Content Strategy Insights

Carlos Evia teaches structured content authoring using DITA and similar tools at Virginia Tech. Structured authoring offers a number of benefits, most notably easy content re-use. By carefully structuring content as it goes into a repository, it can be used later in a variety of publications and applications. Structured authoring has its roots in the technical communications field. As other fields discover the benefits of structured content, interest in the practice has grown. This led Carlos and his colleagues on the DITA Technical Committee to develop a less-technical version of the DITA standard - Lightweight DITA - that can be used by marketers and other non-technical content creators. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carlos-evia/

Michael Andrews literally wrote the book on metadata for web content (actually two books). Metadata puts the structure in structured content. It helps both humans and computers understand what your content is about and how it relates to other content. It ensures that your content is always up to date, easy to find, and able to be tailored to your customers' unique needs. In today's hyper-connected and ever-evolving digital media landscape, every online publisher needs a content metadata strategy. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-andrews/

Regardless of your job title, if you are the word person on a design team, you are a designer first and a writer second. Scott Kubie shows you how to collaborate with your tech and design colleagues while you get the writing done. ` ` https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-kubie/

Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby. She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to digital content mix. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilarna-nche/

Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product. Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design. Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/conv-design/

Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other. She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking behind how content is organized. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hannah-kirk/

Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications. Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carrie-hane/

Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nam-ho-park/

There are huge gaps between the human needs of digital-content consumers and the constraints and requirements of the digital systems that manage it. Andy Fitzgerald shows how information architects use data, stories, and meaning to bridge these gaps and bring content to life for the human beings who need it. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andy-fitzgerald/

Jack Molisani really knows how to put on an engaging and edifying professional conference. He founded and organizes the LavaCon technical content strategy conference, which draws hundreds of content professionals to cities like New Orleans and Portland each year. Jack has experimented over the years with virtualizing parts of his conferences, and he shares in this episode his discoveries about how to run online events. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jack-molisani/