Findability and SEO – It is about the content…
I recently attended the Enterprise Search Summit in New York to meet with search professionals focused on ‘internal’ search. By ‘internal’ I mean the content that languishes on internal intranets, file systems etc. Enterprise search systems are there to crawl, index this collection of documents, pages etc etc. Some notable vendors present at the conference were Autonomy, Mindbreeze and Search Technologies. Some of the enterprise search products under discussion were Microsoft SharePoint / FAST, the Google Search Appliance, Amazon CloudSearch, Autonomy, Attivio, Endeca, LucidWorks, Vivisimo, Sinequa, NXT / Folio and open source alternatives such as Solr Lucene and ElasticSearch.
One major difference between internal and external search is that in external or web-based search there are usually links between the content. In enterprise content that is not always the case. A marketing professional who writes up a product brief won’t naturally link their content directly to another document on the intranet that was written by the product manager or designer. Therefore, in the enterprise search world, other techniques have to be employed to make the content more findable. Note that I didn’t say searchable. The problem isn’t that the content isn’t searchable it is that a user can’t find the content they need for the problem they are trying to solve or the information they are trying to retrieve. I just read a great article on this very subject over at everypageisonepage.com. This article discusses the issues at hand AND I heard this echoed at the enterprise search summit. It is about creating good content that can be found and genuinely helps the reader and not a search engine. If that is done well then good internal AND external search will follow and the tools and the implementers can do their job more effectively.
CMSexpo Summary
I just finished three days educational sessions, demos, one-on-one meetings at cmsexpo.net and all I can say is WOW! Linda and John Coonen did a great job in organization and choosing a nice mix of ‘content’ and ‘technology’ sessions. This is my first exposure to the ‘mostly’ open-source CMS expo community. I say mostly because Ektron and OpenText were also there in force and they aren’t open-source.
I had specific goals in mind before attending. I connected with experts from Drupal, Ektron, WordPress, Crafter and Opentext. I went to sessions on content strategy, coding, project management, customer and digital experiences, javascript and more.
The main themes from the conference were
- Get responsive. content needs to respond to different devices
- Get Adaptive, content need to adapt to people in the context they are in. I.e. a airline website needs to change if the user is on a mobile device at the airport versus on a desktop at home
- Customer and digital experience – it isn’t about web pages anymore. we are providing customer experiences now using a lot of different media.
Some absent topics in the general sessions were the semantic web, web globalization and in-depth SEO sessions but I told Linda Coonen this.She agreed and will think about these topics for next year. Can’t wait.
CMS Expo here we come…
I just arrived in Chicago to attend CMSexpo. Here are some of my goals during this expo.
1. Meet solutions experts from some of the most powerful and cost-effective content management systems out there (i.e. Ektron, Drupal, etc)
2. Listen to educational sessions about SEO, content strategy and content marketing.
3. Network with like minded content professionals and understand more about content marketing problems and solutions.
I can’t wait to dig in.
Girl Wins Hackathon
The BBC reported today, that Seventeen year-old Jennie Lamere, has won and been recognized for winning ‘best in show’ at a Boston hackathon. Jennie wrote code that blocks tweets that are ‘spoilers’ to her favorite shows. Brilliant.
This is hugely significant for my daughter who currently lacks young female role models in tech. By the time my daughter starts to dabble in tech, I know Jennie and the ‘girls who code‘ will be an inspiration to her. Read more over at the BBC.
Acrolinx integrated into Concrete5
I’m doing my best to improve my written English. I’ll admit that I am getting some assistance from Acrolinx. In fact, what I’ve recently done is integrated the Acrolinx style, grammar and spelling functionality directly into Concrete5. In the screenshot below you’ll see a toolbar next to some other TinyMCE toolbar buttons.
Tiny Tasks want to be Top Tasks
I have just finished two and a half days on sessions at the CIDM Dita conference in Providence, RI. Gerry McGovern kicked off the sessions with a theme akin to content minimalism. His experience concludes that a large portion of enterprise content has sometimes never been accessed. His very engaging style made it easy to understand the concepts of ‘tiny tasks’ and ‘top tasks’. Content is mostly comprised of ‘tiny tasks’. In other words, a tiny taks is content whose sole pitiful reason for living is to fulfil a tiny task or outcome for the reader. For example, a single Microsoft Excel user, buried in a mathematics lab, might want to read about how to use the nNum funtion. Gerry McGovern argues that tiny tasks want to be top tasks. Tops tasks are the kings and queens of the content realm. They describe how to use the, oh so famous, SUM function! Wrapping it up, Gerry argues that we should really focus on the top tasks for readers. We should ask ourselves as content professionals, what do we want the outcomes of our content to be and we should strive to provide our readers the ability to complete their top tasks and be brutally honest about the role of the tiny task. Find out what ‘top tasks’ Gerry has in store for you over at http://www.customercarewords.com/
Simply Minimalist 