The Dynamic Publisher

What is the Ultimate Goal of Dynamic Publishing?

MaryLee Grant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:57:18 +0000

As an information development professional, I get asked a lot of questions about new technologies; recently someone asked me, “What is dynamic publishing?” Dynamic publishing means different things to different people. It can mean downloading and printing a PDF on-demand, or searching through a document for a particular topic of interest. These two methods require extra effort on the part of the reader to find the information they need; not a very good customer experience. I believe that what dynamic publishing is really all about is “topics on demand” that get you what you want, when you want it, and in the format and language required. That sounds great, but how is that dynamic and any different than searching using Google?

The dynamic aspect comes into play when the customer can search across the full information set for the specific topics they are looking for, and that information is presented to them on any device they have – be it a smart phone, tablet, eReader, computer, etc. Information developers today want the ability to write the information once, and have a Web front-end automatically determine what device the customers are searching from and systematically render the information in a format made for that device. The customer experience is vastly improved, and the information is provided to the customers in an elegant and flexible manner.

At this point, the next question I am usually asked is “To get that flexibility, doesn’t that mean I have to create a separate style sheet output type for every device? Who has time for that?” In this scenario, the Web front-end determines what device the customer is using and in what language, and then serves up the information in a format that is optimized for the device. In addition, it should only deliver the information that answers the question that was originally searched. DITA XML makes this part easy, as you can break down questions into topics with answers. A good way to determine what questions to write about is to use one of the many tools available on the Web to mine Google information to discover what your customers are searching on. The “questions” with the most hits should be the ones you start developing into topics first.

Remember, the ultimate goal of dynamic publishing is to only deliver the information the customer is requesting in the format and language needed. To minimize the information, make sure you are only answering one question per topic. You cannot rely on a customer to read a previous topic; each topic must be standalone, and can have links to other topics of interest.

Similar to the way cable TV has incorporated movies on demand, I believe that the information development industry should move to the “on demand” methodology. Customers expect to get the information they want, when they want it in other industries, and it is time for the information development community to follow suit. Embracing this new approach allows a customer to use any device, anywhere in the world to get the critical information they need. This new-found dynamic information will result in higher customer satisfaction and engagement, and everyone knows happy engaged customers are what we all strive for.

By MaryLee Grant, Dell
with contributions from Laura Clymer, Dell

About the author(s):

MaryLee Grant is a visionary information development leader who pioneered the use of DITA XML, and championed the use of leading edge technology to enable topics on demand. An IT professional with over 25 years of experience she holds a BA degree in Computer Science from Ithaca College and is pursuing an MBA at St. Edwards University. She is currently an Information Development Director with Dell Inc.

Laura Clymer is a creative and imaginative information development solutions architect and writer, who helped to lead the transition from unstructured content to DITA XML. She has over 16 years of IT industry experience, a BA degree from UCLA, a master’s degree from Stanford University, and is pursuing an MBA at St. Edwards University. She is currently a Senior Information Development Manager with Dell Inc.

Dynamic Publishing and Search. Do it wrong and it won’t be pretty.

Marcia Kadanoff — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:37:34 +0000

Historically, search engines have either ignored or punished publishers of dynamic content.

Ignorance is bliss. Back in the day, it was common for Google and the other search engines to skip over pages that were produced dynamically. So if your page included a Session ID number or “?” as part of its URL – your page would get ignored.

Punishment comes next. These days, dynamic content thankfully doesn’t get ignored but it may get punished. The big thing to guard against is presenting your dynamic content in a way that Google finds deceptive or invasive. Be particularly careful about tactics that can end up hijacking users. Even well meaning publishers can hijack users without meaning to.

But officer, I didn’t mean to hijack that plane. Consider a publisher who sells cloud-based solutions into three verticals segments: A, B, and C. The publisher here starts by creating three different landing pages, one for Vertical A, one for Vertical B, and one for Vertical C. Each landing page speaks to the benefits of the technology a little differently and each presents a different case study, one tailored to the needs of the specific vertical. This scenario is very common in our work at Open Marketing and won’t run into any problems from a search perspective.

Now someone at the publisher decides the program would be more efficient if the landing pages were generated dynamically … say by looking up the visitor’s IP address, figuring out what industry sector they come, and sending the resulting visitor to a specially crafted landing page based on the information gleaned from the IP address.

Most programs like this measure results based on conversion, the percentage of visitors to the page that end up downloading the offer. If you design and implement a program like the one we’ve described, you will see conversion rates go up by 40-50%.

Why Conversion Rates Go Up

Conversion rates go up for two reasons.

First, you’ve reduced the amount of data you need to capture on the page. And this tends to increase conversion. (By doing the reverse IP look up, you can figure out what segment the visitor is from and eliminate the need to ask them this question.)

Second, you can craft a page that is more persuasive. Instead of words, images, and endorsements, you can use words, images, and endorsements that are specific to the industry segment.

So overall, using dynamic publishing to create landing pages sounds like a winner, right?

Well. Not exactly.

There’s just one teeny tinny problem. It’s called Google.

At the current time, Google does not like this program at all. It will penalize you by pushing your pages down – way down – in search engine results (SERP). And studies repeatedly show that it pays to be ranked on the first page of SERP (60% of total click throughs) and above the fold on the first page (80% of click throughs).

Why Google Thinks This Program Isn’t Kosher

The way people at Google operate is that they are always thinking about things from the perspective of visitors to their search engine and your web pages.

If you start thinking about your dynamic publishing project from this perspective you’ll save yourself a ton of headaches.

 With this in mind, it should be obvious how the program we just described got in trouble. What got indexed in search was the generic landing page. But where the visitor ended up when they clicked on a search term was someplace entirely different. Effectively the visitor got hijacked! And therein lies the problem.

Google considers itself an advocate for the visitor to your content. So as a publisher of dynamic content, you need to bend over backwards to avoid what it calls “deceptive or invasive” practices.

Dynamic Content Done Right

 Can you use IP look up (or any other factor that you can “know” and look up about your visitor in real time) as the basis of your dynamic content program? Absolutely.

But to do it right, you need to keep most of the content on the page static and vary only 15-20% of the content.

We fielded just such a program on behalf of one of our clients that sold a $10,000 product direct to homeowners. We used reverse IP look up to take traffic and deliver it to different landing pages based on the geo-location of the visitor. We varied ONLY 3 elements on the page based on geo-location:

The brand name
The 800# provided
The offer

Together these three elements represented less than 15% – 20% of the content.

We were very careful with our branded search terms to make sure that people who clicked on “Brand A” (the brand in California) were not sent to a page for “Brand B” (the brand in Colorado) even if that person came from an IP address that happened to come from Colorado. Why? To avoid hijacking the user. So someone vacationing in Colorado who clicked on Brand A would get to Brand A. Each and every time. Although their IP address “said” they were from Colorado.

Also, we were careful to make sure that more than 60% of the content on the page remained the same regardless of the results of the IP look up – this 60% included copy and visuals discussing the benefits of the product being sold.

Results Seen

While it’s always hard to anticipate how the powers that be at Google will respond to a dynamic publishing program, the best advice we can give you is to keep the visitor and his or her needs in mind. By doing this with the program outlined above, we were able to field a strong program, one that ranked well in search engine results and also drove the results we needed in terms of lead flow.

Technology Infrastructure

One thing people won’t tell you is that dynamic publishing projects that include search are likely to s-t-r-e-t-c-h your technology infrastructure requirements. Most web-based CMS programs don’t include all the elements you will need to track your program in the kind of detail you will need to make decisions about how to vary your content so as to drive incremental results. For the program just described, we needed to source and integrate three distinct systems:

Web-based call tracking
Reverse IP geo-location system
Lead distribution system

None of these systems were in place before we started. Sourcing vendors is one skill; integration another. Along the way, lots of little things can and will go wrong. Give yourself plenty-o-time to get the infrastructure in place before you need to go live with your dynamic publishing search project.

Test-Lather-Repeat

Dynamic publishing. Yes you can do it in a way that is search-engine friendly. Start by thinking through what you are doing from the point of view of the visitor. Never hijack visitors; make sure that when a visitor clicks on a particular search term they end up on a destination related to those terms. Think through your technology infrastructure needs in advance. And put in place a testing plan. Often small changes in execution can and will add up to big differences in conversion rates, in ways you might not have anticipated. The only way to figure this out is if you are always testing something. Big. Small. And In between.

About Marcia Kadanoff

Marcia Kadanoff is the CEO & Founder of Open Marketing, a company that goes beyond your website with content marketing and inbound marketing. Her company focuses on generating leads and tangible results for architects and designers, cause-related businesses, and technology companies. Contact her at getleads@openmarketing.com or on twitter @openmk.

Publication Standards Part 2: The Fragmented Present

Nick Disabato — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:59:36 +0000

Nick Disabato continues his exploration of the need for content standards — and big changes — in the publishing industry. Actually, Nick’s advice and guidance isn’t limited to the publishing industry, but rather, his suggestions are relevant to all organizations that publish and deliver information to those who need it, when and where they need it, in the right language, on the device of their choosing. Today, that pretty much includes nearly every organization on the planet.

Nick outlines the problems and makes the case for change. He writes: “Our ebook reading and creation tools are primitive, nascent, born of necessity, and driven by fear. We have one-click ePub to Kindle conversion, but it’s buried in a clumsy, bloated, cross-platform application that screams for improvement. We have page layout software, but it saves natively in a proprietary format, and it exports ePub files almost entirely as a set of tags, rather than proper, semantic HTML. (Think instead of

.) ePub may be saved as a zip file, but Mac OS X’s default zip archiver doesn’t handle ePub’s mimetype correctly, requiring a separate application. And there is still, as of this writing, no native reader for Mac OS X that’s up to both iBooks’ design standards and ePub’s native spec. (When creating ePub, my workflow involves uploading a new ePub to Dropbox, opening the Dropbox app on my iPad, and sending the ePub to iBooks—every time I want to view a change.) There is so much work yet to be done to make publishing easier. Farming out ePub development—overwhelmingly the current accepted solution—isn’t the answer.”

Read the article. Then, let us know what you think (and let Nick know as well).

Publication Standards Part 1: The Fragmented Present

Nick Disabato — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:48:48 +0000

This is a great blog post by Nick Disabato on the need for standards and semantic markup, new roles and responsibilities, and big changes in the publishing industry. It’s a great roundup of some of the many issues facing publishing (people, processes, change and technology).

Here’s a snippet: “There are key distinctions between ebook publishing’s current problems and what the web standards movement faced. The web was founded without an intent to disrupt any particular industry; it had no precedent, no analogy. E-reading antagonizes a large, powerful industry that’s scared of what this new way of reading brings—and they’re either actively fighting open standards or simply ignoring them.”

Read the article. And learn more about Nick.

Dynamic Semantic Publishing For Beginners (Part One)

Scott Abel — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:45:42 +0000

“The 2010 World Cup was a notable first not only for Spain, but also for publishing and the BBC. This is because the BBC’s coverage of the tournament marked a dramatic evolution in the way content can be delivered online. This new system was labeled dynamic semantic publishing (DSP) by the team of architects–including Jem Reyfield and Paul Wilton–that created it.”

Learn more about DSP in “Dynamic Semantic Publishing For Beginners, Part One” by Kristen Milhollin, Project Lead for GoodSpeaks.org.

And, learn more about how the BBC handles content delivery in this interview with Paul Wilton, former technical and development lead for semantic publishing at BBC News and Sport Online during the 2010 World Cup.

In Search of a Simple Definition For Dynamic Publishing

Ann Rockley — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 23:06:09 +0000

Ann Rockley, President, The Rockley Group

By Ann Rockley, President, The Rockley Group

A recent article on this blog, Scott Abel asked “What is dynamic publishing, anyway?” Scott quoted a definition from my most recent book “Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy” New Riders, 2012, another from JoAnn Hackos, and a third from Quark. All were good, but different. Scott then opened the discussion up to the community which resulted in a number of possible additions to the definition.

Mark Baker responded that the instantaneous publishing that we all do every day through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other communication streams is dynamic publishing. That, in fact, what is published about any topic is never static as the comments and responses dynamically change the perception one person has of the topic versus another person’s perception moments later as they read the accompanying thread of multiple opinions. Mark’s thought on this comment: “The source of social media is typically never revised or filtered (to a custom view), but the ability of the crowd to append to the content thread makes it ‘living content’ more so than dynamically published content.”

Mike McNamara took a slightly different tact and substituted the word “dynamic” with the word “flexible” to arrive at this definition: “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.”

Joe Gollner offered “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.”

Steve Manning was very succinct in his commentary. “You do not publish ‘canned’ content, but provide a mechanism for users to publish their own, customized, subsets of your content.”

Rahel Bailie broke it down into definitions for content and publishing then rolled it up to: “So dynamic publishing is the process of showing specific sets of content to different audiences, carried out by software that analyses audience member choices, and then responds based on a set of business rules.”

Michael Boses also shared a succinct definition: “Dynamic Publishing is a system that automatically and logically assembles discrete components of content on demand and produces an acceptable published product.”

Sarah O’Keefe pointed out that many of the definitions were too technical and that dynamic publishing had its roots in the oral tradition of storytelling. She proposes that “dynamic publishing is a process of rendering output that determines the content and presentation when the information is requested based on user specifications, user profile information, system information, or other factors.”

Noz Urbina defined it this way: “Dynamic Publishing allows content to be assembled on request and delivered to its destination ready for consumption. It may add value above and beyond simple assembly and rendering by automatically enriching content with additional relationships, features or even additional content during the actual publishing process.”

Don Day pointed out that we need to look at the dynamic publishing in terms of the benefit received. He made the case that users may not actually need dynamic publishing if they can effectively search for, and receive the desired content.

Everyone raised a number of excellent points and while all the definitions were somewhat different, a number of common concepts were used such as:

Automatic
Assemble
Upon/as requested
Based on user needs/requirements

Given these common themes I propose a revised definition:

“Dynamic publishing automatically assembles and delivers (publishes) content based on specific customer requirements.”

What do you think? Is this definition just right? Too much? Or not enough?

I’d like to know what you think. Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Data Conversion Laboratory’s New ‘Convert On Demand’

Elliott — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:50:12 +0000

Fresh Meadows, NY
– (May 22, 2012) –

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), a leading provider of electronic document conversion services, introduces a new online publishing portal that jump starts previously dormant content so it can be converted into highly accurate digital knowledge that can be searched, reorganized and published in virtually any format and lead to new revenue streams. Convert On Demand, DCL’s new Web portal is the second in a series of On Demand services backed by 30 years of excellence in providing conversion and related services. “Silos of content that laid dormant within an organization can now be tapped and turned into a new revenue stream,” said Mark Gross, CEO of DCL. “For instance newspaper archives that are a treasure trove to researchers can be turned into searchable mediums and offered up as a new subscription model,” said Gross. The new service streamlines the conversion process and gives organizations of all sizes the opportunity to convert low-complexity paper, Word, PDF, HTML or SGML documents into more powerful digital storehouses of content using XML, ASCII, Word, HTML and other proprietary formats. DCL’s proven automated conversion method produces the highest quality, consistently tagged, data that comes with a 99.99 percent error-free guarantee. Its extensive US-based project management team, 24 / 7 client tracking system and multi-level quality assurance means conversions are ‘ready to go’ and need no additional ‘fixing’. Providing the capacity for high-volume and expert service, even in multi-lingual formats, Convert On Demand offers its customers the benefits of the same powerful resources dedicated to complex projects. EPUB On Demand, the first of a series of On Demand services, is a one-book-at-a-time conversion service to EPUB and MOBI, supporting all popular eReader devices. About Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc. DCL is a leader in organizing, converting, and moving content to modern formats for wide access and new revenue streams. With expertise across many industries, DCL’s proprietary technology matched with US-based project management teams solve clients’ complex conversion challenges securely, accurately and on-time. Serving the full range of businesses, government, nonprofits and individuals by future-proofing their content, DCL started in 1981 and is a 100 Top Company in the Digital Content Industry for 2011-2012.

Contact: Steve Capoccia WARNER COMMUNICATIONS steve@warnerpr.com 617 372 1539

Amazon CloudFront Offers Support For Dynamic Content

Scott Abel — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:05:27 +0000

Amazon has announced that Amazon CloudFront now allows organizations to deliver personalized web content dynamically.

Read the announcement. Check out the geeky details.

Migrating to DITA: How Automated Conversion Works and Why it Matters to You

Patrick Baker — Thu, 03 May 2012 23:55:53 +0000

by Patrick Baker, VP Development and Professional Services, Stilo International

An unavoidable part of moving to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), or any other structured authoring system, is converting your existing content into the new format. Most organizations that make the move to structured writing have to make the change while still continuing to meet their regular delivery schedules. This means you need to convert content and get it up and running correctly in the new system between two product cycles, and usually without much in the way of added staff or resources.

Content conversion is a key part of your migration strategy and the quality and completeness of that conversion is essential to getting the migration done within the constraints of your schedule. However, content conversion is a bit of a black box for many people. It is hard for writers and managers to anticipate how difficult the conversion process is going to be, how long it is going to take, how much it is going to cost, and how much cleanup of the output is going to be required after the conversion is done. The purpose of this article is to lift the lid off that black box. In particular, understanding how automated conversion works will help you form a more reasonable expectation about how your own conversion project is going to go, and what you can do to make it go more smoothly.

No automated conversion is ever 100% clean, but the difference between an 80% clean conversion and one that is 95% clean is huge – it means a fourfold difference in cleanup costs. What makes the difference between 80% clean and 95% clean? Between 95% clean and 98% clean? Such outcomes certainly depend upon how well managed the conversion process is. However, having the right approach to content conversion is of critical importance.

Knowledge is the key to intelligent content conversion

There are three essential mechanisms that content conversion technology may leverage. They are:

patterns
context
guided conversion

When encoding content in a semantically rich format such as DITA, it is important to understand the meaning of the content in order to apply the correct tags. While people can understand the full meaning of the text they are reading, a computer does not, at least not very deeply. What a computer is exceedingly good at is recognizing patterns in the content. But patterns don’t provide the full solution. Patterns, when found in a given context, carry much more insight as to the meaning of the text in question. A sequence of 5 digits, for example, may represent a zip code, in the context of a US postal address, or an ICD-9 diagnostic code, in the health care sector. Guided conversion is supported by the provision of high-level mapping rules that hint at the current context so that patterns are interpreted correctly by the automated conversion tool. Compiling these hints depends on having an intimate familiarity with the document set destined for conversion. It is the content owners, armed with this content knowledge, who are best positioned to specify the mapping rules.

Patterns

Patterns are everywhere in content. Patterns occur both in the content itself, and in the file format that contains the content. The foundation of all content conversion tools is the ability to recognize patterns.People also use patterns to recognize things in content.

For instance, a reader will immediately recognize what these numbers mean based on their pattern:

9/30/12
+1 (613) 745-4242
$65.12

Software can recognize these patterns as well, so if your target format requires semantic markup for date, telephone numbers, or monetary amounts, a simple-pattern matching algorithm can find them and supply the markup. For example, a conversion program could recognize the sequence:

“+” numbers space “(“ number*3 “)” space number*3 “-” number*4

It can then capture each number sequence in this pattern and write it out using whatever XML format you choose for phone numbers, for instance:

Of course, recognizing phone numbers is a bit more complicated than this. For one thing, people do not always include the country code when they write a phone number. People often omit the parentheses and the dash from the number, especially when the country code is used. This is one place where local knowledge of your content comes in – if you have a corporate style for phone numbers, you can tell your conversion software exactly what to look for. Otherwise, the conversion program can use multiple patterns to detect phone numbers in different formats.

Also, this pattern only works for North American phone numbers. Many other countries write their phone numbers differently. This is a case where we can use a context clue to improve our detection of phone numbers. For instance we can use the country code to determine which pattern to expect. The following pattern detects a UK phone number:

“+44” numbers-and-spaces

UK phone numbers use a different format from North America, so our original pattern will not detect them correctly. A conversion program can detect phone numbers as a two-step process. First you detect the country code to determine which country the number belongs to, then you select a pattern appropriate to the chosen country to fully analyse the number.

You can expect support for matching common patterns, such as phone numbers, to be built in to conversion software. However, it should be easy to extend the system with new patterns specific to the vocabulary of a particular domain.

Context

Patterns, though they are an indispensable part of automated conversion, cannot on their own address the challenge of imparting to the content the depth of meaning, or understanding, required for the intelligent application of semantic markup. This is where context comes in.

For example, consider a list in an Adobe FrameMaker document. In FrameMaker, while a table is a distinct type of object, a list is not. In FrameMaker, you create a list simply by adding a bullet or number style to a set of paragraphs. The result is something that looks like a list in the output. However the FrameMaker file format does not record the fact that the content is a list. The human eye can see the list in the output, but it is a little more challenging for a conversion program to figure out where a list begins and ends and what belongs to each item in a list.

Why does the conversion program have to figure out where the list begins and ends? Because most XML formats treat lists as distinct objects. When an XML document is styled, the style is generally applied to the list as a whole, rather than to the individual paragraphs in the list. This is usually the only way that an XML-based system provides for styling lists, so if the conversion software does not recognize the list in the source and create a proper XML list element in the output, chances are that the list will not be styled properly in the final output.

Example: a nested list

Quick-drop cookies

Prepare the dough.
a. Beat the egg in a large bowl.
b. Add flour.
c. Stir in milk.
Prepare the topping.
a. Mix brown sugar and cinnamon in another bowl.
Form 1-inch round balls of dough.
It is helpful to use a spoon when forming these balls.
Roll each ball in the topping.
Place each ball on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake at 425 °F for 12 to 15 minutes.

This is the kind of construct that often occurs in complex procedures in technical documentation, the conversion program has to deal with multiple paragraphs within a single list item, as well as nested lists.

In this example, a paragraph that begins with a numeral indicates a first level list item, while a paragraph beginning with a letter indicates a nested, second level list item. An automated conversion should leverage this pattern to determine the logical nesting level of each item. Alternatively, it should identify nesting level by the indentation or styles that were used. Regardless, the conversion needs to track the current nesting level in order to ensure that the lists are properly opened and closed, and that each list item belongs to the correct list. For our example, this means emitting an opening

each time we transition from an outer list item to a more deeply nested list item, and emitting a closing when transitioning in the other direction. The correct output is:

Quick-drop cookies

Prepare the dough.

Beat the egg in a large bowl.

Add flour.

Stir in milk.

Prepare the topping.

Mix brown sugar and cinnamon in another bowl.

Form 1-inch round balls of dough.

It is helpful to use a spoon when forming these balls.

Use a spoon to make 1-inch round balls of dough.

Roll each ball in the topping.

Place each ball on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 to 15 minutes.

Note that the list markers (1., 2., a., etc.) have been removed by the conversion.

Guided Conversion

So, how can we establish the appropriate context of a given piece of content? The most reliable authority on this is the content owner who is familiar with the content. A mechanism is required which enables the content owner to easily express what the correct context is for any document content. This must be a high-level interface that does not require the user to be a programmer or technical expert.

Example: task steps

Upon further reflection, the markup provided by the previous example is not ideal. An improved DITA markup of these instructions for preparing the quick-drop cookies would use steps within a task topic. But, to target a semantically rich content model such as a DITA task, a conversion tool requires guidance. Such guidance may be provided by means of annotations attached to portions of the content, as illustrated in the table below.

The task title annotation can be based on the formatting properties of bold and underline. The annotation of step level 1 or 2 can be based on the presence of the list markers or the indentation level of the text. The tip might be recognized by the paragraph styling. The conversion should be smart enough to try to fit the last sentence into a task in a way that makes sense, in a way that is permitted by the DITA task content model. The elements , and are good candidates. A preference can be set for the documentation set, and in this case is the best choice.

Guided by these annotations, the conversion software should produce the following output:

Quick-drop cookies

Prepare the dough.

Beat the egg in a large bowl.

Add flour.

Stir in milk.

Prepare the topping.

Mix brown sugar and cinnamon in another bowl.

Form 1-inch round balls of dough.

It is helpful to use a spoon when forming these balls.

Roll each ball in the topping.

Place each ball on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 to 15 minutes.

Typical problems to look out for

Here are some examples of the types of conversion issues that cause problems for conversion solutions that do not make full and integrated use of patterns, context, and guided conversion.

Multiple sets of steps within a task topic

A DITA task topic must contain only one procedure. However, many existing user guides are not written that way, and may have more than one procedure in a section. If you are converting sections into topics, and a section has more than one procedure, the conversion software needs to do something to produce valid output that includes both procedures.

Some control of context is required even to recognize that this problem exists. A conversion that depended solely on pattern matching would not even notice that it was creating an illegal second procedure. For a conversion tool to avoid this error, it has to be aware of the context of the procedure, not only in the input it is reading, but in the output it is creating.

Though the content cannot be automatically re-authored, the conversion software can insert an empty task based on context, effectively breaking the topic into two tasks. This allows the conversion software to apply the semantically correct <step> and <cmd> markup to the content of the second procedure. The user still needs to provide the proper text for the title of the second procedure, post-conversion, but this is much quicker and easier, and less error-prone, than re-authoring the topic, either in the input or in DITA. <h3>Procedures authored as a table</h3> A number of organizations use tables to lay out the steps of a procedure. For a generic conversion program, this structure is going to look like a table, not a procedure, and the result will be that the content will come out as a table rather than a task in the DITA XML, which is not what you want. Guided conversion can identify such tables based on, for example, the content of the first column (Step 1, Step 2 etc) or the header row, or possibly the table style. The identified tables can be stripped of their table markup, and their contents automatically mapped into step commands, info, examples etc. Again, the paragraphs can be identified based on the fact that they were contained in such a table, so there is no need to rely on styles. Tables that contain definition lists, advisories, or any other content, can be similarly identified and stripped of their table markup. <h3>Conditional text</h3> Some conversion tools have trouble working with files that contain conditional text. Sometimes the tool requires that all conditions be turned on before conversion, and then they lose the conditions in the output. Guided conversion should be used to specify a rule which indicates how different conditions in the source content map to XML. The conversion rule can target the DITA otherprops attribute, or a specialization of the props filtering attribute, for the capture of the conditional information. A guided conversion rule could also cause conditions of a specified type to lead to the creation of entries in the relationship table of the DITA map. <h3>Constructing book and map files</h3> While the aim of a conversion to DITA is to be able to reuse topics in many places, the first place you are probably going to want to use your converted topics is in the same book they came from. That means you will need a ditamap and/or bookmap that reproduces the structure of the converted book. Your conversion tool should be able to produce the required ditamap and bookmap for you. Discerning the hierarchy is not always as simple as matching heading levels. Not every heading marks a change in hierarchy, and authors do not always use headings in strict hierarchical sequence. Additionally, different topic divisions may be indicated by the use of different heading types. Managing all of these issues requires sophisticated management of context informed by a detailed knowledge of the content and the style conventions that were used to create it. Another important issue is discovering the book information such as publication date, document number, etc. For some organizations, this may involve the creation of a customized bookmap, if the standard DITA bookmap does not capture all of the publication information the organization uses. This information in not always easy to find in the source files. No generic conversion software can ever accurately detect, extract, and preserve this publication information, since its format and location is always specific to an individual organization. However, with guided conversion pinpointing the location, pattern, and context of this information, a conversion tool can build the correct map. In some cases, important metadata is found in the headers and footers rather than the main text flow of the document. Once again, guided conversion can pinpoint the data of interest and relate it correctly to ditamap and bookmap files you are building. <div id="attachment_1799" class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 310px"><a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Strategy-sign-e1336089205159.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1777];player=img;"></a> </div> <h3>Choosing your conversion strategy</h3> Knowledge, as <a href="http://jgollner.typepad.com/files/the-anatomy-of-knowledge-jgollner-sept-2006.pdf">defined by Joe Gollner</a>: “Knowledge is the meaningful organization of information, expressing an evolving understanding of a subject and establishing a basis for judgment and the potential for action.” The level of success that an automated conversion technology can hope to achieve is bounded by the depth of knowledge it can attain of the content to be converted. Context, supported by guided conversion, provides for the meaningful organization of the information revealed by patterns. The conversion software can act on this evolved understanding of your content to produce the richest XML possible. Knowledge is the key to intelligent content conversion. Because intimate familiarity with the content is so important to specifying the patterns and the context that will produce a high quality conversion that requires little cleanup, you probably don’t want to simply send your files away to be converted. Without your specialist knowledge to supply the patterns and context clues, the conversion you get back is going to be pretty generic, and that is going to mean you will have to do a lot of manual cleanup before the content is really usable. On the other hand, the people with this knowledge are writers and editors in your organization, and they generally don’t know how to express these kinds of context clues in a programming language. Trying to learn to do conversion programming, so that you can write your own conversions that exploit your knowledge of the content, is going to be even more time consuming than cleaning up all the problems left by a generic conversion. To get the best of both worlds, you need to work with a conversion service provider who understands the importance of patterns, context, and knowledge of the content in the conversion process, and who will work with you to define the conversion rules that will greatly improve the quality of your conversion output, and thus save you weeks or months of cleanup effort. You need a conversion service provider that possesses the intelligent conversion tools that allow you to capture and express all the context recognition rules in a high-level human-readable way, without the need for programming or technical expertise. </article> <article> <h1>How Dynamic Publishing Can Make Your Customers Love You</h1> Noz Urbina — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:51:29 +0000 by Noz Urbina, Senior Consultant, Trainer and Presales Manager for Mekon Ltd. Here’s the problem. Marketing and technical communication teams are overloaded. Faced with: <ul> <li>Multiple delivery formats (print, web, online help, and now, myriad mobile formats)</li> <li>Increasing demand for translation</li> <li>Increasing demand for personalization and localization of content</li> <li>Shortening product release cycles with more product variants means more duplicate content need to be kept up-to-date</li> <li>Completely new channels and content sources to tackle (social media, syndication, user-generated content)</li> </ul> <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/camel.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a>It seems we’re the camels, and the market has no shortage of straw to pile on our backs. The solution can’t be “work harder”, because increases in communication budgets have not been proportionate to increasing demand on us. Because we can’t allocate additional resources to tackle these challenges, we must work smarter. This means leveraging automation to create all these personalised deliverables with as little manual effort as possible. We just can’t keep up using outdated methods where we convert from format to format. Our users don’t want content on a website, or a microsite, or a portal, or PDF, or a mobile app – they want it on them all. By dynamically assembling content on request, and automatically publishing it out in the format of the user’s preference, we can focus our precious human resource on the challenges that need humans, like information design, architecture and of course writing. For the grunt work of content assembly, layout, formatting, and publishing, use can leverage cheap, dynamic, automatic processes. This doesn’t just require new software or technology, but a new process and attitudes towards publishing so that it can be dynamically processed while still maintaining quality of output. Going outside the comfort zone of some readers, I am going to illustrate some simple lessons that can be applied across various verticals and industries by using an ‘extreme case’ of advanced technical communications as an example. For nearly two decades, this field has been pioneering dynamic methodologies to address diverse customers faster and across various formats. Why Should We Look at TechComm <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/complexdocument.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a> We usually think of technical communication as ‘the manuals’ (which no one wants to read), but it is so much more. Smart techcomm focuses on facilitating the customer’s experience of the product or service that the published content supports. Techcomm publishers design personas, key messages and establish content strategies and workflows like any other type of publishing. Also like all publishers techcomm leverages social media and dynamic systems to give users what they want, when and where they want it. What Customers Want What customers want is the knowledge that is trapped in the heads (and on the hard drives) of product experts like engineers, technical communicators, trainers, and especially, their peers. Websites, reviews, manuals — even ‘content’ itself — are all a means to an end. Your customers want to be able to do something with your products. They may want to buy, evaluate, install, clean, use, repair, or decommission them. To do what they desire, they need you to transfer the knowledge you have locked inside your walled gardens and give it to them — quickly, so they can get back to whatever it was they were trying to do before they needed your help. The social media explosion of the past decade – which shows no signs of ebbing – has shown us that communities can produce a lot of content. The questions remain: can we get them to produce and distribute usable, useful product knowledge, and if so, how can we leverage that knowledge? * Or government body, or association. What Can The Crowd Do For You? <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/90-percent-10-percent.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a>They can write for you Usability and web specialist Jakob Nielsen has detailed the fact that <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html">the vast minority of consumers will never become content producers</a>. However, when dealing with large numbers of users with large numbers of demands, the contributions they make do not need to be substantial, they need only to be enough. And users know it. “Official” product content — that content created or published by the enterprise — sometimes has a reputation for being incomplete, difficult to navigate or otherwise unhelpful. In all my research and field experience, I’ve found most consumers don’t care who creates the content, as long as it helps them accomplish their goal. As we’ll see below, the nature of the user contributions is also different, making them disproportionately valuable. The lesson: Make it easier for users to extend and add value to your content. When publishing, your platform needs to allow users to easily contribute content. That content will also need to be structured and wrapped in as much metadata as possible. Your platform will need to help you sort and curate user contributions to find both good contributions and top contributors. You find these by filtering the content based on metadata (a taxonomy). Users will build your taxonomy (and therefore links, filters and navigation) for you A taxonomy is a labeling and categorization system. It defines data about your content (metadata), and lets you filter, search and relate content. Users will tag their own content if properly encouraged (again, see <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html">Nielsen’s advice</a> on making things easy to encourage participation), building up a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11idea">‘folksonomy’</a> (a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy">taxonomy</a> built by ‘the folks’ that use the content). Often we think we must choose between a taxonomy or folksonomy. The truth is that the two play very well together. Look at Amazon: <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Screen-Shot-2012-03-29-at-8.09.21-AM.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a> As we know, Amazon’s taxonomy of things like ‘Home electronics’ vs. ‘Books’ vs. ‘Home, Garden & Tools’ is an integral and vital way of navigating a vast amount of content. However, they know that their customers are always right, and that no classification and navigation system they provide will ever (on its own) equal what they can do if they leverage the power of the crowd. Amazon lets users add their own tags. And, they allow their users to search and navigate the site using those tags, in combination with the classification system the company provides. <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/tag-cloud.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a>Leveraging user-generated tags is necessary because it helps solve several problems. First, tags created by users provide a wealth of information about our content. In order to build content classification systems of value, we must know what terms our customers use to describe our products, services and content. Second, because those who work for us creating official content are often resistant to adding metadata tags, leveraging the crowd to build folksonomies can help us provide the right content to the right people at the right time and in the right language. Search engines need this additional information to help customers find what they are looking for and dynamic publishing engines require tags to deliver content to those who need it, when and where they need it. The lesson: Make it possible for your users to build a folksonomy in all your online channels. Curate those terms and glean business-critical information from them. This means enabling user tagging on their own content — and on yours — and having clear guidelines indicating what user-generated terms may ‘graduate’ from the folksonomy into the official taxonomy. This will enable analytics and reporting, which allow you to monitor what’s happening to and around your content. With this metadata in your arsenal, you will be able to sort by products and subjects, locate top contributing users and top rated content. Users can know things you can’t User-generated content is created by users specifically for what users want and/or need. Technical communicators try to do this as well, but users are in the privileged position of having the enterprise’s published content as a starting point. They also have real-world field experience with your products before they start writing, an opportunity many enterprise staff will never have. <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/bicyclerepair.jpg" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a>For general publishing, often we find that when content ‘goes live’ we discover that it was not properly designed for users’ needs. Similarly, in techcomm, it is only when a user first puts the product and all its supporting content into use that the gaps are found. In a recent content strategy audit, we looked at product content generated outside of the organization, specifically, at common user search queries coming in through the website, and questions and answers posted to forums. We found that the users were getting lots of facts, but not the task-based and conceptual overview information they were looking for. By often being derived from engineering specifications and product management documents, technical communication content is often excessively reference-based, giving people more of a ‘dictionary of product data’, rather than true ‘user guides’ or ‘how to manuals’. The lesson: When dynamic methods are not in place, staff get overloaded just trying to hit deadlines and prepare reviewed, nicely formatted deliverables. All publishers need to plan to learn from users, and promote their work. Time is money. Any financial adviser will tell you to always put away 10% at the beginning of the month, no matter how little you have left. You’ll find a way to make do with the 90%, and be far better off in the long term. Plan a percentage of time at the beginning of every project to research the community’s needs by watching their output. <a href="http://www.thedynamicpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Screen-Shot-2012-03-29-at-8.10.13-AM.png" rel="shadowbox[sbpost-1551];player=img;"></a> You can — and should — have a process in place for finding, capturing, validating, and reworking users’ knowledge until it fits alongside ‘official’ content. Pulling it all together By enabling user creation and tagging of content, and building analysis and curation of user content into your process, you will be able to leverage more content than you could ever have the capacity to produce yourself. XML (oftentimes of the DITA flavor) will be required to make all of this a reality. XML authoring environments make it possible to create semantically-enabled content that can go anywhere, and take its metadata with it. As such, the platform you choose will likely be an XML-based system and require a rethink of information design and editorial processes to enable dynamic publishing of the end deliverables. By leveraging your folksonomy and taxonomy, you can dynamically create related links from your content to user-generated content and back again. To illustrate, think about how when <a href="http://www.reuters.com/">Reuter</a>’s sells news on “Middle East oil fields” to a 3rd party news site, that 3rd party site can automatically link that content to its other “Middle East” and “Oil” content not sourced from Reuters – simply by matching up the metadata tags. It’s a simple feature of dynamic systems, but highly impactful. If the users have knowledge and the will to share it, saving us time and making them happier in the process, then it seems only fitting that we help them do so. </article> </main></body></html>