In the field of technical communication, for instance, practitioners are being challenged to adapt to a completely new approach to creating documentation and user-assistance materials. In this rapidly-changing arena, traditional content production practices are being replaced with modular, topic-based content production practices that allow organizations to recombine content elements—often automatically or on-demand—into new, derivative products.

But, moving to a new approach can be painful. Content creators must learn new methods of writing content and understand the value they bring to their organization when they do so. One of the most challenging aspects of moving from creating unstructured, narrative content to topic-based, modular content creation is understanding the concept of content reuse. Reusing content—and repurposing it in different ways—helps organizations create totally new, often personalized, information products from existing content assets. These products can open the door to new revenue-generating opportunities, a major benefit to content-heavy organizations looking to leverage existing content in new and profitable ways.

Today’s Hot Commodity: The Music Mash-up

In the entertainment world, content publishers are struggling to determine how to manage—and charge for—user-generated content types that take advantage of content reuse principles. Known as mash-ups, these user-created works weave together bits and pieces (modular chunks of content) of music and vocals (and increasingly video snippets) into entirely new entertainment products. Mash-ups can be created by anyone equipped with audio/video mixing and editing technology. And, while users began the trend, entertainment companies and music producers are starting to jump on the mashup bandwagon. The best user-generated creations are usually made by musically-inclined individuals who understand the nuances of music, the art of storytelling, and the technologies involved in reworking, remixing and mashing up audio/video content.

As a former dance club dj and a part-time music producer/remixer, I see music as a great example of the power of the mashup (and the future of entertainment and publishing). When I create a mash-up, I am acting as both a composer (of a new, derivative work) and conductor (choreographing the behavior, order, frequency, speed, volume, and tone of many granular musical elements at once) in an attempt to create entertaining musical content. It’s a complex task that requires a diverse skill set and an innate understanding of music. And, it’s easy to muck it all up. But, when done right, the results can be quite magnificent.

One of th best mash-up artists on the planet is DJ Earworm, a talented musician and author of Audio Mashup Construction Kit: ExtremeTech”(Wiley Publishing), a book that explores music (history, theory, composition) and the science of creating audio mash-ups (tools, techniques, tips and tricks). “Together As One” is probably the best music mash-up created by Earworm, who borrows various components of musical content from four completely different artists—number one songs from the past four decades: “Come Together” by The Beatles, “Some Day We’ll Be Together” by Diana Ross and the Supremes, “One” by U2, and “We Belong Together” by Mariah Carey. These unlikely musical acts are blended together by Earworm in a surprisingly pleasant way, producing a totally new entertainment product, something that could definitely find an audience in the commercial music space and a spot on the coveted Billboard Magazine charts [Note: Another of DJ Earworm’s compositions - United States of Pop—has indeed cracked the Billboard Hot 100 charts].

Before you listen to “Together As One”, take a minute to listen to each of the individual tracks. Pay attention to how different they are, and yet, how similar. Pay attention to the breaks, the beats per minute, and the key. Note the crescendos. Then, check out the final product—and it’s accompanying video!

“Come Together” - The Beatles

“Some Day, We’ll be Together” - Diana Ross and The Supremes

“One" - U2

“We Belong Together” - Mariah Carey

“Together As One” uses “One” by U2 as the foundation of the track, leveraging snippets from The Beatles, Mariah Carey and Diana Ross and The Supremes to create the story, which is made possible, in part, by lyrics that compliment each other. Take a listen to the mashup!

“Together As One” - The Beatles, Diana Ross and The Supremes, U2, Mariah Carey (DJ Earworm Audio Mashup)

Now, watch the video!

Mashups—user-generated entertainment products produced by fans for other fans—like the ones produced by DJ Earworm, are the future of entertainment. Yes, there are all sorts of pricing, copyright, and licensing issues that remain to be worked out. But, these challenges do not negate the fact that the mash-up genie is already out of the bottle. For those of you working in traditional content production environments, it’s important to understand what is technologically possible and what our customers are actually doing—with or without our permission—with other types of content. In a world where components of audio and video content can be easily re-purposed to create new entertainment products like DJ Earworm and others are clearly doing today, is it really that far-fetched to think our customers won’t find innovative and useful ways of mashing up the content we provide to them today?

What do you think? 

The pace at which technological innovation occurs is amazing. The last 20 years have been jam-packed with paradigm-shifting technological advances that have altered forever the way we create, manage, and deliver information. The personal computer, the World Wide Web, desktop publishing, touch-screen mobile phones, interactive television, social networks, and wireless connectivity have transformed not only the way consumers interact with content, but these advances have also altered the way professional communicators work.

Nowhere are these changes more evident that in the world of technical communication. Technical writers and editors have been forced—like it or not—to move to a more formal method of creating content, often for a global audience. Gone are the days of the free-for-all approach to creating technical documentation products one-at-a-time using desktop publishing tools. While this technique was the best method possible in the 80s and 90s, today, those who create user manuals, online help systems, and other types of documentation are increasingly expected to take a more formal approach to content creation, utilizing content standards like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) - the subject of DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers, a new book from the folks at The Rockley Group.

The advent of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and rapid adoption of topic-based content standards like DITA have forced us to separate content from format and end our addiction to desktop publishing. Today, technical communicators must learn to write modular, topic-based, context-independent content using a new breed of authoring tools. It’s not an easy change for many. The resources available are often poorly conceived, confusing, jargon-laden collections of information that don’t make learning new skills and techniques easy. In fact, they make things much harder than they need be.

That’s why DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers ($9.95 immediate download; $25.21 paperback) by Ann Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper is such an important work. Simple, easy-to-understand, and loaded with practical examples that resonate with technical communicators. Rockley and team have consolidated years of experience helping folks just like you make the move from unstructured content creation to DITA. This work is the result of their efforts and a valuable contribution to the technical communication literature.

Go ahead, take a peek. It’s not as scary as you might think.

This slide deck is part of a presentation I delivered to STC San Diego, June 10, 2009. Additional information about Twitter can be found in the O’Reilly Radar report, “Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time”.

As I am not an owner, board member, nor employee of the company—I was just contracted to market, set up and run the event—I am not privy to the intimate details behind this decision, but suffice it to say that due to the economic climate we find ourselves in today, conference registrations were nearly non-existent and sponsorships were down 60% from same period last year. I’d imagine that after careful analysis of the business situation they faced, PUBSNET made the decision they thought was best for them.

Here’s the official announcement I received:

Due to the strong economic downturn that has negatively and severely affected our conference business, all future DocTrain conferences are cancelled and the business is dissolving. We are sorry for the inconvenience this causes to our customers and staff; we tried our best to weather this storm, but it is clear we cannot.

It should be noted that conferences in general are doing poorly this year. There will many others that throw in the towel. I know this because I am on the advisory board for Meta Context, Inc. creators of Confabb.com, the world’s largest directory of conferences and a conference services provider for conference program managers and planners. And, a quick search of Google will provide you with anecdotal evidence that conference attendance is down 30-40%. Biotech events are down. Game developer conferences, too. And, that’s just the data available for the conferences that elect to disclose that information. I believe the decline is much steeper in most industries. We’re planning to survey the 22,000 conference organizers in the database to see what we can learn.

The real way to understand the impact of the economy on trade show type events is to ask event service providers. One Los Angeles event services company manager summed it up this way: “2009 really sucks for us. Last year, our biggest event needed 340 booth pods for their expo hall; this year, the same event needed only 60 pods. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we’re not going to be in business for long if this keeps up.”

I’ve also had the privilege of getting a few banquet food servers tipsy at a local watering hole. After a few kamikazes, one server said, “If we don’t stop seeing cancellations, we’ll be the ones being canceled next.”

Companies around the globe are cutting back on non-essential travel. According to USA today, it’s a drastic cutback, not a minor reduction in travel budgets. Trade shows are often tossed into the non-essential category. The lower the employee is in the corporate hierarchy, the less likely it is he/she will be given approval to travel.

A The Content Wrangler of 500 technical communicators found that getting funds for training is just as challenging as for events. The survey asked:  In this current economic climate, how likely is it that you could get funding to attend necessary training classes during 2009? The answers:

• 4.% said: “No way, dude! - Obtaining funds for necessary training is not possible this year”
• 21.9% said: “Likely to be a challenge - Obtaining funds for necessary training is not likely this year”
• 27.9% said: “Maybe yes, maybe no - Obtaining funds for necessary training is just as challenging as obtaining funds for all other services”

Only 7.6% said “Should be easy - Obtaining funds for necessary training is easier than obtaining funds for some other services”; with 2.8% saying: “No problem - Obtaining funds for necessary training is easy”.

Technology industry commentator Robert Scoble predicted the demise of the trade show industry in a December 2008 blog post. He blamed social networking sites, blogs, and web-based video for the downfall. And, if you are an Apple fan, you know that Apple withdrew its support for MacWorld, the largest Apple event in the world. It’s happening all over. It’s a good and a bad thing.

It’s bad for obvious reasons. Trade shows help the economy, so every one that dies damages hotels, airlines, audio visual providers, printers, caterers, event decorators, internet service providers, and others involved in trade show production. They are fun and provide cubicle-dwelling knowledge workers with something to look forward to—an escape, if you will, from the daily grind. The help us network with our peers in social settings. They help us grow as professionals—and, for those who seek the spotlight—as presenters. These benefits are difficult to duplicate outside of in-person conferences. Difficult, but not impossible.

The good thing about the demise of the trade show is that it will prompt us to be creative. Webinar and online conference providers will be aggressively courting us, trying to get us to move to online meetings. Flash and web-based video training will take off. Webinars, too! And, those who struggled to get funding for in-person events will be able to participate in online events more easily, without missing work. Travel budget requests will not be needed. Training dollars will go much further.

On a positive note, I don’t want folks to read this article and think that trade shows are dying altogether. They’re not. But, the ones who are not strong, who cannot take money from other revenue sources and invest them into their events, may find it difficult to stay afloat. Events that focus on a specific product—user groups conferences—for example, will flourish and grow. These events aren’t considered “non-essential”. After all, if your firm just invested hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in software or services used to run your organization, travel budget restrictions will likely not be enforced. I’ve attended three product-specific events this year, including last week’s MarkLogic User Conference, and each and every one was jam-packed! According to organizers at these events, their attendance has been up as much as 30% over same period last year.

While I feel badly that the event series I helped to reshape did not make it through the economic storm, I do feel a bit better knowing there are new opportunities on the horizon. And, I’ll take this opportunity to say that I’ve offered all of the sponsors and presenters that were on the roster for DocTrain DITA a complimentary slot in The Content Wrangler Summer School program—a free online education series that will feature many of the topics that were to be showcased at the conferences. Details to follow.

So, if you were upset because you were not able to attend the DocTrain DITA conference, you’ll be happy to know that you will now be able to participate in many of the free, web-based educational opportunities we have on the roster this summer. No management approval needed. No travel budgets. No expense reports. And, no waiting in line in airport security. Doesn’t sound so bad, after all.

TCW: Robby, thanks for taking time to chat with us today. For those of our readers who don’t know who you are nor what you do, tell us a little about yourself and the company you work for.

RS: I run a process consulting and methodology engineering business, Slaughter Development. We help organizations to analyze workflow and rebuild business processes through a comprehensive, bottom-up, stakeholder-driven change methodology. Since most of our business is based on individual client relationships, I mostly work with part time contractors on a project-to-project basis. There’s usually between 3-5 people actively engaged at any one time.

TCW: Your website says you specialize in usability, software development, process and methodology, technical communication, and data architecture. That’s an awful lot for one man to handle. Can you tell us what tasks you are you are best suited to perform and why folks might want to consider hiring you instead of someone else?

RS: In the technology industry, we have one overarching problem: widespread, unwitting incompetence. I meet people who call themselves designers who have never heard of kerning or affordances, self-professed programmers who can’t code Fuzz-Buzz, methodological “experts” who can neither define sampling nor detect bias, technical writers and speakers whose ability to assemble phrases would embarrass their second-grade teachers, and database administrators whose pinnacle of knowledge are wizards in Microsoft Access.

This phenomenon means that it makes more sense to be a competent generalist so that you can advise, consult and refer people to specialists where necessary. Too many technologists are competing with somebody’s nephew or the secretary who is reading a “dummies” book. I’m best suited to help you analyze and understand what you are doing, and if we need a high-level specialist, I can help you find the right expert.

TCW: What projects have you completed, for what companies and where can we see your work?

RS: I like to say that a portfolio is like a picture of a field of icebergs: the landscape has changed since the photo was taken, and most of the work is beneath the surface therefore invisible. But I have written hundreds of thousands of words, lines of code, developed over a hundred different websites, done speaking engagements, led training sessions, and taught at major universities. As much as I like talking about myself, I’ll spare your readers the full biography. Google is available if you really want to know more.

TCW: Mobile communications devices (previously called personal digital assistants) are finally starting to take off in the US, thanks in part to Apple and the iPhone. In the past you’ve said you invented the first PDA-centric courseware system. I’ve seen some of these from companies like BlackBoard. Tell us a little about this project, what your role was, what happened, and why it matters today?

RS: Starting in 1999, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Anthony Petrosino at the University of Texas at Austin on research regarding the use of Personal Digital Assistants in educational environments. At the time, these devices were primitive, mostly with monochrome screens, limited storage, and no Internet connection, but were still a fraction of the cost of desktop or laptop computers. In the meantime, web-based courseware systems (such as BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai and Moodle) were just starting to be used for content delivery and student engagement. I suggested that since most of this interaction occurred while students were not actually online, we could take advantage of the “disconnected nature” of PDA’s to provide a form of PDA-based learning.

At the time, the existing courseware tools assumed a full-screen browser (or a custom application) and an always-on Internet connection. I built a complete courseware tool from the ground up which featured electronic syllabi, threaded discussion forums, a private messaging system, a formative assessment tool, and even reading materials including PowerPoint lectures and electronic texts. Students could synchronize their device using cradles at their schools. We did several case studies at the University and elementary school level. You can still see the final version of the site (in 2002 glory).

Technology marches on, so $200 handheld devices don’t make much sense in a world of $200 OLPC’s. This project proved, however, that with a little intelligence in the device and only occasional Internet access you can provide a comprehensive electronic courseware experience. Our students were able to review slides, read hundreds of pages of text and pictures, take part in discussions (using detachable keyboards and complete take-home quizzes. Even modern classroom environments still struggle with this level of interaction; the Sakai-based tool OnCourse which I use with my students at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) does not provide the level of portability nor (in some areas) the quality of usability for course management which I created nearly a decade ago for PDAShare.

The important lesson of PDAShare is that the power of technology far surpasses typical use. We could give every student an iPod Touch, but most of the interaction desired by educators is constrained to the content and experiences defined by the curriculum. This is possible with obsolete hardware. We need to learn to look past the shiny, sexy features of the latest gear and focus on the fundamental opportunities. Innovation often arises from working with something old in a new way.

TCW: As a former student at IUPUI, I know my best educational experiences were usually provided by non-tenured instructors. When I’ve returned over the years to take some advanced classes, I’ve not been very impressed. Schools seem to be behind the curve with regard to teaching students about technology. What classes are you currently teaching at the university? What classes do you think are needed, but aren’t yet being taught?

RS: Currently, I teach two courses at IUPUI: Web Design and Systems Analysis.

The principal question for me is whether university educators should focus on fundamental concepts and enlightened discourse about the topic or particular details of current approaches such as specific tools, techniques and vendors.

For example: Adobe Dreamweaver is hot right now, so should our classes use that program extensively or advocate only generic text editors for writing code?

For example: Should we explain in detail how to create CSS sprites as it is the clever idea of the moment, or emphasize a more philosophical and less technical discussion of separation of presentation and content?

For example: Should I teach students about the (copyrighted) Rational Unified Process, explain how to use Microsoft Visio to draw UML diagrams, or engender a broader conversation about software, systems and design?

I personally believe that the university is not so much intended provide a toolkit of skills, tricks and hacks, but instead to engage creative and intellectual capacities and foster deep contemplation and discussion. There are some facts which must be learned by memorization (like common CSS properties) but I really am much more interested in students who can explain the difference between italic and emphasized text, than those who can recite all the CSS positioning types on command. Dreamweaver, likewise, is a perfectly wonderful tool, but I feel that teaching students to use that application is biasing them toward a company. Open source programming languages seem to be a better choice for teaching concepts than using those donated by a vendor. Doing that is about as academically appropriate as insisting students take notes using only Bic-brand pens.

This is not to say that students do not need these skills and nor that there is no place where they should be taught. Universities have a long, intentional tradition of neutrality and academic freedom, and locking on to one vendor or one technique eats away at that storied principle. I would like to see institutions like IUPUI clearly mark all courses as “academic” or “practical” and avoid mixing the two. The latter could be evaluated differently, especially with regard to traditional issues such as plagiarism, proper citation, and grading. The university needs to certify that you understand, say, database design. Whether you pick up some knowledge with Oracle or MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server is your prerogative and while the school might provide resources, you should not receive the same kind of grade or authoritative report of your progress in these areas.

Our program is in flux now, but I think the most important area to change is to increase cohesion between courses in the sequence. Too many classes have unclear or unenforced prerequisites. Curriculum expectations are not solidly defined. An old expression states that “teaching begins when teachers close their doors.” This may be the reality, but the future of education is open. I hope that my courses and my teaching will be audited, reviewed and improved by others more in the future.

TCW: I know you are a usability evangelist. Like me, I’m certain you have a list (written or in your head) of five things that just drive you nuts about the web. Share with our readers five usability challenges that should be easy to tackle, but for one reason or another, are making the web harder or more confusing to use than it should be.

RS: Here goes…

1. File Uploads - We still transfer files between local storage and the web with a painful, senseless user experience. Instead of having to click a “browse” button and an “upload” button, you should be able to drag and drop files to the browser. You should be able to view your local hard drive inside a web application just like you can using the OS dialog for a desktop program. Every file you create should *automatically* have a private, well-formed URI, which through an appropriate authentication mechanism can be shared with an application. The distinction between browser and non-browser interaction needs to end.
2. State Synchronization - We have all typed a witty comment onto a blog post or half-filled a request form only to have a distraction or a browser crash destroy our work. Our bookmarks, cookies, passwords, and preferences do not follow us from computer to computer. (Google Toolbar and Delic.io.us help a little) The back button is comically ineffective, allowing us not to see our history but only the list of pages in the current session which we actively selected (Try it: above, click “People”, then “Conferences”, then Back, then “Jobs”, then try to get back to “Conferences.” Forget getting back somewhere tomorrow.) Not to mention three click-monte.
3. <RSS - A technology which is two-thirds reassurance (it’s not just simple syndication, it’s Really Simple Syndication) should tip off even the most gullible surfer. RSS feeds don’t syndicate, they demand to be picked up on a certain interval. There’s no agreement on how to handle presentation (such as, referencing a URI to a CSS file), so lots of people just inject style directly as HTML hidden in CDATA. You now have to test your feed with different readers, which creates a new dimension on top of testing your site with different browsers. There is a much better and trivial solution: create a new SMTP header for syndicated content, and just send messages when the data is ready. Your client can collect it the way it always has, and use the header for authentication and filtering. If you really want to expose your information architecture to end users, then make source XML available.
4. Multi-page Articles - Why must I click through several links advance through your article? I have a scroll bar, place all the content on a single page. This may limit the number of times you can interrupt me with advertisements, but I didn’t come to your site for this purpose. I came to read the article. Every extra click and page refresh you require is a waste of my time.
5. Redesigns - The web development business (and the marketing VPs who employ them) is obsessed with cosmetic makeovers. The dramatic destruction of an old site with a new site that does exactly the same thing, only newer sounds like a great idea. However, doing so alienates countless users who are accustomed to an existing model. Instead, upgrades should be gradual, with new features introduced as optional instead of mandatory. When faced with a new design, users should be able to safely exit to the old familiar approach as they learn your new system. Stop pulling the rug out from under your users. Believe in their ability to change, but help make that change as painless as possible.

TCW: What about usability outside of the web? Do you have any usability nightmare stories you could share with our readers? What usability problems drive you mad?

RS: Finding usability problems in the real world is about as hard as imagining a barrel that contains fish. The Starbucks I’m in right now has three power outlets for a dozen, laptop-ready tables. Pairs of cushioned chairs face each other at 90 degree angle, so even a short meeting causes neck pain. Cords for the window shades are positioned behind furniture, so an average-sized person must crawl around obstacles like a coffee shop archaeologist to reduce glare. Once you start to see the world in terms of usability, it’s hard not to find something to fix everywhere you go.

TCW: You’ve been participating in conversations on the ultra-popular microblogging website Twitter. What do you think of Twitter? And, do you think it’s really useful?

RS: To quote Jeb Banner, “Twitter is an amazingly useful waste of time.” Mostly, Twitter is tremendous fun and not of great value. But I believe it can be helpful; I have gotten business (and made purchases) off of connections built solely on Twitter.

The arbitrary 140 character limit of Twitter enforces brevity; when combined with the public nature of the service Twitter can be an information platform for pure and powerful ideas. Certainly, Twitter makes everyone a citizen journalist in miniature, such as how TwitPics of the Hudson river crash scooped traditional media. If anything, Twitter is a primitive form of “whuffie” (social hard currency) advanced by Cory Doctorow in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. We’ve already seen popular bloggers receive free products from manufacturers in hopes of positive reviews, perhaps Twitterers will actually receive some kind of payment for their contribution to the community based on follower count.

TCW: As you may know, I’m a proponent of adding social networking functionality to web services, websites, and software products. Do you see a movement toward including the user in software development? Are there any organizations you are aware of that are doing it right?

RS: Yes, there is a movement toward including the user in software development, but that change is glacial in pace and a source of almost interminable friction. Those who create software, whether they are marketers or developers, tend to treat users as an *other* who inherently lack their vision or technical capacity. True user-centered design requires a radical release of ownership. It is not yet clear if there is a business model in this approach to building software.

Nobody is doing this right, but a couple of people are close. In specialized markets, for example, User Centered Design seems to be taking hold. SmartBear and Atlassian make development tools for software developers and have aggressively incorporated user ideas. Perhaps parts of the open source movement are achieving this by arbitrarily calling themselves their users. For example, if you’re working on Chandler, I bet you love Chandler, even if it confuses most everyone else.

TCW: If you had a crystal ball, what do you think it would show you about the next five years of technological innovation? What changes do you expect to stick (social media, video, etc.)?

RS: The next five years will see the near-complete absorption of all media into the Internet and the complete devaluation of content. Information is already free (as in speech) and will eventually become worthless (as in [stale] beer). We’ll stop using the phrase “social media” and all of the various branded clients and mediums will mesh into a general space. You won’t “twitter” or “blog” or “email” or “text” anymore, you will just be online and perhaps tag content as privately intended for particular recipients.

Since Moore’s law seems unstoppable, we’ll also see an unbelievable increase in automatic content association. Manually identifying people in photographs will sound as archaic as uploading a Polaroid does today. You’ll be able to search videos for text written in other languages by speaking it in your own. It will be effectively impossible to misplace or even destroy information.

The combination of the above will create huge economic and social problems. Millions of people who produce content or manipulate information by hand will find themselves out of work; analogous to the entire industrial revolution occurring the span of a year instead of a century. Likewise, total accessibility of information will eliminate privacy. (See this article for an early version of this phenomenon.) Appear in the background of a tourist photo or talk loud enough to be overheard by someone else’s mobile device, and your spouse will inescapably know you are buying a surprise gift---or flirting with a coworker.

Somewhere after the five year mark, we will pass the singularity. Then things will get really strange.

TCW:Thanks for taking time out to help our readers get to know a little about you. Are there any online resources you’d like our readers to know about? And, if they’re interested in talking to you (or hiring you) what’s the best way to contact you?

Go to any page; after it loads, paste [ javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true’; document.designMode=’on’; void 0 ] into the location bar of your browser, and then edit that page. Now ponder.

For more on my work, visit me online.

[Note: I’ll blogging from the MarkLogic User Conference, May 11-14, 2009 where I’ll be reporting on topics including those mentioned in this article. You can follow my adventures on the conference blog and on Twitter.]

TCW: Norm, thanks for taking time to chat with me today.we’ve known each other for some time now, but, for our readers who don’t know who you are, tell us a little about yourself and your connection to XML.

NW: Sure. I’ve been doing XML since we spelled it SGML. I started with Structured Generalized Markup Language back in the mid-nineties. My day job now is a wonderful combination of development work, helping customers build cool stuff with XML and XQuery, standards work at organizations like the W3C, pre-sales engagements talking about interesting and sometimes hard problems, speaking at conferences, working on community outreach programs, and other “evangelism” sorts of things.

I was an elected member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group for eight years, I’m also chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C and co-chair of the XML Core Working Group and a member of the XQuery Working Group. At OASIS, I’m chair of the DocBook Technical Committee and a member of the RELAX NG Technical Committee.

TCW: Wow! That’s a lot of committee work. Thankfully, the work you do helping these groups also benefits what you do for your employer, MarkLogic. When you joined the company, there were a few people in the industry who were really surprised. After all, you were looked upon as a rock star in the XML arena. Why did you decide to leave Sun Microsystems after so many years employment?

NW: I’m not entirely comfortable with the notion of “rock star,” but between DocBook, open source projects, and standards work, I’ve guess I have become fairly well known.

Anyway, why did I leave Sun? I have tremendous passion for XML; let’s say that over time I felt like my vision for XML and Sun’s vision, as I perceived it, became so divergent that I decided to make a change.

As soon as I started talking to people at Mark Logic and had a chance to play with the server, I knew I’d found a group of exceptionally sharp folks who shared my passion for XML. A year and a few days after joining, I’ve never once felt otherwise.

TCW: After you joined Mark Logic, I recall you writing a blog post detailing who Dave Kellogg, the CEO of MarkLogic, challenged you to think differently about XML. Tell us a little about the challenge, what you thought before, and what made you “think differently?”

NW: That post is “Thinking differently about XML”.

I’d been at Mark Logic for a few months; I’d been thrown into a couple of small projects almost on day one, so I’d been busy. I was still trying to sink my teeth into the server, I wanted to develop something a little bit bigger.

In the course of building this project, I ran into some performance issues. I posted some basic questions to an internal discussion list and one of the folks who replied was Dave Kellog. His response wasn’t a challenge as much as a clear, patient explanation of how I had the wrong end of the stick.

I was used to thinking about XML in terms of a number of documents. The exact details escape me now, but roughly speaking I was trying to get all the documents I needed, then reach inside each to find the elements I needed, then process those. Dave’s observation was that I now had this great big, honking fast database that understands XML “natively”, and has everything indexed for fast access to XML. Instead of grabbing everything I might need and then filtering through it, I should push the constraints down into the database. Instead of applying XPath expressions to a document I had in hand, I could apply it to the whole database and get nearly instantaneous answers.

The app ran faster, I learned something pretty cool, and the *CEO* had taken the time to answer some newbie questions on an internal list. I thought that spoke volumes.

TCW: That’s a great example of good leadership and one of the reasons your CEO is admired by many others. In fact, his blog just won an SIIA Codie Award! And, the solutions your clients are creating using Mark Logic’s products are nothing short of miraculous, as far as I’m concerned. MarkLogic Server, for instance, has made it possible for organizations to see trends in—and answer questions derived from—unstructured and structured content, together in one repository. What is MarkLogic Server? Why is it so useful? And, what can it help organizations do today, that was impossible—or, at least extremely difficult—to do in the past?

NW: MarkLogic Server is a platform for rapidly building and deploying XML content applications. It’s a highly scalable native XML repository that can store and retrieve XML content and perform powerful search and analytics on it.

I’m a document guy. I think that most of what’s really important to an organization is bound up in documents one way or another. I’m not denying that there are huge quantities of tabular data out there, but documents provide the context for that data. The ideal way to store documents, so that you can extract the most value from them, is XML.

Because we have access to the structure and content of documents and metadata about them, we can do so much with them. Searching comes up a lot, of course, and we can easily provide both full-text searching: find me all the documents about “structured programming”, and faceted navigation: refine these search results by selecting only documents written by a specific author.

Alerting is important to a lot of people. Instead of querying a corpus of documents to find items of interest, you let the server do the work. By storing the queries, you can get the server to respond on the fly when new documents are inserted that match your criteria.

An area that I’ve been excited about for a while is geospatial applications. A *lot* of people are now carrying around devices that know exactly where they are, so I think the ability to quickly perform geospatial queries is going to become increasingly important.

One of the things that really impresses me about our core engineering team is how dedicated they are to maintaining the composability of features. Full text, structured and geospatial searching, for example, are all independent features, but you can compose them together arbitrarily and it “just works” *at speed*.

TCW: Publishers really see immediate benefit from using MarkLogic Server. Tell us about a few implementations by publishers and describe the value they’re receiving as a result.

NW: Custom publishing is a hot topic. At the MarkLogic User Conference (May 12-14 in San Francisco), Wiley is going to demonstrate Wiley Custom Select, an excellent example of a custom publishing application that I worked on recently. It allows professors to mix and match content from different textbooks to build their own custom textbook for a course. They can even upload their own content to be included in the book.

By putting all of the textbooks in MarkLogic Server, we can dynamically assemble a custom textbook in real-time. We give professors incredible freedom because we have effectively instantaneous access to every book in the system.

Another cool one I saw was a medical imaging application. A technician looking at an x-ray could enter a speculative diagnosis and the system would search a huge library of medical textbooks and journals. In this case, the system didn’t return whole documents, it returned just examples of x-rays that were diagnostic of the condition the technician entered. This provides instant access to exactly the x-rays that the tech wanted to use for comparison as an aid to making a final diagnosis.

TCW: Those are some great examples. The changing nature of consumer information consumption habits has led to drastic changes in the journalism arena. Are any publishers using MarkLogic Server to help them engage their readers online and to provide them with interactive experiences you just can’t have with a traditional print publication?

NW: Absolutely. The one that immediately comes to mind is BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange. This is a complete “social network” style site built for business professionals. The site incorporates content from many sources, including users. User participation drives the relevance of articles, creating a positive feedback loop for higher quality content and user participation. This also helps the editors decide where to expend their editorial resources.

Another cool application that comes to mind is one I saw recently that was built for a petroleum company. This company has all sorts of research documents about exploration for petroleum reserves of one sort or another. One of the important things contained in those documents is information about the location of the deposit in question. Using our geospatial capabilities, we could provide an interface that combined not just full text and faceted navigation but also a dynamic map. Search for a topic and the points on the map change to reflect only those search results. Select a subset of the points on the map and the search results change to reflect only documents about those points. It was all very cool.

TCW: The success of the iPhone is amazing. That little device (like the iPod before it) helped reshape an entire industry and impacted almost every vertical market along the way. Are you seeing anyone using MarkLogic Server to power iPhone solutions? Is there an iPhone app that uses your software?

NW: MarkLogic Server is well suited to supporting mobile clients. Applications running on the server have complete access to all of the content. They aren’t limited, for example, to just finding whole documents. They can find, combine, and aggregate information within documents at a very fine level of granularity. That means you can send exactly the right data to the mobile client. Sending less means better performance and less drain on the battery.

As apps get more sophisticated and need more capabilities, the need for strong server-side components will only increase. For example, geospatial capabilities are already hugely popular on the iPhone. If the next generation of iPhone software really supports push content, as it’s expected to, then alerts will be huge, too.

TCW: Let’s switch gears a bit. I know that you and I see eye-to-eye on the importance of XML to the world of publishing. But, I wonder if XML has been overlooked a bit as a powerful tool to help us provide data in ways that are meaningful to users. For instance, the whole field of information visualization is dedicated to helping us provide the best way to present information, depending on what type of information it is, and what question we’re hoping to answer. For instance, I love the examples provided by the often-cited Simile Project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Timeline, for example, provides an excellent and easy-to-understand example of how looking at data over time makes it easier to understand it. Do you know of other examples on the web that use data visualization in interesting and meaningful ways?

NW: Visualization is really important. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. I see this all the time in mapping mashups, but you can use MarkLogic Server to support almost any kind of visualization because it can retrieve the data you need so quickly. If you’ve seen MarkMail, for example, you’ve seen how it can quickly generate bar graphs. Sometimes those graphs help you really quickly narrow your search.

TCW: Guy Kawasaki has said that it may take a good 20 years for some new technologies to take off and gain widespread general acceptance. We’ve had structured content standards—leading up to the XML standard we have today. Is it time for XML to really take off? What does your crystal ball tell you? And, if so, what are some of the primary drivers for adoption?

NW: Prognostication is not my strong suit, but as far as XML goes, we’ve reached a point where it’s used in everything from traditional book publishing to mobile phones to gas pumps. I bet some part of your communication with the world passes through XML more often than you realize on any given day. Everyone using a recent version of Microsoft Office or Open Office is using XML, they just might not know it. I think widespread, general acceptance is upon us.

That said, I’m sure there are organizations that haven’t embraced XML. To the extent that information, that is, documents and other content artifacts, are an important asset to them, they’ll continue to be drawn to XML because it leverages reuse and repurposing of those assets in a way that drives down costs.

TCW: While you’re making predictions, you’ve been involved in the publishing world for a long while. What changes do you see in the publishing arena? Given what you know and believe, what will publishing look like ten years from now?

NW: Can I repeat that bit about my ability to prognosticate? If I could predict the future, I’d be rich.

As a distribution mechanism of ephemeral information, I think we’re all going to be reading more on some sort of electronic device. I’m hoping for an electronic paper breakthrough that lets me carry around something that more closely resembles a flexible, paperback book. Something with a hundred or so “pages” that I can turn and riffle through but where the “ink” is all electronic.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for publishers. They’ll have a ubiquitous platform for delivering rich, personalized content. With a powerful content server in the background, they’ll have the ability to deliver compelling content in an agile way to a diverse audience.

TCW: One question I continue to have to answer is “Why can’t we just put our documents in the database we have already?” Can you help our readers understand the problems with this line of thinking. Why aren’t databases that rely on tables and columns appropriate for content chunks that comprise typical documents? Why is is a bad idea to go down this path?

NW: The short answer is because typical documents don’t look like, simply aren’t, tables. The slightly geekier answer is “mixed content”. The simple truth is that relational databases were designed to solve a different problem.

Think about it this way. If you weren’t already biased by the tabular database systems that you already have, could you imagine in a million years that you would look at an XML document and think, yeah, let’s decompose the elements in this document and put them in columns in tables? Wouldn’t happen.

There’s a whole science built around analyzing tabular data, decomposing it into the right tables, and building the best indexes for it. The goal of this exercise is to systematically eliminate redundancy while preserving data integrity.

Tables just don’t make sense for documents. We’re chatting, but your audience will be reading this. Is this paragraph in the same column as the preceding paragraph? The same row? The same table? These questions don’t even make any sense.

Words and markup all mixed together in irregular ways, what happens in paragraphs and what we structured markup guys call “mixed content”, is just too loosely structured to sensibly model in rows and columns.

Another problem is information loss. Let’s say you shred a document and stick it into a table somehow and add metadata to let you query it. The fact that the metadata says that document 17 talks about Paris isn’t anywhere near as interesting as actually being able to write queries about the structure of the document. How does it mention Paris? In what sense? Is it near other markup that gives us clues about its importance? And so on…

There have been all sorts of approaches for getting documents into traditional databases: storing them as “blobs”, shredding them on element boundaries, inventing odd, nested table structures, and I’m sure at least that many other methods that escape me at the moment.

They’re all inferior in one way or another. If all you have is rows and columns and tables, then you can invent something that works at some cost in terms of time, or space, or utility. Sometimes, all three.

Relational systems give you a lot of query flexibility over data that has a constrained schema, and is consequently very structured and regular, which human prose is not. Curiously, if you invert those parameters, that is, if you think in terms of very little flexibility in the query and an effectively unconstrained schema, what do you get? You get full text search engines.

What an XML Server gives you is really the best of both worlds. You get a lot of query flexibility over data that, while it isn’t completely unconstrained, is also very flexible.

TCW: Wow, I just realized we’re out of time. Anything else you’d like to add?

NW: No, I don’t think so. It’s been fun chatting with you!

TCW: Thanks for your valuable time today. I really appreciate you helping our readers understand a little about you, the company you work for, and the content standards and technologies that are changing the way we consume content.

NW: You’re most welcome. Talk to you again soon.

Localization software and services vendors usually hail from the translation industry. Some claim to have created entire suites of tools designed to assist you in adapting your products—and product information—for non-native customers, especially those from other nations and cultures, who likely don’t share your native language. Sometimes known as internationalization and localization, this type of service (and the software tools that make their home in this space) are indeed valuable. They can help you adapt products and services for sale in specific regions of the world and help you address locale-specific concerns, including translation of text and other content types. Unfortunately, that’s not really helping us solve the real problem: delivering the wrong information, to the wrong people, at the wrong time, and often, in the wrong format.

What these software and service vendors can’t do is help you provide personalized content designed for individual people in your existing customer base. Sure, some of them are happy to sell you the types of software you’ll need to manage personalized content. But, it’s up to you to make the effort to discover everything you can about each member of your target audience and to use that information to create relevant content that will resonate with each person you’re targeting.

Unfortunately, if you’re like most organizations, your firm probably sucks at this extremely important business task. But, don’t fret. You’re not alone. Pretty much every organization on the planet sucks at content personalization.

Localization Means Getting Personal

Simply put, content localization is nothing more than one very small ingredient in a successful content personalization initiative. It’s “low hanging fruit” for those who are trying to improve their global product marketing or worldwide sales and distribution channels, but it’s not really providing the value most organizations need in such challenging economic times. One only has to look to the world of retail marketing to see the value of personalized communication.

The 2008 Personalization Survey conducted by ChoiceStream found 39% of consumers overall are more likely to click on an ad if it is personalized, while that number rises to 58% among those who shop online at least several times a month.” The more personalized those ads are the better chance retailers have of connecting with those consumers.

The survey also found that the bigger the spender, the greater the interest in personalized ads. Half (50%) of those spending more than $250 online over the past six months indicate that they are more willing to click on ads that are personalized. This compares with only 32% of the smallest spenders.

If you’re like most consumers, you don’t want to receive mass marketing messages masquerading as personalized content. The only ones who apparently think this approach is a good strategy are old school marketers that believe a 2-5% response rate is something to be proud of. [Hint: It’s not!] And, consumers don’t find content valuable unless it meets their individual needs. According to the ChoiceStream survey, 45% of consumers reported receiving personalized recommendations that were a poor match based on their tastes and interests in 2008 (vs. 46% in 2007). The most often cited reasons for why recommendations were considered to be poor were that they were “inappropriate” (51%) or that they didn’t match their personal preferences (48%).

And, it’s not just advertisements that consumers want personalized. According to the ChoiceStream survey, consumers continue to recognize the value of personalization in other types of content. Interestingly, 71% of respondents said personalization would improve their social networking experience by introducing them to other members with similar interests and preferences.

What Is Personalization, Exactly?

The term personalization, unfortunately, is often misunderstood. Personalization does not—as many seem to think—mean inserting the name of the person into a web page or email message, or emblazoning it on a direct “junk” mailer. Personalization is much more than that. It’s an explicit attempt to accommodate the differences between individuals by providing content based on the characteristics of each person in a target audience. Characteristics used to determine what types of personalized content is appropriate include individual attributes like: interests, faith, context, locale, gender, sexuality, previous behavior, marital status, home ownership, financial status, area of study, etc.)

Personalization requires us to know our audience—not just pretend we do—and to develop relevant content of value to each individual, based on what we know about them. That said, when developing a content personalization strategy, it’s also important to consider what is NOT known about each individual and to address this lack of information by finding creative ways to learn (or discern) this missing data.

Language and cultural differences—often things content localization tools were built to address—are things we often assume are similar characteristics of members in a target group. That’s seldom the case. However, even if we are correct, when we only address these two factors, chances are we’re still producing lots of content that doesn’t resonate with many of the individuals that make up our audience. This is one big reason why localizing content without incorporating personalization is nothing more than putting a bandage on a bullet hole. Failing to incorporate personalization in a localization project is a HUGE waste of content creation dollars and a lost opportunity to improve our communication effectiveness.

There’s an old adage that should serve as a proper warning here: “When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.”

Making Content Resonate With Content Consumers

As a gay, Caucasian, 45-year old American male, I don’t share the same characteristics as everyone else who lives in my corner of the world. I recently relocated from Indianapolis, IN to Palm Springs, CA - a city that is both disproportionately gay (more than 50% of residents in the city self-identify as gay or lesbian) and Hispanic. I run my own business from a bedroom in a house I rent. I have posted nearly 5,000 “tweets” on Twitter. I just bought a new car. I shop at Target - a lot! I have a cat. I travel frequently. I prefer cash over credit. I have a blog. I recycle. I just registered to vote. I have two iPhones. I will drive out of my way to go to a mall that has an Apple Store. I have a VOIP telephone line. I have Skype. I have a swimming pool. My mom and dad are still alive and well. I am learning Spanish. I mix dance music. I prefer vinyl over CDs. I travel 20-30 times a year on an airplane. I leave the U.S. 2-3 times per year. I love to work in coffee shops. I’m a Mac person. I buy lots of music. I am an uncle. I’m on a low carb diet. I need new eye glasses. I plan to buy a house in the next five years. And yet, I still get the same old junk mail in my post box as everyone else, regardless of the aforementioned facts that describe me, the public records that document many of these events, the data contained in the repositories of all of the companies I interact with, and the many other pieces of data about me not included in any easy to access information portal.

The same holds true for email. I still get exactly the same uninteresting, ill-conceived mass email messages that I received when I lived in Indiana - despite moving 2,000 miles, two time zones, and six agricultural hardiness zones away.

To add injury to insult, the biggest violators come from two camps: marketers pushing localization services and/or software and makers of component content management systems—tools that can actually aid in the management and delivery of personalized content. Ironic? Inefficient? Stupid? Reason to fire a C-Level executive? You betcha! Frankly, it’s laughable (unless you’re an investor!) that the same companies that want to sell you tools and technologies that can help you segment your audience and deliver relevant, personalized content don’t have the time to do this themselves. This type of non-sense was excusable a few years ago. It’s not any longer. If you’re a localization or content management system vendor and you have the nerve to tell your prospects that things like response rates, customer satisfaction, and content quality are improved dramatically when you localize (and by extension, personalize), then it makes perfect sense that you should adopt the exact same tactics for your marketing messages and other content types.

I am certain that I am not the only one that sees how incredibly dumb the current approach is. And, I’m equally confident that some of you reading this article are probably not too happy that I’ve shined light on these disturbing facts. Just be happy I didn’t use your company names and less-than-flattering screen shots of your marketing materials and email advertisements. In the social-media-powered world we find ourselves in today, there’s no excuse for hiding your head in the sand. If you’re still marketing your localization/translation/global information product management software or any one of a number of content management systems (web, component, learning, digital asset, or otherwise) expect a fair amount of public scrutiny from folks like me. Scrutiny and public humiliation may be exactly what you need to force you to begin personalizing your own content. And it’s likely the only way you’re going to get the budget you need to make the same changes your asking your potential customers to make. Such a change is not going to be easy. But, just wait until you see the ROI.

It All Depends On How You Define Success

Savvy marketers know that traditional “spray and pray” approach to marketing can’t compete with highly-targeted, personalized content marketing. Let’s look at the typical marketing approach data to gain an understanding of the concept of direct marketing success.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, the typical response rate for a direct marketing campaign in 2007 was between 2.15 and 5.35 percent. Catalog shopping promotions came in at 2.24%, direct mail fundraisers at 2.1%, lead generation emails at 4.09% (although this may be an exaggeration depending on your definition of “lead"), and website or in-store traffic building at 5.35%.

Do these numbers sound impressive to you? Before you decide, let’s flip those Direct Marketing Association numbers around. Here goes: In a typical direct marketing campaign, 94.65% - 97.85% of those who were targeted will not respond to the offer. Wow! That doesn’t sound like a good use of marketing dollars. And, the reason it sounds like it’s not good is because it isn’t. It’s a huge waste of money caused by the absence of personalized marketing content. And, it’s not acceptable, especially when it doesn’t have to be this way.

One-to-one marketing is the purview of companies like JFM Concepts, makers of the enormously successful personalized URL (PURL) marketing solution VDP Web. While leveraged primarily as a web and direct marketing campaign creation and management tool, personalized URLs outperform old school direct marketing by leaps and bounds. A personalized URL program for Strike Yachts yielded an incredible 14% response rate; while a PURL campaign for ThermoSpas pulled 15.5%, yielding $187,000 in revenue per mailing and an ROI in excess of 10,000%.

JFM Concepts is one of a handful of companies helping marketers gain a new understanding of success in the direct marketing arena. These success stories are made possible because JFM marries information its customers know about their clients (contact data, sales history, etc.) with information collected from public sources (including the National Consumer Database) along with behavioral data (tracking data such as responses to previous offers) to create what they call their Profile Complete Real Time Personalization Service—a real-time content matching engine that can provide personalized content to an individual based on their personal profile. It’s like Match.com for marketing. And, it’s getting lots of attention from companies like Caterpillar, Marriott, and other big name global corporations because it works better—much better—than old school approaches.

And yet, even the major players in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) arena—companies with great big budgets—have yet to see the value of personalized URLs in their own marketing—nor have they realized that their customers need the same capabilities.

Your Color Almost, But Different

In my college years, I was a newspaper reporter whose job it was to locate unusual feature stories. One afternoon I accompanied a group of drag queens on a shopping adventure. They were hunting for low-priced, high-quality wigs from a popular Korean wig market on the East side of Indianapolis. I thought the story would be interesting. According to my editor, it wasn’t. The article never saw the light of day. But, something the wig store owner said to her female impersonator customers relates to the point of this article. Each time one of the guys tried a wig on, no matter where she was in the store, she would shout out, in really bad Kor-Engrish, the same marketing mantra:  “Your color almost, but different.” Today I think back on her approach to making a sale and think it’s pretty much the same tactic used by almost everyone who isn’t using personalized content. Let’s just put something out there, something that *might* be of interest to *some* people in our target audience. Maybe it’s not exactly what they want, but it’ll be their color, almost.

This problem is not limited to marketing. It’s a problem for every organization, in every industry, in every country on the planet. There are very few exceptions.

An adult film producer recently asked me to chat with him about his idea to create sexually-explicit films for a Latino audience. He bumped into me in a coffee shop and overheard my conversation with a client about the need to provide content of relevance to the individual members of their audience. He told me that no one was producing relevant adult content for the millions of Mexicans who have found their way into the United States. It’s not about language, he said, as there are already a plethora of adult films translated into Spanish. “It’s about telling the story in the way Mexican consumers can relate,” he said. “The adult flicks produced in the U.S. for recent immigrants don’t resonate with them.” He had an idea to use the mega-popular and highly-addictive novella story format to create adult-themed films that are not only delivered in localized Spanish, but also attract a loyal base of fans who can’t wait until the next episode to see what will happen next.

Compete, a magazine for gay and lesbians interested in sports, has the same challenges as much bigger sports publications: Delivering the right stories, to the right readers, at the right time, and in the right format. Despite being targeted at sports enthusiasts in the gay community, Compete struggles like every other organization to provide relevant content to its gay and lesbian readership. The one primary difference is that they readily acknowledge the problem and are working to overcome it.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Compete has to figure out a way to accommodate the wide variety of individual gay readers they are targeting—both women and men—while not losing any of them to the competition. Is bowling a sport? Some readers don’t think so. The International Gay Bowling Association disagrees. So do the tens of thousands of gay bowlers who participate in the world’s largest gay sporting organization. Should the magazine include articles about gay artists who focus on painting sports figures? Should the publication include articles for gay parents on teaching their children about sports? These and many. many other questions need to be answered to help ensure success.

Developing a personalized content strategy for Compete will involve the publishers making a concerted effort to identify the attributes of the individuals in their target audience, combine it with data about their behavior (login and click-through data), and then using that information to create and deliver relevant content to subscribers. The magazine has recently adopted a web content management system that the management hopes will help them manage and deliver engaging content to readers on an individual level. While the magazine management has dreams of seeing their print publication on newsstands around the globe, overcoming the personalized news challenge may be easier—and more affordable—to tackle on the web.

The “Your Color Almost, But Different” problem is something the folks at Google have been working on for some time now. In November of 2007 the company received a patent from the U.S. government entitled “Customization of Content and Advertisements in Publications”. The patent claims Google has developed a “method of receiving personalized content from a plurality of content sources, the personalized content being based on user input; receiving a personalized advertisement based on user input; and creating a customized publication including the personalized content and the personalized advertisement.” The need for such a patent, Google explains, is because consumers are often provided content that doesn’t resonate with them.

“Consumers purchase a variety of publications in various forms —print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books / e-Books), electronic magazines, etc.), etc. The publishers define the content of such publications, and advertisers define which advertisements (ads) may be seen in the publications. Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them.”

And while the Google patent focuses on providing relevant content to readers, it also addresses the needs of content publishers and advertisers.

“Publishers often lack insight into the profiles of consumers who purchase their publications, and, accordingly, miss out on subscription and advertisement revenue due to a lack of personalized content and advertisements. Advertisers,” the Google patent claims, “sometimes purchase sub-optimal or worthless ad space in an attempt to reach their target markets. Advertisers also have difficulty identifying new prospective market segments to target because they have limited insight into the desires and reactions of consumers.”

Google knows the “Your color almost, but different” approach is a big, fat failure. Response rates of 2-5% are nothing to brag about. The “spray and pray” method has run its course and needs to be replaced by personalized content, created, managed, and delivered with individual users in mind. Lesser approaches don’t provide maximum return on investment, no matter what software and services vendors may say.

The Lesson

Localization without personalization is really missing the point. Translation and localization of interfaces and products/services is indeed needed, but there’s really no good reason to translate content until you know exactly what you need to say, how to say it, and to exactly whom your speaking. Localization in isolation is not going to solve your problems—and, in fact, it may create an entire new set of problems (fodder for another article) once you realize the error of your ways. Translating generic content that is not optimized for personal needs of individual customers means you don’t respect your customers enough to care about what they really want and need. It also means your idea of respect is limited to providing translated content that doesn’t address the needs of the individual human beings you are targeting.

If your organization is serious about saving money, eliminating waste, and developing profitable customer relationships that last, take the promised ROI from translation savings and content reuse, factor in the benefits of personalization, including, but not limited to, improved response rates, higher sales figures, and enhanced customer satisfaction ratings and you’ll soon see how much better you could be doing. By eliminating the “Your color almost, but different” approach, you may find the secret to your future success.

What do you think? Share your comments with our readers and don’t forget to include your contact information in your response. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

I am not sure what happened between 2001 and 2009. It could be that with a growing business and family, I just lost focus. But, I distinctly recall hearing about a new and exciting standard called XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) sometime around the end of 2001 or the start of 2002…

Well nearly seven years later, the details escape me as to how I became familiar with the XLIFF. Working in the translation and localization industry, the standard is of direct use to me and my colleagues. We have even managed to make use of XLIFF on a few occasions, since the tools we use for computer-aided translation natively support files in this format.

This article is not about XLIFF as a standard. As far as I am concerned it is a fine standard and appears to be getting the requisite attention from the XLIFF Technical Committee within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). My commentary is directed at everyone involved with content management system (CMS) tool development. (And, I don’t mind using a shotgun where a scalpel may be more appropriate).

In localization work, we interface with lots of different web content management systems--from those built by smaller web development companies to help their customers manage corporate sites to larger enterprise-wide deployments of third-party CMS software. From my experience and where I sit in the localization food…er, supply chain, most CMS developers recognize that they must offer hooks for localization, i.e. an easy way for localization vendors to easily access content within the authoring-to-publishing workflow. For this, we are quite grateful, because just a few short years ago, we didn’t even get a hook.

The real issue is the nature of the hook. Some CMS developers assume or are directed by their customers to provide a “translator interface” (scare quotes intended). Others are instructed (rightfully so) to simply make it easy to extract source content and readily reinsert translated content in the CMS database. The latter is the kind of hook we localizers like. We do not want to be given a translator interface because most developers are not translators and don’t have a clue as to how to design an efficient and translator-friendly UI. (If you are a CMS developer, don’t be offended, even the localization tool developers have yet to come up with a truly killer translation UI, and most translators still tremble at the thought of “Web-based translation”).

The first thing CMS developers miss in regard to translation interfaces is to support translation memory functionality. It is typically assumed by non-translator developers that what is required is a simple tabular interface that displays the original (source) text in the left column, and translation can be inserted into the right column. They will typically segment the text at the sentence level. This does allow someone to type translation for insertion into the CMS pretty easily. And, these forms are trivial for developers to construct. However, through these simple forms, there is no way to access a translation memory database that will enable translators to reuse common text or to leverage translated content from related projects; something translators have become dependent upon, having used desktop software that has been around since the early ‘90s.

I have seen a few smaller Web development vendors attempt online translation interfaces that even supported variable matches, a rudimentary type of translation memory. The form that contained the translation UI would constantly poll the database while the translator moved from segment to segment, checking to see if the current source segment matched a previously translated one. This approach, while accomplishing the intended goal, does not perform as well as expected in real time and is too slow for most translators. In addition, online translation interfaces usually lack otherwise standard features such as target language spellchecking and access to integrated terminology management tools.

At this point, I am bracing myself for the flood of emails from various Web and localization tool developers who, I am sure, will inform me of the respective capabilities of their online translation tools. Feel free to save yourself the carpel tunnel; I am aware of tools that do support these features. Unfortunately, your developers weren’t working with the respective CMS developers who attempted to implement their own poorly conceived solutions.

Here is the ultimate point:

To CMS developers—Don’t get into the translation business! Trust me; it’s crowded and full of people with liberal arts degrees. Don’t try taking the translator away from his or her desktop. You will only expose yourself to incessant whining. Focus instead on utilizing well-established standards such as XLIFF. Create robust and easy to use import and export functionality. Throw in a little bit of administrative functionality too that will enable CMS admins to quickly batch, bundle, deliver, track and receive XLIFF files from localization service providers. Also be sure to include smart hooks that allow translators to see the content where it appears either online or in documents; context means everything to translators.

To localization tool developers—Start thinking about working with the CMS developers. They are smart enough to build complex software just like you. It won’t take long for them to figure out translation memory engines. Once they have that, you’re sunk.

The results are in. Despite the economic challenges facing the global marketplace today, technical communication professionals are in need of training. The problem is finding the money for the classes (and more often than not, the travel), as well as finding and the right class (see below), at the right (low) price, in the right (nearby) location, from the right (trusted) provider.

Based on the responses of more than 500 technical communications professionals who answered The Content Wrangler Technical Communication Training Needs Survey, the top five hot training topics for 2009 include:

1. Writing topic-based content for reuse (44.2%)
2. Darwin Information Typing Architecture aka DITA (36.4%)
3. Moving to unstructured to structured content (32.5%) - most often from unstructured to structured FrameMaker
4. XML authoring (28.1%) - in general
5. Simplified Technical English (20.1%)

The top five software training classes needed by technical communication pros include:

1. Adobe Technical Communication Suite (19.9%)
2. Adobe Captivate (15%)
3. MadCap Flare (14.2%)
4. Adobe e-Learning Suite (11.8%)
5. Adobe RoboHelp (11%)

While they didn’t make it into the top five, nearly one in ten survey participants said they need Author-it (9%) training.

The demand for these classes doesn’t always translate into sales, as any trainer will tell you. We asked survey respondents to describe “how likely” it is that they could obtain funding to attend necessary training in 2009. Only about 10% of respondents said getting funding is “no problem” (2.8%) or “should be easy” (7.6%), while the majority said obtaining funds is “not likely” (35.4%) or “impossible” (21.9%) in this economic climate. That’s not the complete picture, however. About one in three technical communicators surveyed said they may or may not be able to get training dollars for needed training classes. This group answered “obtaining funds for training is just as challenging as obtaining funds for any other service” (27.9%).

Whether related to the economy, or to other factors, the most desirable time of year for training classes appears to be evenly split between Fall and Winter, 2009, with Summer a close third. While Summer has traditionally been viewed as a horrible time to plan events, survey data suggests otherwise, with nearly a third of respondents saying they’d like to take courses this Summer.

Factors that most influence selection of classes include:

1. Training is not provided by a salesperson who works for the vendor
2. Training is taught by experienced industry expert
3. Training helps us create (or get started with) our own content
4. Training is coupled with post-training telephone support and consultation
5. Training is web-based

This survey was not a scientific examination of the entire universe of technical communicators. Like all industry surveys, this one was designed to capture feedback from respondents—this time about the training needs among those who elected to respond. It also served to provide participants with an opportunity to share their anecdotes, comments, and suggestions (we provided a text box after most questions to allow respondents to share additional information with us).

Here are a few of the more than 400 anecdotes received:

• “The case to show necessity will have to be stronger than in past, but once the case is made, the funding will be there.”
• “I would not say that obtaining funding for training is either easy nor difficult. As in years past, I must show how the cost of the training will improve my job performance. The cost of training must be less than the anticipated improvement.”
• “Our training budget is flat rather than cut.  We will need to provide justification for all training as our budget is shared across the department.”
• “Our company is being very selective and is utilizing webinars to maximize our training dollars so that multiple folks can attend and we can eliminate travel expenses.”
• “I’ve stopped looking at materials on any training that costs money, because I know there isn’t any. And there’s no time for the free ones!”
• “Funds for training held locally probably wouldn’t be a problem, but anything else would be nearly impossible.”
• “I was already able to get an 8 hour training course paid for this year.”
• “We can attend training and the company will pay for it, but they won’t pay for the travel, hotel, meals, or any other expenses. None of us can afford to attend unless it is in our home town or close by.”
• “It all comes down to price. It seems anything over $999 is considered too expensive.”
• “I will still be continuing to go to training, but I am looking carefully at each training opportunity and cutting back on some that I would have done previously.”
• “Obtaining funds is the easy part, finding affordable training is another matter!”

Keep an eye out for our next survey on “Web Content Management and Marketing Communication”. Coming soon.