Bob Doyle mini-bio

DITA Users need not install anything or know XML to begin topic-based structured writing today. They use the browser-based DITA Storm editor or the desktop <oXygen/> XML editor with WebDAV access to author structured content in an online workspace folder.
A modest investment will help develop skills transferable
to top DITA XML Editors and XML Content Management Systems
(the site has extensive software listings in the Tools A-Z section).

November 2005 - Bob launched the TaxoTips website to identify taxonomies and taxonomy consultants who can help organizations increase the ROI on their taxonomies by adding memography and memetic search.

October 2005 - Inspired by Peter Morville's Ambient Findability, Bob launched the Memography wiki and The Memetic Web blog, developing techniques that greatly increase precision and recall of searches on the world-wide web.

2004-2008, Contributing Editor of EContent magazine. Bob writes seven print columns a year and twelve online columns for ECxtra. In 2005 he helped EContent editor Michelle Manafy design and build the voting system for the EContent 100.

In early 2008, I dropped my monthly online column for EContent, and this will be my last print column. I will focus my remaining time and energy on Information Philosopher and my I-Phi blog (http://blog.i-phi.org), an attempt to examine many classic philosophy problems from the standpoint of information.

I have been writing about content management techniques and technologies for EContent since June 2004, when I was 67 years old. Last June, I turned 72 and decided to refocus my energy on my longtime interest, information philosophy. I will tell you something about that in my December column, which will be my last.

Working in groups with free online tools has become an American passion. In his great 19th-century, two-volume work Democracy in America, Alexis deTocqueville estimated that there were more independent associations in America than there were individuals.

It is a truism that tools and technology are not the answer. Success depends on people and processes that make good use of those tools. The best content management system (CMS) may not help. As someone who has followed tools and technology for many years, I see a seismic shift away from monolithic content management systems to parallel distributed processing models that mirror the latest thinking in cognitive science about how our minds work.

The toolsets alone can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars when a fully automated publishing solution is integrated with an XML CMS, such as those from Astoria, Vasont, and XyEnterprise, or integrated editing, styling, publishing, and CM systems from PTC Arbortext. Significantly, however, where free content management solutions have been driven by the open source community—who built the leading CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla, and Plone—the free structured publishing option for DITA is the gift of one of those large corporations: IBM.

For those wishful thinkers who dream of corporate “knowledge management,” few tools are more seductive than the enterprise wiki. In the idyllic wiki Web 2.0 future, all your mission-critical information will be easily accessible with a quick keyword search. What’s wrong with this picture? We have plenty of evidence in its favor. Hasn’t Wikipedia shown us all the way?

The XML dialect of choice is the new DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), developed originally by IBM and now an OASIS standard. Of the original twelve XML editors, eight now do DITA, and one new WYSIWYG XML authoring tool has entered the market that does only DITA.

For the past three years, my annual wrap-up of content management systems has mostly counted the exploding number of branded products, for sale and open source, on the world market—now nearing 3,000. This year, I want to focus on a handful that are doing things so well that they show the way to the future for all the others.

The content you offer about your product is key, but so is understanding how people will search for products like yours, so you can match keywords on your site with their searches.

XML has established itself as the preferred technology for exchanging data between web applications. Now it has earned pride of place as a document markup language, its original purpose.

I have been writing for some months about the many benefits of component content management and structured publishing. They include content reuse, multi-format, and multi-channel output from single sources, and ease of translation and localization when the components are translated and approved independently.

Less is not a bad thing. In fact, for those creating the reusable multilingual user-oriented content of today’s websites and structuring the writing of today’s corporate documents, the cry should be “Less is less.”

In these days of exploding numbers of podcasts and YouTube videos, companies everywhere and many small organizations are asking, “where do we get the interesting content to fill these new communications channels with our corporate messages?”

I went to the Blackboard World 2007 User Conference in July to see the latest developments in eLearning technology. With 2500 attendees from 40 countries, BbWorld included many users of recently acquired WebCT. The emphasis was on higher education and I found that large companies have training relationships with strong eLearning teams at nearby universities.

Making the business case for a technology change is primarily about your return on investment (ROI). To make the business case for structuring your content, you must align the many advantages of structured content with specific needs in your business or organization.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the Defense Department’s development of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model and SCORM is on its way to dominating the content marketplace for on-line courseware, both educational and corporate. SCORM is now managed by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a part of the office of the Secretary of Defense, which now requires that all eLearning materials be SCORM compliant.

The localization industry is, by its nature, distributed worldwide. The best translators are native speakers living in their locales, though their knowledge of technical content means many are part of the brain drain from developing countries. Common Sense Advisory estimates that the global market for outsourced language services was $8.8 billion in 2005, growing at 7.5% per year. This is big business and localization has seen many revolutions in the technology used to move content to and from translators, each one improving speed and accuracy.

April was a busy month for content management trade shows, each bigger than the one before, and each with an emphasis on multilingual content.

I have been trying to understand the past and likely future of topic-based authoring. This is structured writing of content in which you break down the content into topics or “chunks” which have a good chance of making sense when standing alone. Single-source structured content is more reusable and localizable.

I wrote this month’s column online. Normally I use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, but the hard drive on my main laptop computer crashed and though all my document files are backed up, it will take some time to reinstall my applications so I figured, why not write about Google’s online office tools?

There has been a buzz lately on the mailing lists of the content management community about “Component Content Management.” The discussion was provoked by a 2006 issue of the Forrester Wave on Content-Centric Applications.

You may get what you pay for, but getting started with structured content creation using the new DITA XML standard has recently gotten a lot less expensive.

The holy grail of structured content is a tool that lets authors write their comfortable and familiar unstructured content, but which then auto-magically converts their text to structured XML when it is saved. But skeptics cite the old maxim “garbage in, garbage out” here. If every document is arbitrarily different, they say, there is no way it can be exported to useful XML.

In a classic high school essay, you are asked to find the similarities and differences between two things. In your current job, you may be asked to compare and contrast content management systems, probably the one you are using now and the new one being promoted by the boss’s brother-in-law, or worse, the one already purchased by the boss and installed by IT.

The terms Information Architecture and Information Architect were first coined by Richard Saul Wurman, a real architect who created the theme for the 1976 convention of the American Institute of Architects. His theme was The Architecture of Information. Twenty years later, Wurman solidified the essence of his vision with the 1997 book Information Architects, which documented the work of twenty leading designers of illustrations, diagrams, publications, software, and exhibits.

In EContent’s 2005 year-end roundup of the Content Management System marketplace, I (amazingly) found 1,879 distinct CMS products listed in 20 directories around the world. I have received dozens of requests for my spreadsheet listing all the CMS tools and a second spreadsheet of their most common features, which is being developed as part of the CMSML project (a markup language to help describe and evaluate CMS capabilities).

Publishing your content is not the last stage in the content lifecycle. For user-centered designers, in many ways it is the beginning of great content and services.

YouTube’s tagline, “Broadcast Yourself,” signals the beginning of a new era in digital content, though the necessary production technologies and distribution infrastructure may still be a few years off. The wide acceptance of blogging as a means of self-expression was the first wave of personal content. The second wave, riding on the phenomenon of iPod and iTunes, is personal podcasting. The third wave, which will dwarf the others in gigabytes of content transferred, is personal video or individual television. Variously called vlogging, vidcasting, or vodcasting (the marriage of video on demand and podcasting), I’ll simply call it iTV.

In a past column, I looked at content globalization, which includes internationalization (getting a site ready to handle multilingual content), localization (adapting to the culture and language of each locale served), and translation (including workflow tools to manage the translation process). Now I’ll take a look at publishing content to many locales.

In my recent review of XML editing tools, I looked particularly at their support for DITA, especially integration of the DITA Open Toolkit. The DITA OT is a reference implementation of the OASIS specification for “ready-made metadata” in the DITA DTDs and Schemas. Why is the DITA OT important and likely to affect your choice of a CMS in the near future?

In a follow-up to their landmark publication The Digital Classroom: How Technology is Changing the Way We Teach and Learn, the Harvard Education School noted that essentially all the K–12 classrooms in the U.S. have been wired (though many still have slow dial-up connections). So here, the “digital divide” is fast disappearing, from a pure technology standpoint. For the world as a whole the picture is not so uniformly bright. Asian countries like Korea and Japan have even greater connectivity than we do, while Africa, the Near East, Latin America, and Caribbean countries lag way behind.

Where does content management end and community management begin? For some IT diehards “everything is content,” including human resources data that tells all about every member of an organization. For others, content is about text, whether online documents, structured XML files, posts to weblogs, or attached multimedia files, like audio and video podcasts. Stuff about people does not belong in a content management system (CMS).

More and more often I hear clients who want a new website saying, “Why can’t we use a wiki?” or “shouldn’t we just start a blog?” This is particularly true of businesses and other large organizations that already have significant websites but aren’t satisfied with them for some reason or other.

Personas and Scenarios are powerful new tools in the content management toolbox to enhance the user experience of interacting with your content, especially web content that includes any form of interaction.

One of the great things about technical journalism is getting to talk to the people who are making the tools of tomorrow and thus changing the way we work. It’s also an opportunity to take the tools out for a spin. In this issue, I do my first comparative review of content-creation software XML Author and Developer tools.

You need people and processes, content flows, and a content lifecycle. If you have these things, most of the top tools will do a terrific job for you. But it’s not tools and techniques that create the content and its organization, make it usable, credible, and desirable, in short make it into valuable knowledge that is actually used.

Content Management Systems are only ten years old and yet there are already over two thousand types of them on the market. At the low end of the multibillion dollar CMS business there are weblogs, wikis, forums, and news portals–often called CMS-Lite. At the high-end are enterprise content management (ECM) systems, which integrate management of documents, records, customers, and expert knowledge, as well as provide ecommerce support. In either case, we need to structure information in these CMS to create the best interactive user experience. What are the differences between the Big CMS and the Small ones; and do they matter to optimizing the user experience?

OpenOffice is a suite of free office tools originally developed as StarOffice for Sun Microsystems to compete with Microsoft Office. Microsoft and Sun have both developed XML support for their office suites, with major implications for managing structured content. Advanced content management systems allow contributors to edit in standard office documents, and XML simplifies the ingestion of that content into a CMS

I must admit that can I not begin to count the myriad ways that content is input–created, captured, converted, and automatically ingested into today’s content management systems. With multi-channel, multi-format, and multi-lingual publishing, the full matrix of paths through to the system output is daunting, to say the least. However, there is one thing that all content inputs and outputs appear to have in common today: XML.

Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation are all terms that describe making content readable in the world marketplace. Our CM Professionals community has chapters around the world and hopes to translate its Web site navigation and some content into several languages for outreach to new countries, but the challenges are formidable. So, what is the best way to manage a content globalization project?

Keeping Found Things Found is a multi-year project at the University of Washington Information School by Professors William Jones and Harry Bruce, with Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research. The team is studying the various ways people attempt to make interesting Web pages they’ve found easily accessible later.

Want to try for yourself a new information retrieval method that is powerful yet very simple to understand and implement? One that will affect everything from enterprise search to your own desktop search? Follow these simple steps . . .

Major highlights of the Fall 2005 Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies and the accompanying fourth international Summit of the CM Professionals community of practice were both educational and entertaining.

It’s really a jungle out there in the Content Management System space. For the past couple of years, I have attended the Gilbane Conference in Boston and reported on the number of CMSs listed in various online directories, like the Google directory, Business.com, the Yahoo! portal, etc. There are well over a thousand systems listed, perhaps even two thousand. I myself edited several hundred entries in the DMOZ Open Directory Project (which has more than 1,000 in its various subcategories) and in my CMS Review (with a few hundred).

One of the mantras in the CM profession that is right up there with “Separate the content from the presentation” is the hard rule, “It’s never the technology, it’s the people and processes.” Most of the rest of us think of a CMS as software that helps people implement their processes, especially processes that involve digital content. But there is good reason to think of the software itself as involving three groups of very important people and processes.

Nearly ten years ago, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, information scientists at Xerox PARC, compared humans seeking information on computers and the Web to animals foraging in the wild for food. They equated clues that lead animals to food (usually their noses picking up a scent) to clues in a Web page that might lead to what they called information patches. “Informavores,” they called us content foragers.

When can I do some XML with you? Adapting and reusing this Beatles lyric for our theme works best in the UK, where Rita rhymes with Meta and DITA; It’s a stretch in the US, where Meta sounds like better and DITA sounds bitter.

The most well-known content management books, reports, and organizations describe various numbers of stages, or phases, of the content management process and lifecycle. While the experts differ somewhat on specifics, aspects of these stages are universal and those seeking to make a CM investment best be prepared.

How did an IP squabble lead to the first podcast? And why did Jenny Attiyeh quit radio and TV to create her own show on the Web? Well, it all began with the third international Open Source Content Management (OSCOM) conference at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in the spring of 2003. Dave Winer, the creative genius and enfant terrible of the blogosphere, was invited to give the keynote address to a couple hundred OS CMS developers from all over the world. As the architect of several Web standards like XML-RPC, SOAP, and RSS, Winer garnered enormous respect from his developer audience.

Where are all the Web Services we were promised a few years ago with the blossoming of so many new protocols in support of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

In all the talk about findability, a constant theme is augmenting a sites search engine by adding synonym rings, taxonomies, and maybe even thesauri–so a search for one keyword can find a lot of related topics (or subjects or concepts) on your Web site.

To paraphrase Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver: “We all gotta get organizized.” Otherwise, how will our Web site team know where to put all our content?

Open access is an initiative to distribute content over the Web at no charge to the reader. It is not an attack on copyrights, nor does it imply that no money is to be made on the content. Innovative business models suggest that sales of physical items like books and technical reports might actually improve if the content is freely available for browsing and searching on the Web–with some important caveats.

In the age of the intelligent search engine, the importance of metadata is called into question. It seems that Google can find everything we need by sending its robots to crawl around inside all of our documents. Why bother with the hard work of categorizing, classifying, and tagging each document with metadata that’s stored outside the document in a database, or worse, buried in XML/RDF tag attributes in a stored version of the document that is rarely served as is, so the expensive metadata is never seen by today’s search engines?

Do you get “sticker shock” when you see some of the three- and four-figure prices on analyst reports and some of the new books on content management? Well, I have bought some of them and now that I’m a columnist I’ve gotten more for review, so I will try to tell you whether they’re worth it.

As content management systems add functionality to serve the enterprise, one of the more important capabilities is digital rights management (DRM). For Web publishers with large content databases, how and whether they restrict access may be a life-or-death decision. If a company charges for content, its revenue stream is threatened by anyone duplicating its information.

What are we to think when so many products are being marketed these days as a CMS? For starters, content management seems to have won the day over many management software paradigms in the last decade or so. Companies that once did document management, knowledge management, information management, or–dare we remember–data management, all herald their products today as content management software. But what are we to make of the small specialized systems, fine tuned to organize content in very specialized ways, with intriguing new names like weblogs or “blogs,” wikis, news aggregators, news portals, and forums?

Sharing best practice knowledge is one of the stated goals of a “community of practice,” an increasingly used content industry buzz phrase. McKinsey & Co. defines a community of practice as “a group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge.” But even if a small community agrees on a particular best practice, where is the motivation for them to share their knowledge with one another and the wider industry?

So you have finally settled on a content management strategy. Now what? Unfortunately, resources for the CM Pro are not abundant, especially those that will actually help you put strategies into action. While some of these that I’ve collected here would benefit from community feedback, I offer some knowledge resources intended to help you and your organization get the most out of that hard-wrought content management strategy.

In February 2004 several CM experts were invited to present a one-day workshop on CM for Information Architects at the IA Summit sponsored by AIfIA and ASIS&T in Austin, TX. The CM professional in attendance were quite envious of AIfIA (the Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture, an international community of practice created by Lou Rosenfeld, Christina Wodtke, and other IA luminaries. So we asked Rosenfeld and Peter Morville to help us create a similar community for CM.

Here are 15 suggested steps to research enterprise CMS options. Some are expensive and some require plenty of reading and study so, while you may not have the budget, time, or inclination to complete them, you should know what you skipped. If you are part of a large organization that hires consultants to complete some or all of these steps, insist that they document how they covered each step and return the results to you.

A triple-barreled question facing many enterprises today is whether to use an application-building tool or “framework” to build a content management system (CMS); to buy one of the many out-of-the-box finished products in use by major Web sites; or to simply rent a CMS from an application service provider (ASP) and avoid the headache of running an application server in the enterprise’s data center.

Content management, especially popularized as Web content management, is nearing its tenth anniversary. More and more CMS vendors are converging on a basic set of features that characterize a content management system. So I spoke to a number of vendors to see who claims priority for their original contributions to the basic toolset.

Facets may help solve the thorniest problem of digital publishing today: How to help users find their way around your documents. Whether it’s Web content, document management, or a sophisticated knowledge management application, visitors want more than a good search engine to get around. I Column Like I CM, commentary on tools and best practices for CM pros written by Bob Doyle of cmsreview.com, debuts in today’s ECXtra and will generally appear on the first Tuesday of each month. Look forward to thoughts, advice, and anecdotes from someone who has spent 20 years in the trenches and continues to explore the ins and outs of content management!

In 2004-2006, Bob was the founder and first Executive Director (later Technology Advisor) of CM Professionals, The Content Management Community of Practice. Bob Boiko, Tony Byrne, Frank Gilbane, James Robertson, Ann Rockley, Lou Rosenfeld, Martin White, and twenty other CM Pros got behind Bob's idea of a new professional association.

Bob built the CM Pros public website in September 2004 and served as principal website designer and programmer. He helped CM Pros grow to almost 600 members at its fourth international Summit in Boston. CM Pros was named one of the 100 top Content sites of 2005 by EContent magazine.

1994-1998, Digital Video Editor, NewMedia Magazine. Wrote cover stories on Desktop Video, Web Servers, and (with Derek) Serving Dynamic Pages.

1993-1995, Desktop Video Columnist, Videomaker Magazine. Wrote stories on Desktop Video, Multicamera Editing.

1984-1986, 11th certified developer for Apple Macintosh, with Holly and son Rob wrote first desktop publishing program, MacPublisher, in 1984 (before PageMaker). Sold to Letraset in 1986.

1980-84, VP, Chief Scientist, iXO, invented Telecomputer, a handheld computer terminal with built-in phone-line-powered modem (cover of Byte magazine, 1982). Raised $13 million in venture capital funding.

The Toy Manufacturers of America named Merlin the best selling Toy and Game Item (SKU) in America in 1980 (2.2 million sold).

In 1978 Merlin (painted blue) and Milton Bradley Simon shared the cover of the Christmas issue of Newsweek.

1977-1980, Partner with wife Holly and brother-in-law Wendl Thomis, MicroCosmos, invented six electronic games for Parker Brothers, including Merlin, The Electronic Wizard and Wildfire, a handheld pinball game.

1973-1977, CEO of Super8 Sound, invented synchronous sound recorder for Super8 film cameras, with Wendl Thomis and Jay Kirsch.

1971-1973, Coordinator, NASA Ground-based Observing Program for the SkyLab missions.