Content Everywhere [Book]

Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future Ready Content
Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Now here’s a book that I loved reading.  Lots familiar, lots new.

The author’s thesis is that the “content = web page” model is no longer the only approach to delivering content, and that you need a content strategy if you want content to be repurposed, in whole or in part, in different places within your organization, and even outside it.  Oh, and by the way, here’s how to do it.

A lot of the book talks about breaking content down into smaller chunks that can be managed and deployed in new and useful combinations.  Most IAs who have been a business analyst or developer will understand the concepts and the lightweight notation used.  And team members on the content or visual design side will pick it up easily enough.

The strength is in the examples.  Although not presented this way, they comprise a set of case studies that it is well worth studying and assimilating.

Other sections of the book talk about how to repurpose content in a varity of ways, including discussions of markup, and responsive and adaptive design from the content perspective.  Especially interesting to me was the discussion of web API, linked data, and mashups.  I knew the concepts but hadn’t realized just how far they had come.

I thoroughly recommend this book. I found myself Googling many of the examples and references, making it a much broader (a.k.a. later night) learning experience than I first anticipated.

Excellent job!