All Articles in Our Archive
Issue #3
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It’s hard to fake being useful. You have to know what you’re doing, from your strategy all the way through your execution. But, when useful content is so important to your credibility as a source, it’s hard to justify anything less.
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When we realize that ideas are, at least in part, shaped by the body and its interaction with the world, we’ve found the sweet spot for content work. We also open worlds of opportunity for creating work that can resonate, educate, and engage with audiences that we may never otherwise reach.
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Online communication technology has shown the potential to shift the balance of power to a nation’s people. And we, the people who will shape the intelligent content and communication platforms of tomorrow, can play an important role in safeguarding this power.
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All books live in a wider context. So do all interactive experiences. The context for an interactive experience doesn’t come from the site itself; it comes from what others are doing in the category and out of category, as well as all the information about the organization, its audience, and its objectives.
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When you learn what your audience needs to know, it simplifies the problem of what content to create and when to create it.
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During the last year or so, retailers have slammed headfirst into the future of customer communications. Tried-and-true tricks are not working anymore, and there’s no single, clear path forward. Luckily, trends are emerging that most businesses can learn from.
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As the online editor, I sometimes feel like my job is to make something beautiful, just to hack it apart for kindling. Here’s the way I (mostly) think about it instead: any link to a fragment of LQ is a breadcrumb that can bring you back to the whole.
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It’s an article of faith at Contents that we all need to get smarter, in practical and immediate ways. We need to know more about our readers. We need to better understand the systems that let them find and use the things we publish.
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From intensely geeky close examinations of a single computing principle to descriptions of a working ethos or a personal battle with distraction, the articles in this issue attempt to reveal a little bit of the dark matter of our work—the things we don’t usually take the time to consider.
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Ambiguity is the essence of metaphor, mystery, poetry and humor. Without it we couldn’t write songs, flirt, or tell jokes. It’s a magical aspect of communication. But try telling that to your laptop.
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Let’s create the quiet we need. We’re makers. And we’re not making for the sake of adding to the pile. We’re here to make things better, clearer, and easier. We should add calmer and quieter to that list.
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How we feel about something has a much stronger role in decision making and comprehension than we’d like to believe. No matter how analytical we are, the emotional brain still decides.
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Instead of interviewing one person in this issue, we bring you seven, each focused on three simple questions about the principles that underlie their work.
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Argo is a public experiment in developing technical and editorial frameworks for thoughtfully managed topical content projects that don’t require a huge team or a big budget.
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People with low literacy skills have always been part of our audience. They’ve always needed their information presented clearly, plainly, and simply so they can succeed in understanding and using it.
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Curiosity is tricky. It’s the first thing that pushes us forward, but it’s also one of the first to hold us back: to keep us from shipping good ideas because we’re too busy lusting after unachievable ones.
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We don’t often have time to consider all the underlying stuff that gives our work shape, character, and meaning, and that time won’t ever appear on its own. But we can choose it. Even in the crazy spells—and maybe especially then, when we’re making so many important decisions.
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As we end the year—and our first issue—we offer a final meditation on the information we inherit, along with this, our first set of topical annotations. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in 2012.
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No one really owns a recipe. They get shared and disseminated through a love all humans share, of good food. Substitutions get made, volumes altered and flavors tweaked as the cook makes and remakes a dish.
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Content wants to be messy. It wants to roll around in the mud. It wants to be gross. Our job is to pull it together—to take the guesswork out of creating and curating it—and to treat content work as something closer to a science.
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We also have to make sure the stories for a particular feature knit together with stories from all the other features and apps on Facebook. Does this story make sense next to others in the news feed? Does it “feel” like Facebook when you get this story? These are all content strategy questions about framing and dealing with user-generated content.
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With a constant deluge of new content channels, technologies, and demands, content crises are a fact of life in many organizations. These day-to-day crises aren’t just isolated events—they’re symptoms of a far bigger change: content is now a business asset, and that is rocking the foundations of the business world.
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And just as our tent is expanding, so too are our ideas about what we do. A complete description of our work would begin to define what it is that makes this our tent: What brought us all here? What are we hoping to achieve? Of all the assumptions and ideas we’ve dragged in with us, which are the babies and which the bathwater?
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It’s time to recognize that many of us in nominally separate fields and industries are working on the same problem from slightly different angles.