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I’ve had my head stuck in various planning documents, so a shorter list than usual but, hopefully, thought provoking none the less.

  • Documentation = dollars ~ “Software development without documentation is self-centric. Documentation is a signal that the developer actually cares about her downstream users. For projects that actually want downstream users, write good documentation. It won’t cannibalize buyers: it will create them.”
  • TechComm Pros Wiki – could grow into a very useful resource, and as it’s a Wiki you can help.
  • TICAD 2007 – OK, this one is a bit cheeky as I’m going to be speaking at it. More on that later, but the programme looks interesting and has some excellent speakers (I’ve shared dinner with Bernard Aschwanden who is smart, engaging and… tells a dirty joke like you wouldn’t believe).

That aside, the issue of blogging came up on TechWR yesterday, with some people stating that they didn’t read blogs as they were just one persons opinion… but to me that is entirely the point. Admittedly weeding out the opinionated from the passionate, and the intelligent from the insulting can be tricky, but you soon gain a good radar for such things.

And I guess I should ask, which am I?

bookmark_borderContent Analysis for re-use

The basic premise of “single source” can be summed up in one word.

Re-use.

Sounds simple enough but there is a wealth analysis and work that is required before that, somewhat elegant, aim can be met.

Analysing your content for potential re-use opportunites is, by and large, an onerous task. Whether you do it all by hand, printing out reams of documentation and annotating by hand, or electronically compiling spreadsheets using colour coding or obscure (“they made sense to me at the time”) codes, it takes time to do it properly and there are no shortcuts. Sorry to break it to you so bluntly.

However it does mean that you are forced to spend some time re-reading your content, content which you might not have visited for some time or in some cases, may not have written yourself. You’ll likely find inconsistencies in the content itself, styling errors and quite probably a completely different writing style. Whilst it may seem obvious I urge you, should it arise, to fight the urge to start editing as you go along.

My basic understanding of single source, and the re-use of information, is that there are times when you’ll need to rewrite content so it can be easier used in multiple locations. A change of tense perhaps, a rephrasing or reconstruction of a sentence may be all that is required, and hell, if you have the document open in front of you, why not just go ahead and make that change? Suffice to say that editing content that you are analysing has only one potential outcome. Chaos. Regardless of how well organised, how well planned your analysis is, if you start making changes to your content on the fly, you will soon find yourself with a blurred view of the very thing you are trying to analyse.

Yeah, I know. It’s sounds obvious, and it is when viewed from a distance.

However what I really wanted to discuss, for I’m certainly not 100% certain on this, is at what level does content granularity become too granular? If I want to re-use a paragraph then, obviously, breaking up content to the paragraph level makes sense but that immediately seems like overkill in many cases. So I’ve been steering away from that kind of structural thinking, away from paragraphs and sentences into semantically discrete blocks. So a short product description, containing a heading and a paragraph, is one block and a long product description, containing a heading and several paragraphs, is another. I’m pretty sure this is the correct approach but it does mean that, once you’ve made that decision, you are stuck with fairly large chunks of information.

I’m hoping that this is a good balance though, for if we are to break our content into smaller granules, the overhead of maintaining and manipulating them surely increases. Remember, in a single source system we are concerned with more than content, we also have to contend with the metadata associated with that content, and the more pieces of information we have to maintain, the increase in risk that the metadata becomes so complex as to be useless?

I think. Maybe.. I’m really not that sure.

Have you conducted any content analysis? If so how did you approach the granularity issue? I get the sense that, for a lot of people, the level of granularity is reached once the content analysis is complete, that it basically decides itself.

As we slowly progress towards a single source solution, I’m intrigued as to what to expect next, any thoughts or comments are much appreciated. After all, all the articles, conferences and books in the world can replace real life experience.

Notes:
This post was, in part, inspired when pondering if semantic analysis might be a way to tackle this but, for now, I wonder if it is perhaps a step too far for most?

bookmark_borderLet Go

I’ve mentioned this before, and much as I hate to go on, it’s a subject I want to try and tackle one more time. I’m going to focus on one particular application, but the principals are applicable across many, they are not limited to a particular type of file but there are some thresholds which factor into this discussion.

Specifically, I want to discuss iTunes and the MP3 phenomenon.

I don’t want to discuss whether MP3s are ‘killing CDs’ or why Ogg Vorbis is a much better format, nor do I wish to bemoan the features of iTunes. However I think it’s easier to talk about a specific example, than to talk about “library applications” (applications which will act as the interface to your files) and “numerous files” (as we are only talking about applications that handle 1000s of files at a time, not those that are concerned with one file at a time). So, with that in mind…

Whether you like it or not, MP3 is the de facto choice for music files. It has won the battle and is unlikely to be replaced and, as such, the number of MP3 files is only going to increase. Making the decision of which file format to use was something I didn’t really bother with, I just followed the crowd. Many others have done exactly the same.

Over the years as I’ve slowly added MP3s to my music collection, I’ve swayed between different MP3 applications, FooBar, Winamp, and others. Winamp held the floor for quite a while, and when they added a library function to help organise the thousands of MP3 files that soon accumulated I started to rethink how I handled my MP3 collection.

In the Winamp days, I spent a lot of time managing the MP3 files themselves. Making sure the internal information, or tags, correctly listed the artist, track, album and so on. I would then make sure the files were in appropriately named folders organised by first artist, then album name. Even the filenames themselves were carefully managed and all in all I had a fairly streamlined workflow that kicked in whenever I was ripping a CD to MP3. It used two different applications, one to handle automating the tagging process, another to tidy up any erroneous tags and intelligently rename the files (Tag & Rename if you must know).

Then one day a company called Apple released a version of their iTunes application for Windows. I’d heard a bit about iTunes and, curious as to what all the fuss was about, I downloaded it and gave it a shot. First impressions were not good. It was slow, clunky, ate RAM and, worst of all, it screwed up my carefully managed folders. How very dare it!

After some searching I found some answers to solve that problem, mainly some settings to change but it wasn’t enough. iTunes just wasn’t for me. As far as I was concerned it didn’t fit in my workflow so the application was unsuitable to the way I ‘worked’.

I hadn’t factored in the Apple marketing department though, and soon as I was back in iTunes-land. Why? Mainly because my shiny new 10GB iPod preferred it.

However I was still embedded in my MP3 workflow. Rip, rename, tag, file, repeat. Rip, rename, tag, file, repeat. All my files and folders neatly arranged and tagged. This continued for some time until, and I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t recall exactly when, I had ripped a large number of CDs into iTunes and didn’t have time to properly clean them up. I figured I’d do it later.

A few days later I sat down at the PC, fired up iTunes and searched for the one of the CDs I’d ripped.

That’ll be about when it hit me. That’ll be the precise moment I realised that my renaming and filing days were over, as iTunes found my music and started playing it, based purely on the tags containing the artist, album and track information. It was, laughably, a light bulb moment. The sudden realisation that I could just leave the filenaming and storage location to iTunes and largely not really care what it did as long as I could search for a track by any of the variety of information held within the MP3 file itself.

Since then I have done exactly that. Other than specifying the parent folder into which iTunes rips or copies MP3s, the underlying folder structure, for all I care, may be a complete mess. I really don’t care as I interface with the files through iTunes.

I know there are some of you out there that are baulking at this idea and I will state that it is not solely because I use iTunes. I think the same revelation would’ve occurred if I’d been using Windows Media Player, or if the Winamp Library facility had had a search function.

I now treat my photos in a similar manner, worrying only about the metadata associated with them (location, date, occasion) and not really caring how they are stored.. Picasa takes care of that for me (and if I could find a way to get iPhoto to scan networked folders I’d have a shot with it but it seems to insist on copying the photos to the drive first).

And finally, with reference back to my post on RSS feeds, as Google Reader (my tool of choice) now allows you to search through your feeds, what does it matter if I have more than 1000+ unread items in any folder. The folder isn’t important, searching for content is.

I agree this kind of approach to data isn’t for everyone but, in our current climate of “too much”, anything that minimises the amount of work that I need to do for menial tasks like organising my ever expanding music collection is very much a GOOD THING. There is, of course, an argument for cutting back and decluttering your digital life, but that’s a different discussion.

As Obi-Wan once said, “Let go”.