Fuzzy Content

As I was watching Mike & Mike in the Morning, I heard of something that made me say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” (I say that a lot). Kurt Warner and a couple other Arizona Cardinals, in conjunction with Alltel, are giving “wireless autographs” for fans.

What are wireless autographs? You hand your phone over to Kurt, and he provides a voicemail greeting. Something like:

This is Kurt Warner of the Arizona Cardinals. Eric and I are busy tossing the football around, so he can’t get to the phone. Leave a message and he will get back to you after I leave.

How’s that for cool? Who would you want to leave a wireless autograph for you? Clint Eastwood, Mario Lemieux, and Robert Plant are at the top of my list.

Sign up for FreshO Days! On Tuesday, October 28th, there will be games on the Landing, refreshments from OCD, and plenty of time with other matriculants. Go to Brooks Hall to meet with your VDC to register.

What? What are FreshO Days? What are matriculants? Can I register online? And where is Brooks Hall anyway?

Unfortunately, I find this type of content on college and university Web sites far too often. We typically call this “institutional speak”…good for the writer, bad for the audience.

As a prospective student, slang, acronyms, and locations are a mystery until they are on campus. As content authors for the Web, we must write for the common denominator - someone who has never been on campus and knows nothing about your institution. Even when writing academic information, use words and phrases that your audience will understand, rather than what you will understand. Here are some tips:

• Explain the unknown. I’m not saying not to use slang and acronyms, but link to a source or spell it out.
• Use a Glossary. On your site, especially for prospective students, create a glossary of slang, acronyms, and locations. This will help as they are in their first year on campus as well.
• Link to your Maps, virtual tour, and other dynamic content. What a way to promote other features on your site. When a location (like Brooks Hall) is used in text, link to the virtual tour. It will give relevance to the location and drive people to the full virtual tour.
• Talk like them. Your site visitors don’t know what a matriculant is…they are just beginning to understand what a “prospective student” is. Rather than using process words, listen to how they describe certain steps in the process. Then use their phrases.

With these helpful hints, your content can become more relevant to your site visitors or readers. Remember that the site is for and about them, not for and about the institution…write for them, show plenty of benefit, and remember to drive them to action on each visit.

Now let’s take another crack at that paragraph:

Sign up for Freshman Orientation (FreshO Days)! On Tuesday, October 28th, there will be:

• Games at the center of campus (we call it the Landing - linked to campus map),
• Refreshments from On-Campus Dining, and
• Plenty of time with your future classmates.

Go to Brooks Hall (linked to campus map) to meet with your counselor to register, or register by phone (555-555-5555) or online (linked to registration form).

“A system for dynamically adaptively personalizing at least one navigation control for a web site. Based on collected behaviors for a user, at least one navigation control is dynamically updated to link to a portion of the web site that may be of most interest to the user.”

That’s from patent No. 20050228775 [APPL-NO: 000431 (11)] filed 11/30/04. I’d wager many of us have thought of that and even implemented a similar feature on our site? What about this one:

“Techniques for detecting, managing, and presenting syndication XML (feeds) are disclosed. In one embodiment, a web browser automatically determines that a web site is publishing feeds and notifies the user, who can then access the feed easily.”

There are many other “embodiments” in patent 20050289468 [APPL-NO: 105637 (11)], which was filed on 4/13/05, including one where: “a feed is parsed and stored in a structured way.”

I honestly hope I’m an idiot and don’t understand patents and/or how they are issued. If not, this is appalling, regardless of whether anyone profits from these ideas.

Claiming restrictive ownership over generic ideas is futile and abhorrent to me. Web businesses thrive on their delivery (and recovery) not on the uniqueness of their widget.

It’s cool if you came up with an algorithm that creates PageRank. But One Click shopping? No way.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t blame Amazon for looking out for its shareholders. I blame the patent office for not having a clue.

Taking Agile Development To The Limit
Originally uploaded by Dimitri Glazkov.

While visiting Capital, Dimitri encountered a strange set up in one of our buildings. Two urinals side by side behind a stall door.

Dimitri’s context, that of a programmer extraordinaire, was “Taking Agile Development to the Limit.”

My context was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

Duchamp’s perspective was that the environment, not the artist, created art.

So I learned everything I need to know about interaction in Art Appreciation 101. That was where I first encountered the power of context.

Adding to Dimitri’s thoughts on customers ….

Being right is an exercise in power. All my talk of customers being in control obviously puts them in a position of power. I can see where that just as damaging from the reader’s side as what I’m trying to tear down on the organization’s side.

The struggle most organizations are having right now is a power struggle, and any of us who have children over the age of two or three know that power struggles are pointless and typically end up in lose-lose situations.

So what’s a socially-net sensitive organization to do? Forget about power. Everyone suffers if power is allowed to enter into the equation. This is not about being right. It is about being heard.

The three-year-old throwing a fit in the grocery store isn’t trying to be right. She/he is trying to be heard. The parent screaming at the child as they leave the store is trying to be heard. Unfortunately everyone in this situation is talking to themselves which is the way most customer-corporation dialog goes.

The organizations that are listening to customers, are not abdicating responsibility to the unquestionably correct consumer. Successful organizations are respecting customers as equals and collaborators. They are building relationships while they build products.

I am sure somebody said this more eloquently someplace more important than here, but it just hit me so I blurt it out as usual.

Customers aren’t always right. They’re just in a position to claim they are. Whoever you are, whether you’re serving burned meat on buns or building next generation jet engines, please pause and make a mental note of distinction.

Being right has nothing to do with it. It is just exercise of power. Drastic difference.

Possibly one of the most significant microformats is starting to really take shape. hAtom 0.1, which builds on its mecha daddy, was stamped with the first numeric release. Why is this important? Well… As you may have heard, content wants to be free. But that’s just part of the story. Context wants to be free, too. By building syndicated feed capability straight into your markup, we increase degrees of freedom, trivializing creation of ways to connect. I don’t need to be pegged into hole that my CMS/blogging tool allows. I get to choose what’s a feed. Want an example? Here’s a list of people who blog here:

With a touch of extra markup, I also made this an hAtom feed. You can now subscribe to it to see who’s blogging here.

Quick! Take your hAtom-aware aggregator, point it to this page and understand the importance of the moment. Yeah, I know. There aren’t any hAtom-aware aggregators out there just yet. But imagine if there were. Or better yet, go build one.

With wider adoption of authoring and syndication tools, we further liberate the user from technology. If I am free to talk to the world, why should I not be able to define how the world connects to me?

I jumped to a couple conclusions after reading a great article by Bob Sevier in University Business: “Marketing: Think Daringly, Execute Steadily.”

Bob starts off talking about the value of conflict within teams. He argues that conflict within a team can lead to better (not best) options and plans. He discusses collaboration and uses that as a platform to condemn competition among teams and team members.

I’m going to oversimplify his excellent article into an equation: conflict - competition = collaboration.

Bob also talked around a meme that I’ve been carrying for a while: “Perfection is the enemy of good.” Between the three C’s and that little ditty, I think any team should be able to get along.

Karine Joly of CollegeWebEditor recently posted an idea to aggregate the expertise and experiences of her contacts. CollegeWebEditor is a widely-read blog and Karine has considerable contacts in the offline world. She might be able to connect some knowledgeable, lesser known folks like me to some people in the real world. That might be nice for some, but I took more away from her post than a longing for a speaking gig.

Karine tagged her post “Web Team,” and that got me thinking. Knowing some of the people who know Karine, I think she’d have quite a Web team should those people come together in some way. So I’m going to piggyback on her request for contact information and suggest a social site, Digg style, which allows us to gather and share.

I’ve had enough of higher ed. ListServs rife with RFI’s from newbies. I’m happy to share information, but I like to receive too. Karine is gathering an experts list. Who else is interested in signing on and contributing problems, comments and solutions to YASNS?

Comment to let me know.