I stumbled upon this site by the Australian Government's Department of Finance & Deregulation. They have a comprehensive collection of guides and checklists for managing their online properties. The collection covers IA to content strategy to intranets to KM. Cool!

An article from the New Scientist has Palo Alto Research Center in California warning that Wikipedia's growth is tailing off and extreme governance could be behind it. "Chi thinks that Wikipedia now includes so much information that some editors have turned from creating new articles to improving existing ones, resulting in more disputes about edits. Such disputes are not a level playing field because established editors sometimes draw on extensive knowledge of Wikipedia's guidelines to overwhelm opposition in a practice dubbed 'wikilawyering."

Jean Hollis Weber wrote this article in 2007 but it's still relevant today given the recent focus on content strategy. "This article provides information that will help you in planning and developing a style guide. You’ll find information about the purposes of a style guide and guidelines for what should (and should not) be included, whether to develop one or more style guides, and how detailed the style guide should be. At the end of the article, you’ll find a sample style guide outline (in PDF format) that illustrates many of the details discussed in this article."

Jeff Cram has written about 3 types of content management system projects. The technical migration The visual design The strategic redesign I think this captures a lot of projects I've done over the years. However, I'd like to add 'The politically motivated' to the list. These are projects that make you wonder why they are "on" in the first place. [Via ColumnTwo]

J.Boye has published an article that lists "[CMS] vendors you should examine closer and potentially send your RFP to? Interestingly J.Boye is a vendor neutral consulting firm, so this list might turn out to be quite influential.

Eric Reiss shares web writing tips that he has gathered over the years. It sems that George Orwell’s rules are a must-have in any such list. George Orwell, the English author of 1984, Animal Farm and other classics, has six rules of writing. Here they are - they’re all gems: 1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. 2) Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4) Never use the passive voice when you can use the active 5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent. 6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous!

Elliott Masie points to this article in the Armed Forces Journal by T.X. Hammes (retired Marine Corps). In this article, Hammes systematically describes how Power Point is a horrible tool for doing decision-making briefings. "PowerPoint is not a neutral tool —it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them… PowerPoint has clearly decreased the quality of the information provided to the decision-maker, but the damage doesn’t end there. It has also changed the culture of decision-making." Hammes’ argument is that Power Point runs against the grain when it comes to the decision-making process. It just does not allow for deep understanding and does not provide the big picture—big barriers to effective decision making. Hammes however thinks that Power Point is good for information briefs and not decision briefs. But Hammes is not convincing in this position. He hardly spends a couple of paragraphs on the positive aspects of Power Point before going negative again!

The NY Times reports on something we intuitively knew was the case: Teenagers don’t tweet. "Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations."

A Stanford University study seems to suggest that multitasking reduces intellectual efficiency. "Nass [the author] says the study has a disturbing implication in an age when more and more people are simultaneously working on a computer, listening to music, surfing the Web, texting, or talking on the phone: Access to more information tools is not necessarily making people more efficient in their intellectual chores."

Clive Thompson discusses the new literacy in Wired Magazine. He uses a study by Andrea Lunsford of Standford University to base his claims that the Internet is providing a new ground for literacy development. "Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others." Compare this post with the previous post where another Standford study finds that the fast-paced literacy confuses the decision-making process. We’re living in interesting times!