The Content Wrangler
Ware are You? Web Content Delivery Strategies
By Richard Hamilton, RL Hamilton and Associates
Humans are wired to put things in buckets. We have an innate need to create categories and sort things into them. While the average human leans this way, technical communicators dive off the cliff. From the DITA Maturity Model to The Content Wrangler’s article categories, if it’s not tied down, it will get dropped in a bucket.
This is not a bad thing; buckets help us organize and retain information. If you are shopping for a television, having a set of criteria in your mind—screen size, plasma vs. LCD, screen resolution, price—lets you bucket the choices and narrow them down to a manageable number.
Given both the ubiquity and potential usefulness of categories, I was surprised when a web search didn’t turn up a set of categories for classifying web content delivery strategies. So, of course, I had to create a set.
This article proposes a set of buckets and draws a few conclusions about content delivery from the exercise. I’m just scratching the surface here, and would be glad to hear from others about the usefulness and appropriateness of this way of looking at web content delivery.
Web Content Delivery Categories
This categorization focuses on presentation of technical information, though it could be adapted to other uses. The buckets suggest a rough hierarchy, moving from No-ware to Active-ware, but as you will see, they do not follow a strict progression.
No-ware
No web presence at all. Unless you work for a part of the government that even the NSA does not know about, you are probably not in this category. These days even buggy whip companies have web sites (I’m not kidding, check out jedediahsbuggywhip.com). And of course, the NSA has a website, too.
Shovel-ware
Content is shoveled onto the web in whatever form is convenient. This may mean that entire books end up on the web in a single PDF or Word file. While clearly not optimal for all content, Shovel-ware is not always a bad thing. For example, many companies post PDFs of their product manuals that are identical to what was shipped with the product. That way, a customer who has lost the manual can get a printable version on the web.
An example of a good use of Shovel-ware is IKEA, which posts nearly all of its assembly instructions on the web in PDF form.
Book-ware
Content is developed and displayed as books, usually in HTML or PDF, with an index and search capabilities. With good search and well-designed books, this can be a reasonable way to go, though it does not take full advantage of the power of the web.
Hewlett-Packard’s documentation web site docs.hp.com is a good example of Book-ware, with some Shovel-ware for documents like product pamphlets and installation guides.
Lego-ware
Content is designed, developed, and assembled for delivery on the web using a modular methodology. This is the first bucket that targets content for web delivery and brings the unique considerations of displaying information on the web into play.
Technologies like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), and the modular methodologies that most people use with DITA, are examples of Lego-ware. Interestingly, the closest I could find to a general set of content strategy buckets was the Dita Maturity Model mentioned above. That model is a nice way of categorizing Lego-ware, and to a lesser extent, Custom-ware.
Custom-ware
Content is designed and developed like Lego-ware, but the display of content can be customized by users, either directly by allowing them to select what they want to see or indirectly by having the interface select what they see based on information about the specific product or service being used.
An example of Custom-ware is the Boeing Aircraft MyBoeingFleet service, which gives customers access to customized information for aircraft they own or lease. Another example is FLOSS Manuals, which was featured recently on The Content Wrangler.
Active-ware
Wikis, forums, on-line chats, webinars, and so forth. Anything that lets you interact with users on-line falls into this category. This category is orthogonal to the others; you can have interactive features in any environment except No-ware.
There is a continuum within Active-ware, based on the level of interactivity, with Wikis at one end, mailing lists and forums a bit further along, twitter next, and webinars/live chats at the other end. There are many good examples of Active-ware, the best known being Wikipedia. In the technical communication world, both DocBook and DITA have wikis, and the DocBook community hosts a freenode chat at irc://freenode/docbook.
So What?
One of the good things about bucketing is that it gives you a new perspective on something you may have been looking at for a while. Creating this set of buckets led me to a few interesting ideas that I might not have considered before.
New World vs. Old World
There is a clear divide between Old World uses of the Internet (Shovel-ware and Book-ware) and New World uses (Lego-ware, Custom-ware, and Active-ware).
The Old World contains clear evidence of carry-overs from previous technology. Shovel-ware shows this most directly, since it is a direct transfer. Book-ware shows it a bit more indirectly, through structural elements like tables of contents, chapters, and so forth, but the influence is still discernible.
The New World, while often having recognizable elements of the past, at least attempts to forge a new paradigm. In the case of Lego-ware and Custom-ware, the paradigm is modular structure and a separation between content development and deliverable structure.
Re-considering Active-ware
Active-ware, while clearly New World, builds from a different set of paradigms, modeling collaborative structures like conferences or symposiums in the case of Wikis and face-to-face meetings in the case of chats and webinars. This explains why Active-ware is orthogonal to the other categories and suggests that successful approaches to Active-ware will draw from a different set of models than the other categories.
This also implies that some of the things we value most in technical communication, like good writing and complete and accurate solutions, may have less importance, if any, in Active-ware. To some degree, this is happening already in a chat room, no one thinks twice about bad writing unless the meaning is completely obscured but it is likely to expand as Active-ware matures.
To come back to the buckets themselves, I am putting them out as a straw man; I think they represent a reasonable way to look at various web content delivery strategies, but I don’t claim that they should be set in stone. In fact, I invite comments, questions, and brickbats.
About the Author
Richard Hamilton is principal consultant with R.L. Hamilton & Associates, specializing in documentation management and the application of XML technology to documentation. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Communication People, Projects, and Technology, which will be published by XML Press later this year.
Copyright © 2008 Richard Hamilton
It may sound obvious, but I didn’t see anything in the article about content quality. Far too often these days I see people who are all about layout but purchase their online content as an afterthought. No matter how many backlinks you get, bad content is still bad content.
I see bad writing as a consequence of technologies that are coming back to haunt us. Mainly, television. We don’t read anymore. So how can we be expected to write well?
Active-ware may be part of the problem. And it may continue to be so into the future. But it could also be part of the solution. Sure, tweens are butchering the English language in chat rooms from here to Timbuktu. But at least they’re writing. And reading. Better than sitting motionless in front of a TV, right? Maybe these are the first faint stirrings of life after the golden era of television.
That said, if the internet follows the evolution of the printed word, we’re right now heading into the online equivalent of the television age. As technology advances to support it, video is becoming more and more mainstream online. Active-ware is inherently a more interactive model, but soon the “active” component will be talking into a web cam, not typing on a keyboard.
In ten years, who knows if we’ll have written web content. Maybe all the current content writers will be script writers. There’ll be “web actors” who specialize in emoting for online media.
I take a glass-half-full approach.
As a toolsmith, I can spend hours combing the web for just the right obscure piece of info. Yes, there is some poorly written content in Web 2.0, but I’ve also seen some fairly sharp stuff contributed to wikis, blogs, and the like.
One example is the developer wiki run by WebWorks (http://wiki.webworks.com/DevCenter). What makes it good is that WebWorks developers (particularly Ben Allums) contribute useful information to the site. The posts are well-written, occasionally humorous, and—most importantly—very informative.
When a company uses active-ware (Web 2.0) as an information-delivery solution, most of the information on that site will be contributed by people who care deeply about the product. That includes information developers, trainers, and engineers inside the company and very involved users on the outside. Information developers and trainers should create well-written information, and if the engineers care enough about their contribution, they know where to get editing help. That leaves only the outside contributers who may need editing or other guidance. I would look on the resources needed to provide this support as a minor cost of Web 2.0 (depending, of course, on the volume of contributions).
Lshep,
I agree with you that we often forget content quality when talking about all the whizbang things we can do with technology.
For this article, I chose not to discuss quality (other than the aside about chat rooms) because I didn’t want the article to get too big, and I didn’t want to divert attention away from the categorization.
This article is a distillation of a larger section in my upcoming book, Managing Writers . In the book, I do discuss writing quality and the differences in writing style required for the different categories.
Incidentally, I butchered the sentence about chat rooms. Here is what I meant to say, “To some degree, this is happening already. For example, in a chat room, no one thinks twice about bad writing unless the meaning is completely obscured. This trend is likely to expand as Active-ware matures.”
You make a good point, Simon. There’s a lot of valuable content out there. There’s also a lot of well-written content. But I think it’s important to draw a line between user-generated content posted in “clean” academic and professional bubbles and the user-generated content of the masses.
To me, the most compelling question isn’t “What are the white collars writing?” I expect that content to be up to a certain standard. What I find more interesting–because I see it as a real measure of our society–is how the active-ware model will affect the quality of non-regulated online content. That is, content on the level of the chat room messages Hamilton mentioned.
To me that is more indicative of where the future of content is headed. It’s a cliche, but those kiddos are the future. If they grow up in a world where misspelled words are the norm, how will THAT impact not only the quality of future content, but communication and society in general?