Reading this made me realize that we are all (or most of us, at least) talking about publication in its old pre-Internet sense, as a monolithic act of an authority blessing information for distribution and thereby affixing to it an imprimatur. Publishing, in short, as marking the end of a lengthy process of collection, collation, evaluation, selection, analysis, and composition.

But this is not what publication is in the age of the Internet. When I press the post button when I finish typing this comment, it will be published, without oversight or debate or delay, to everyone from Toronto to Timbuktu and from Manchester to Mandalay. In being so published, it will dynamically change the article which Scot originally wrote. The experience of the reader who reads it after I press the Post button will be different from the experience of the reader who read it before it did so. The conclusions and impressions they take away from reading it may be quite different from those of the people who read it yesterday (or not).

In short, the answer to “What is dynamic publishing anyway?” is “this is”. What we are doing right here in this thread is dynamic publishing, for this topic is public and it is dynamic.

The particular form of dynamic publishing we are engaged in here might be called distributed manual dynamic publishing (a category that would include Wikipedia), but there is very clearly a great deal of value to be realized from automated and centralized models of dynamic publishing. But as to the question of what dynamic publishing is, its this, what we are doing right here, right now.

There is no doubt about it, ‘Publishing’ is what we are talking about, i.e. “The activity of preparing and issuing of material for public distribution or sale” as one on-line definition puts it.

Perhaps it’s the word ‘Dynamic’ that is a bit out of place in the phrase.

Looking at some definitions for Dynamic, many of them talk about energy or objects in motion or continuous change, activity, or progress – some of which is definitely going on in Publishing at the moment.

Maybe a better pair of words would be Flexible Publishing.

To paraphrase a number of definitions for ‘flexible’ that I have seen:-

“In the context of Publishing, one can define flexibility as the ability of a ‘process’ to respond to potential internal and/or external changes affecting its value delivery, i.e. the activity of preparing and issuing of material for public distribution or sale in a timely and cost-effective manner.

So to answer the question (with a bit of further editing) What is Flexible Publishing?

It’s the ability of a ‘process’ to respond to potential changes affecting its value delivery, i.e. the activity of preparing and issuing of material for public distribution or sale in a timely and cost-effective manner.

I think that definition might stand firm whether it be used when a 100 scribes were brought in to produce 100 extracts from the King James Bible faster than 10 scribes could, to meet a production deadline; right up to using the latest and greatest Cloud based publishing platform to deliver an emergency Service Bulletin wirelessly to my front line flight engineer on their iPad.

Hope this adds to the on-going discussion.

Here goes:

Dynamic publishing delivers customized information products that help users to be optimally effective. Dynamic publishing achieves its goal by leveraging automation to assemble content resources according to users’ requests and according to the applicable business rules, and then rendering, packaging and
delivering contextualized information products that they can use with whatever technology is available to them.

Some background on sources:

From Steve I took the importance of packaging and delivery – the things that make up the last mile and that sees the information products actually arrive in the hands of the users that requested them.

From Rahel, I took the emphasis being placed on business rules which, in enterprise environments, can be an almost overwhelming concern. And by the way, I don’t think that the formatting of your comment looks wonky Rahel – if E.E. Cummings were to write a definition of dynamic publishing it would look like that.

The stress that Mark places on dynamic release is a very interesting one. Also my experience confirms his assertion that the dynamic release of up-to-the-minute content can be the most profound change that a dynamic publishing capability can effect. I think that this becomes an “emergent property” of a dynamic publishing environment and so I have not found a graceful way to bring this out in the definition. Maybe someone else can. Or perhaps it is implicit in the capability laid out by the definition.

From Michael, I specifically plucked the emphasis placed on automation and on the assembly of content resources (discrete components).

I like Sarah’s definition because I spot in it some delightful details buried within its apparent simplicity. Specifically, I like the word “rendering”. In one of my more torturous decompositions of the “publishing” concept (in my past “Content Engineering” workshops) I break publishing into a whole sequence of process steps: selection, assembly, resolution, compilation, rendition and delivery. The hidden gem in Sarah’s definition (at least to my eye) is the fact that the “process of rendering” determines not just what content will be published but the presentation that will be applied. On one level this is obvious but on another it is not all that obvious. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but to me this speaks to environments where the formatting rules are dynamically assembled and tailored in parallel with, and in exactly the same way as, the content itself. These are my kind of dynamic publishing solutions!

From Noz, I jumped on the points he makes about “enriching” information products to make them optimally useful. This can include things like contextualizing the products so that related products can be recommended to users. This way, if they have further questions, or their interest takes them in new directions, they have somewhere to start. This is how “contextualized information products” made it into my elaboration of the core definition. Perhaps “enriched” is better but after years of using that term I have found it a little too abstract (again people might find that funny coming from me).

From Don, I took further emphasis of the importance of semantically enriched (there’s that word again) chunks of content as the starting point for this next generation of dynamic publishing solutions.

To begin with, my definition of publishing is simpler than Joe’s: 
publishing, in the context of dynamic publishing,  is the act or
process of converting or packaging content into the product that you
will deliver to consumers and then delivering that product.

Dynamic publishing is a publishing system/approach in which (1) the
scope of the content to be included in the final output and (possibly)
format of the output is defined at the time that content is actually
published and (2) that scope and format are specified by the
information consumers, either as on-demand requests or based on a
defined profile .  

In other words, you do not publish “canned” PDFs or HTML, but provide a
mechanism for users to publish their own, customized, subsets of your
content. 

Consider the following scenario:

An electronics publisher has four models of the same product with 20
options that you can add on.  How do you document that product?  One
book that documents all four products and all 20 options?  One book for
each product (four total) with the options duplicated in the books? 
Four books for the products and one for the options? Or, you might
provide a web interface where a user can select the product and options
they bought and, in real-time, have a custom PDF generated for them. 
That’s one example of dynamic publishing.   Alternatively,  your
publishing system reads the user’s profile in a CRM database and
automatically generates a PDF for them.  That’s another example. 

Dynamic publishing can be accomplished using a number of methods,
including filtering content to hide stuff you don’t want to show/read,
assembling discrete chunks of content (like topics) into books/etc.,
pulling information from databases, or a combination of approaches.  It
requires a complete understanding of your users, their needs, and your
content.  It also requires a very thorough content architecture,
including content and metadata specification.

That might be three cents worth.

Here’s an example of the implementation details problem: Suppose you want to serve a page differently depending on which country the user lives in. You could dynamically compose the page each time based on country information. But that would mean running queries on your servers thousands or even millions of times when there are really only a little under 200 different pages to be served. You can save a lot of cycles if you pre-build a version for each country and serve it statically. Alternatively, you could have a single version of the page, served statically, which included JavaScript that rewrote the page dynamically for the country it was displayed in. The difference between static and dynamic here, and how and where the dynamic part happens, is an implementation detail, an optimization. It isn’t interesting from a publishing point of view, and it should not be part of the definition.

There are several things that the phrase “dynamic publishing” could encompass. The word “dynamic” is so hopelessly overburdened with connotations that I won’t even attempt to dissect them, but for the word publishing, I can see three distinct meanings:

* To make content
* To render content into a form that can be consumed
* To release content for public consumption

Attach the word dynamic to each of these and you get three interesting things:

* Content that is dynamic in nature: content that has buttons to push, lights that flash, comment forms to submit.

* Content that is rendered dynamically: content whose synthesis, presentation, or formatting is performed dynamically when certain input parameters are received.

* Content that is released dynamically: content whose elements are released atomically, as soon as they are ready, without waiting for a general release cycle, and which are dynamically integrated into the rest of the content at the moment of its release.

Of these, I believe that dynamic release is actually the most interesting. Sarah makes an interesting distinction above between customized content and dynamic content. I’m not sure that the distinction she makes is sustainable if we only look at dynamic rendering. The rendering of a paper credit card bill does not take any longer than the rendering of an on-line credit card statement — it is the delivery that takes longer, and I’m not convinced that delivery speed should be considered a differentiator. The real difference between the paper credit card bill and the on-line credit card statement is that the credit card bill is rendered periodically on a schedule and is not dynamically updated when a new transaction takes place. Your on-line statement on the other hand, will show every transaction up to the present moment. It is dynamically released content.

Dynamic content, and the dynamic rendering of content, are well enough understood these days. The interesting problems, I believe, are in the area of dynamic release — especially for domains like tech pubs.

For a definition though, I would offer this: The creation and delivery of content that is dynamic in behavior, and/or dynamically rendered, and/or dynamically released.