ia play

I laughed out loud at the accusation in the comments that content strategy, as defined in Rachel’s article, was an ‘expansive transposition’ followed by the explanation that we already have “user experience”, a term not unfamiliar with land grabs.

As soon as people don’t want to be constrained by their job titles, they start redefining their job titles as matching their interests. I realise I’m running the risk of falling foul  of my own critique.

A good while back, Chris Sizemore pointed me at Rachel Lovinger’s article Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data.

He thought I might find it interesting as Rachel’s take on content strategy overlapped alot with how my IA team at the BBC had formed, as opposed to IA out in the digital agency world. Our heartland was content management and search, we did content audits, metadata models and were entranced by visions of linked data. We were part of a wider UX team, but it was an often difficult relationship, with many designers (UX or otherwise)  seeing us as cuckoos in the nest.

You’ll have probably noticed that I’m uncomfortable with the growing voices within the IA community to re-brand us all as UX designers. And I was struck by Rachel’s comments on her blog that a discussion of URIs didn’t seem at home at the IA summit . That’s led me to have a better look at what is going on in the content strategy field than I did when Chris first told me I ought to.

So as well as Rachel’s article, here’s some content strategy reading material

• The discipline of content strategy
  
• Content-tious strategy
• scatter/gather – blog of the content strategists at Razorfish
• Meaningful data – Rachel’s own blog
• A re-read of Ann Rockley’s Managing Enterprise Content might be helpful

Apologies to those of you who still find IA a new-fangled job title.