From Kristiana Halvorson: "The most important thing to understand is this: Content strategy isn’t a bunch of tactics. It’s a plan." "It’s a well-founded plan, fueled by your business objectives and user goals. An achievable plan, created with your current business reality, content assets, and limited resources in mind. A future plan, for what’s going to happen to your content once you send it off into the world. And, most importantly, a profitable plan, where your measures of success ultimately have impact on your organization’s bottom line."

Evan Rosen, author of The Culture of Collaboration, writes about his 5 ways to bust silo mentality at work: Eliminate Needless Formality and Hierarchy (easy access) Provide One-Click Access to Entire Organization (easy access to everyone) Design Dedicated Physical Spaces for Collaboration Adopt Common Systems and Processes (standard platform) Establish Cross-Functional Mentoring

I came back from work today to find my 6-year-old daughter in a bad mood. She was upset because Mommy told her that she got low marks in a math test! Surprised? Yes, in Singapore, reality hits early! I find it surreal that tests are given so early but I’m going along with it to see how all this works. So I’m biased over here. But that is not why I’m writing this post. I decided to write this post after what happened next. I picked up the math paper and it took me a while to figure out how to do the sums. I’m pretty sure it will take you a while too. Here is part of the math paper. Were you confused? I was. The instructions are too complex and there are just too many distractions on the page. The sums are numbered, the options are numbered and then the answers too are numbers! And did you find the "brackets"? They are on the right hand side, a trick I guess to test the range of the eyes! See my daughter’s first answer in the brackets. Now see her second answer. Do you blame her for putting in the right answer in the bracket? Read the instruction, which number do I put in the bracket? The option number or the correct answer? The point of this test I gather is to help the student better ‘see’ math in abstract and concrete terms. That’s fine, but where does trickery come in to play? So, I took a shot at redesigning the paper and this is what I came up with in 5 minutes. I gave the same paper to my grumpy daughter and asked her to try the sums out. She looked at the paper and knew exactly what to do. She had a smile across her face. That is when I decided that I should share my concerns with the world. We live in a scary world where 6-year olds are asked to do such math sums. The least we can do is to motivate and encourage them to take on this challenge. Giving badly designed papers to these kids is such a cruel thing to do. So, if you come across papers like these then please do something about it.

An interesting take by Danah Boyd on how the information streams that we are living in (blogs, tweets, facebook, buzz, etc.) need some change in order to be relevant. The main argument here is that it is difficult to direct attention to something in a stream. And if we do manage to do that, it is difficult to hold on to it. I feel the same way when living in the stream of blogs and tweets. At times I long for the slow pace of a book. If only I could control the pace of my stream…. "To be relevant today requires understanding context, popularity, and reputation. In the broadcast era, we assumed the disseminator organized information because they were a destination. In a networked era, there will be no destination, but rather a network of content and people. We cannot assume that content will be organized around topics or that people will want to consume content organized as such. We’re already seeing this in streams-based media consumption. When consuming information through social media tools, people consume social gossip alongside productive content, news alongside status updates. Right now, it’s one big mess. But the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides."

Designing collections for the web - my new article over at PebbleRoad. The idea of the article came up when the team was discussing how best to leverage and surface homogeneous information. We were doing a redesign of a hospital website and found out that patients wanted to be connected with getting care in many different ways - by clinic, by doctor, by diseases and conditions etc. This idea let us to investigate collections, first as used by libraries, and then modified and as used by social media. This article compiles our experimentation and learning on the subject. "A collection is a list of homogeneous items. A collection on the web can be as simple as a blog (a list of posts) to as complex as a library collection (multiple lists of different library materials). Collections are an integral part of many websites, but not all collections are designed with ease-of-use and ease-of-retrieval in mind.  In this article, I’ll cover some theory and give practical advice on designing online collections for the websites and intranets."

Great piece on teaching math that is fun and memorable by Dan Mayer. His blog has more.

Donna Spencer on the different ways to classify information (alpha, location, task, etc.). A nice pick up from Wurman’s 5 hatracks article. "When you do information architecture work you’ll realize that most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. One of the challenges for an IA project is figuring out what way works best for your audience, your content and your project’s goals. In this article I’ll talk about a few different classification schemes you can use to organize your content, and offer tips on when and how to use each."

Very nice article by on faceted navigation by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callenderi. I really like the part where they differentiate faceted browse from parametric search. "On the other hand, the distinction between faceted navigation and parametric search is relevant. In parametric search applications, users specify their search parameters up front using a variety of controls such as checkboxes, pull-downs, and sliders to construct what effectively is an advanced Boolean query. Unfortunately, it’s hard for users to set several parameters at once, especially since many combinations will produce zero results."