I’ve spent the last 2 weeks very focused on creating screen videos for our YouTube channel. While this isn’t hard, I thought I’d share how I do it, in case it’s useful information to you.

But first, a related tangent.

Learning styles

Adult learning theory says that adults learn in four modes:

• Visual
• Auditory
• Read/write
• Kinesthetic

Because humans are wonderful, individuals typically prefer one of more of these modes to consume information. This is called a mixed strategy.

People tend to be stronger in some of these modes and weaker in others. Personally, I’m very weak in Visual. I really struggle to consume information when it’s presented in only a visual mode.

For example, when I was in Graduate school, getting my degree in Cultural Anthropology, I struggled with archeological site maps. These line drawings that showed the monumental architecture and distribution of artifacts seemed flat and uninteresting to me. I just couldn’t “see” why the other students were so excited about them.

I’m not a visual learner.

But other people are.

Good user assistance

Good user assistance supports all four learning modes. And because we have the web, it’s easier today to support all four.

Screen videos are a great way to support visual and auditory learners. And they are not my best ways of learning, because they are so visual.

Delivering information in a visual way means this is hard for me. And yet, my customers need this support.

Worse, my boss is a visual learner. I know this because he prefers to video conference when we have our weekly meeting. He says he feels better when he can see who he’s talking to, that it feels flat otherwise.

So, my users need this support and my boss prefers to consume information this way.

Looks like I’ll be making screen videos!

How to make a visual process less visual

Now that we’ve established that we’re not pitching to my strengths and I need to do it anyway, I thought I’d share some ways I’ve found to make this easier for me. It may help you as well.

Step 1: Decide the small thing I’m going to show

This may sound obvious but it’s an important step. The videos must be no longer than five to seven minutes or it’s going to seem complicated, even if it’s not. So, short is good.

I look for a small thing I can show in less than seven minutes, understanding that eventually, I’ll have lots of small things which will be a large thing.

Step 2: Write the script

Because I’m a word oriented, kinesthetic learner, I want a written script that includes what I need to be doing on the screen. Think of it as the plan.

So I write out what I’m going to be saying and what’s generally happening on the screen. I don’t need to include what to click, for example, because I’m fairly confident of the product.

As a rough guide, my scripts work out to about 3 minutes per page, single spaced. I use that as my first measurement of Step 1. If I’m at the middle of the second page and I’m no where near the end, I’ve got issues and I need to edit what I’m doing.

Step 3: Walk the application with the script

When I’m done with the script, I walk the application, doing what I think I’m going to be doing to check issues:

• Do dialog boxes appear where I think they’ll appear on the screen? I need to adjust and relocate these to appear where I want them.
• Is there anywhere where things are going to take too long? This may be a spot I can cut frames or speed up the video in post processing.
• Is this the easiest way to do this? I may discover an easier way as I walk the application.
• Is there a place where things are happening on the screen and I can talk about a best practice while we wait? If it’s short, I’ll add that to the script.

Then I edit the script, making notes and changing things until I have a better feel for this.

When I’m done, it’s time to start recording.

Next week

Next week, I’ll take you thru the actual recording and post processing steps I’m using to get good videos.

I was talking to friends the other day about functioning in a business environment and about building business cases. They mentioned Jack’s guest blog post and said there was a little more to it than what he had written. I agreed and asked Jack if he could give us a little more info.

Jack agreed and this is the rest of the story. Thank you!

Part 2

In last week’s blog, I mentioned you build a business case to purchase something that will solve a business problem and save your company money.

Actually, one can build a business case for any company expenditure.

More broadly, address SWOT situations in your business cases: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

• Strengths: Is there something your company does well, that you can replicate and use to expand into new markets and generate new revenue streams?

Or perhaps you implemented a new process at the department level that trimmed production time that you could share with other teams in your company?

• Weaknesses: Is there something your company is not doing well, anything from high customer service complaints to maintaining redundant copy in user manuals, online help, website content, etc.?

For example, have you asked tech support for the top 10 reasons why customers are calling and see if any of those issues can be addressed through better documentation, online help, better UI text, etc.?

• Opportunities: Is there a market opportunity that is not being served, an area where your company can do better/faster/cheaper than your competitors?

Or perhaps there is an opportunity to reduce internal production costs, such as using a CMS to reuse content in documentation and training materials?

• Threats: Where does your company risk losing money? Is there regulatory requirements that you company is danger of not meeting, which might result in a fine (or a law suit) if your company is not in compliance?

For example, check with your company’s legal department to see if they need help drafting your company’s electronic data retention policies.

Think you don’t have a wide sphere of influence?  Think again!

Do a SWOT Assessment and look for ways you can save your company money.

Jack Molisani is the owner of ProSpring Technical Staffing. He also produces the LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies. You can follow him on Twitter @JackMolisani.

One of my tasks at Author-it is to help us better explain what we do. I’ve spent some time this week, looking at our products and trying to come up with a coherent way to talk about them.

The best way, I decided, at least as a start, is a table, showing tools across the top and interesting things the tools do on the left column. It’s a pretty standard information design layout, nothing invented here, if you will. But I thought it might clarify what we offer.

Help

Then I asked for help from others to identify the things our products do to go in the left column. That’s where life got interesting.

Because I work with very smart people, I started getting all sort of information. I accepted it and added it to the table. But it wasn’t the right information. I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t right, I just had that vague feeling: there’s an issue.

After about two days, the list of things was pretty long and I was getting pretty lost. I put it aside to work on other things, knowing I’d be back to it.

Sleep is good

I was almost asleep that night when it hit me – the reason the information was wrong wasn’t because it was bad information. It wasn’t audience appropriate. (This says far more about how much I think about work than it does any brilliant insights I might have.)

We were creating a list of all the features of the products instead of focusing on the information the table was trying to show – what products do you need to do what big picture stuff?

With the user in mind, I took my editing hack saw and starting cutting. I cut about three quarters of the content.

The list is in review

So, the list is in review now. When it’s done, expect to see it on the website. It should help you clarify what you need when you decide to move to our products.

It really struck me that despite my constant focus on my audience and why the audience cares about the information, I can still get led down a garden path. Thank goodness I was willing to trust my vague feeling. Sometimes, when you’re creating and designing information, you have to play with it and look at it before you realize what the issue is and then how to fix it.

Any other ideas about how the website can be clearer/more helpful? I’m happy to hear them!

We’re starting a new Webinar series. Often, these will be about our products, but not always.

If you want to learn more about what Author-it does or how to use it in your environment, we’ve got you covered. But we’re also going to have webinars to just keep you educated in topics that you may be interested in around the content development space. And because these are live, you can ask questions.

We’re trying to schedule these so that they are available to as many people internationally as possible, given that the presenter – Sharon! – is based in the Pacific time zone and occasionally does sleep. If you can’t make the time or date listed, sign up anyway. We’re recording the webinars and you can get the link automatically the next day.

To see the current listings, click here.

Recently I’ve noticed that not only within the pages of this blog, but in CMS blog-space in general there are a handful of commonly used acronyms that are bandied about with the assumption that all readers automatically understand what they mean, not only literally but also what technologies and processes they actually represent.

Another twist to this is is that even within the content management community, there isn’t always agreement. Here is my humble attempt at bringing some clarity to the subject.  My thanks go to Wikipedia and Peter Halgopan of Information Week for help with definitions.

CM or CMS – Content Management  or Content Management System.  This a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion.  CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files, electronic documents, and Web content.

CCMS – Component Content Management System.  Content Management applications which break down authored content into granular components (‘topics’).  Core components of such content, can then be reused in many content products.  Research shows that as much as half of product support content is redundant and could be reused. For a large organization, reuse can yield significant savings, efficiencies, and quality improvements over time.  A core component can be something as small as a legal copyright statement, the first steps in a process that are shared by many processes, or an key branding message like a product name or tagline. Reuse allows the core component to be edited and maintained from a single source, and then be easily assembled into thousands of documents where it is needed.

WCM or WCMS – Web Content Management or Web Content Management System.  Content management system software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions. Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages to create and manage content with relative ease.. Blogging tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Movable Type are examples of WCM tools.

DM or DMS – Document Management or Document Management System. A computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. Some DM systems also have tools to help support workflow. The term has some overlap with the concepts of Content Management Systems and is often viewed as a component of Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM) and related to Digital Asset Management, Document imaging, Workflow systems and Records Management systems. Contract Management and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can be viewed as either components or implementations of ECM. DM systems are particularly good for organizations with a high volume of documentation that needs to be easily searchable, as well as organizations that have to comply with regulatory restrictions.

DAM – Digital Asset Management covers content and files of every type, including images, video and audio files, MS Office files, in fact just about anything that can be digitized. DAM usually refers to a hardware/software system that helps to store and manage these digitized files. The term “Digital Asset Management” also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, backing up, rating, grouping, archiving, optimizing, maintaining, thinning, and exporting files.  Occasionally the term “Visual Asset Management” (VAM) is used, especially in the FMCG space.

MAM – The term “Media Asset Management” is sometimes used as a sub-category of “Digital Asset Management”, mainly for audio or video content.

ECM – Enterprise Content Management tends to be a bit of a all-encompassing concept but generally refers to systems that include content management and digital asset management components. ECM systems are usually fairly expensive and hardware intensive, and often require a significant level of IT experience to set up and run. The “official” definitions as set by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) is “Enterprise Content Management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

The major differences between CMS and ECM? The CMS definition specifically mentions software; it’s a software system (or systems) for a the specific use of managing and publishing content, whereas the ECM definition refers to both tools and strategies.

I’m sure we are just scratching the surface here, so I’d be grateful if anyone can give deeper meaning to any of the above, or indeed add to the list.

Posted by Dunken Francis,  Web Consultant, Author-it Software Corporation

“Web 3.0? But we’re still getting our heads around Web 2.0!”

Sure, but technology and the internet waits for no man.

Web 3.0 describes the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. and was coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, referring to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that make up what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’ – such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies – which emphasize system-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010-2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:

• transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
• ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices
• network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;
• open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);
• open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;
• the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;
• distributed databases, the “World Wide Database” (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
• intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents.

So, in a nutshell, what will Web 3.0 mean to the average user?
First, we simply have to assume universal adoption of broadband to enable delivery (sounds easy if you say it fast ..).  Once this is in place, my belief is that the online experience will become much more personalized when it comes to content. There is no doubt that we will see emerging technology dramatically change our interaction with the web at a base level.

For example Artificial Intelligence systems in development will soon have the capability to provide a “virtual” online assistant, providing human-machine interaction at far greater levels than ever before and the new generation of ’3D’ sites will be similarly enhancing gaming and related environments like “Second Life”.

At the moment, Web 2.0 allows for collaboration, discussion, and in most cases distribution; however the user still has to put effort into tracking down their areas of interest and has to actively pursue the content whether it be via groups, forums Feeds etc.

Web 3.0 promises a world where each user’s profile, preferences, likes, dislikes, wants and needs are so widely available via open data streams (for some, a scary thought in itself) that when surfing the ‘net, you will no longer just see “a page” created for the masses, but will receive specifically delivered content, personalized for you at a granular or component level.
Needless to say, the implications of Web 3.0 for the development of the CMS industry worldwide is huge.

Posted by Dunken Francis – Web Consultant Author-it Software Corporation (with thanks to Wikipedia for Nova Spivack references)