co-exist with humans in a process. I sat down this morning and tossed around some…

I was born in New Zealand in 1971. I immigrated to the United States as a six-year-old in 1977 (on the day Elvis Presley died, incidentally). I didn’t get my citizenship for 32 more years. I was almost 40. I even served as a medic in the U.S. Navy as a non-citizen. No excuse, other than laziness, a…

I have a book called Behind the Screens: Illustrated Floor Plans and Scenes from the Best TV Shows of All Time . It’s exactly what it says: blueprints of the sets of spaces of famous TV shows: the apartments from “Friends,” Cafe Nervosa from “Frasier,” the house from “The Waltons,” etc. (I’ve…

I like pencils. I still take a lot of notes in pencil, in a cheap spiral-bound notebook. I refuse to give it up. A guy I know went to work for a pencil company. I had never heard of these pencils, but I trusted his judgment, so I went out and bought some. I have since turned into a pencil snob….

I’m interested in what level of “personalization algorithm awareness” we carry with us, either consciously or otherwise. Put another way, how aware are we that every platform has a demographic profile of us? And to what extent do we actively “manage” that profile, meaning alter our behavior in ways…

Minor rant: I’d like to see CMSs start providing “rendering as a service.” What I mean is that your CMS should have an endpoint that can accept a JSON representation of content, and render a preview, even if it doesn’t actually “own” that content. The endpoint should be stateless and transactional….

Something I’ve always struggled with a bit in software development: when you build software for a specific use case, where is the line between building a software platform and evangelizing/enforcing a method or philosophy of doing something? A long time ago, my team was asked to build a “project…

I’m back in the West Des Moines Marriott. We’re down here for our grandson’s first birthday (yes, he’s adorable, thank you). Just like last time , I’m getting a little contemplative about the idea of meeting with people. Last time I was here, it was a Shriner’s group. This time, it’s the Iowa…

Instead of bigger groups of people, maybe we should concentrate on more meaningful interactions with the right people

I completed my first significant “scratch” coding exercise using AI. I needed to write a C# class to track a graph of HTML links and store them in a SQLite database. I asked GitHub Copilot to write this while I was listening to a webinar. It dutifully complied. I looked at the code, but couldn’t…

I’m germinating a framework on the over-arching “questions” every product company needs to define and answer. These are the large-scale, strategic, existential questions that define the… tone (?) of the product and the organization. Clearly, these might be wrong (I’m posting them here before I’m…

I loved role-playing games when I was younger. I spent way too much time and money on Dungeons and Dragons, Champions, Traveller, and other tabletop RPGs. If you’ve never played, RPGs are basically “Let’s Pretend” with rules. You create a “character” by codifying their personal attributes…

Here’s something I’m noticing about content search these days, especially search vendors – There are two ways to look at search. (1) Do you want the searcher to find what THEY want to find, or (2) do you want the searcher to find what YOU want them to find? Innocently, I would argue that search…

I’ve never been a big Tim Ferris fan. “The Four-Hour Work Week” just kind of pissed me off, really. But this is a good article, where I feel like he calls himself to account. The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me “You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of…

There’s a tendency to get really weird about sharing code, which prevents people from doing it. I’m trying to get better about this. The average programmer will be writing something handy, and they’ll think, “I should publish this…” But then they get freaked out, because it has to be… better. It…

For a couple years, I’ve been tossing around a theory/model for why organizations don’t use post-publish optimization tools – things like personalization, experimentation, etc. Some do, of course. But let’s be honest – most don’t, even though they buy them all the time. Vendors are constantly…

Back in the mid-80s, “Star Trek IV” was in theaters. It was a great movie about how the Enterprise had to go back in time to the mid-80s (the present-day for movie goers). The humor of the movie was mostly because the crew of the Enterprise had to survive in the 80s. It was a classic fish out of…

I’ve been thinking about storytelling lately. I’ve done a few “be a better speaker” talks inside Opti in the last few months, and that’s put me on a quest to figure out how we really understand things. This got me in the mood to re-watch one of my favorite videos. It’s a five-minute long…

This video is about six minutes long. You might not think you’ll watch the entire thing, but you probably will. Posting it here will lead to a large collective loss of productivity. I’m not sorry. (There are quite a few versions of this video floating around. This was the original. I saw one the…

Here’s some random philosophy for you on a Sunday morning – I’ve read a number of books in the last year that theorize technology is …alive (?), and it’s just using humanity as a vector to spread itself. You know how certain lifeforms are parasitic? They hitch themselves on some other lifeform to…

I read a random exchange the other day between Kate Thomas and Margot Bloomstein about old tech books. I don’t even totally know what they were discussing, but it got me thinking about my weird penchant for buying or hanging onto industry books out of some kind of nostalgia. I grabbed a bunch from…

I’ve often wondered about the intersection between enterprise technology adoption and … therapy? Some years ago, I had dinner with Mark Demeny and Amanda Shiga in Copenhagen. We tossed around the idea of a theoretical CMS conference and who we would invite to speak. Maybe it was the Carlsberg…

In college, I took a class in German. I wasn’t very good at it, but I’m normally really good at studying and taking tests, so I figured I’d be fine. But there’s the thing: a huge part of my grade for the class was an “oral exam,” which meant I just had to sit in my professor’s office and have a…

I’ve been posting to LinkedIn quite a bit more lately, and it’s got me thinking about our relationship to raw text – meaning simple text with no visual formatting (bold, italics, indenting, etc). LinkedIn doesn’t even allow embedded links. It’s odd, but there’s a peacefulness to it which I enjoy….

I’m still thinking about The Ineffable Concept of Thought Leadership™ (or TICOTL; “tuh-cottle”). Here’s what has to happen for someone to create “thought leadership” (as a noun, I guess?). Something interesting needs to happen, either a specific…thing, or some observation or realization someone has…

I’m working on a theory (theories?) for The Ineffable Concept of Thought Leadership™ (that phrase coming to a T-shirt near you…) There are different… levels of it. In reverse order of usefulness: Performative: This is content that doesn’t provide any actual value. Rather, it’s intended to…

It’s Saturday, so here’s a rant I present for your opinion – I believe the current trend toward tipping food counter workers will not result in any appreciable benefit to them over the long-term. I think this is nothing but a long-play strategy by employers to increase profits. Here’s my reasoning…

I just got back from a week in London. I was speaking at the First Line Software Summit, and I was able to bring my wife (thanks Marcus Portström). Annie and I spent a few days seeing the sites. As such, we were on and off The Underground multiple times a day (the Shepherd’s Bush station was right…

Optimizely is doing a lot of research around AI, so I’ve been recently introduced to a “Winograd Challenge.” This is a phrase that’s very hard for AI to understand due to ambiguity – some of these are invented purposely to test or tune AI. Example: “The trophy doesn’t fit into the brown suitcase…

I had a sobering moment yesterday morning – I was driving with some co-workers, and one of them told us how she had gone on a jog that morning. She was telling us where she jogged, and she said, “I went down this road at first, but there was no traffic so I didn’t think it was safe, and I turned…

This post linked below goes a lot of different directions, but I love this point – …the printing revolution partially caused the scientific revolution by making knowledge more rigid. Before, if some observation didn’t match some claim, you could always shrug and be like: ‘Well, the person who…