Is there a pattern language for publishing content?

Using the work of Christopher Alexander as inspiration, Erin Kissane, author of The Elements of Content Strategy (and content strategist for Brain Traffic) tried to define a pattern language, or enduring principles of content strategy, in a humanistic presentation that pushes past the situation content strategists find themselves in today toward a vision of what world we could inhabit tomorrow.

Weird and Getting Weirder

Kissane: “Everything is weird and getting weirder,” meaning: in the last 10 years, we have an incredible transformation in media usage, a proliferation of distribution platforms, and an impressive increase in the number of devices for engaging with content.

The data: Less than 10 years ago, half of U.S. adults were online, now it’s 75%; analysts predicted 3.3 million iPad sales in 2010, but 14.8 million were sold; and sales of mobile computing devices surpassed desktop computers last year. The CEO of Forrester said the web is dead as the dominant architecture of the Internet, and apps would take over—but 26% of apps downloaded are opened once, and 3/4ths don’t make it into regular use

Result: Companies and organizations feel reactive, making fragmented decisions about where to engage and how to engage. Where’s the strategy in that?

Make People More Alive

The game of “Go” is about options—creating situations where you can defy your opponent’s effort to trap your pieces. That’s a rough metaphor for what we do as content strategists. There are no clear answers for how to use emerging technologies; just options, ways to situate yourself for better dealing with the stampede of ever-changing tools and outlets and unknowns.

And that’s where a pattern language comes in—a pattern with more life is one that makes the people who interact with it more human, more alive. Examples: The wonderful Powell Books in Portland, OR (where I have fond memories of frittering away afternoons and evenings amid the stacks); Central Park; Wikipedia; and Twitter.

Or, as William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things,” but first you must put the thing out on the street. The question for the content strategist is, what are you going to put on the street?

Kissane identifies the characteristics of that which you put on the street as accessible, searchable, findable, sharable, selectable, self-aware, portable, and usable—and these provide the ingredients in her effort to define the patterns for publishing content.

Guiding Principles for Content Strategy

Kissane’s framework for publishing decisions is one that “preserves the life of our content and enhances the life of our human users.” That means it needs to be earthquake-proof, like the Tomb of Cyrus the Great in Persia (which has withstood XX) because the tomb is set on the base, not attached, meaning it’s flexible—it’s own, whole thing. “Whole” is her first principle.

Her second principle is “enmeshed”—things like Twitter for the iPhone that offer sharability, selectability, finability; and, to her delight, Amazon’s deal to let you check out books on the Kindle from the library, releasing people from an otherwise closed system.

Her final principle is that it “resolves forces,” such as Netflix offering a huge selection of videos, for immediate download, right away.

Kissane suggests that we’ll see more and more of these things, and that as publishers of content, we need our own plan or way of making decisions to accommodate new technologies, with the guiding goal being that users have what they need.

Final Thoughts

I considered this presentation a beautiful work-in-progress—the gesture toward identifying the patterns that lead to enduring content strategies is worthwhile, one all of us ought to support. I’m not sure her principles are perfectly illustrated by her examples yet, or that the language of her patterns ought to be considered final or concisely defined, but I’m not sure that matters right now. It’s the first life for this presentation, the aspiration of which is to poetically reinvent what we can achieve with content.

Any effort to bring life to a content strategy that gives those who interact with the end product more life and more humanity is one I’m 100% behind.

(Based on a session at Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference, held in Minneapolis, MN May 9 – 11.)