metatorial process
Bob Boiko on the metatorial process
03/26/10 08:02 Filed in: tagging
Another
great speaker at the WritersUA conference was Bob
Boiko. If you have not read his great Content
Management Bible, google it and read it online. Yes,
all 800 some pages. He loves indexing and tagging
data, so knowing him and quoting him when you are
talking to clients can establish a common vocabulary.
His talk this year was about the importance of the metatorial process. It is like the editorial process, but for your content's metadata. His strategy when approaching large bodies of data that need a schema is to ask these questions:
What underlying structures can be behind the surface structures we need?
How will we tag items so that they are part of the structures?
How much time and resource do we expect to get the backlog tagged and to tag on an ongoing basis?
How will we review, evaluate, and renew our approach?
He says that professionally tagging content is more important than social network tagging, because the content has to participate in another structure outside of the social one, and you must have consistency at the base of the information.
"Information strategy tells you what you had better be doing. Information structure tells you how you had better be doing it."
He feels that content writers and structurers (and us, as part of that) need to take control back from the IT people and drive the metatorial process.
Boiko is always worth reading and hearing if he comes near your town.
He has a course up at winhost.ischool.washington.edu/courseBook - go take a look!
His talk this year was about the importance of the metatorial process. It is like the editorial process, but for your content's metadata. His strategy when approaching large bodies of data that need a schema is to ask these questions:
What underlying structures can be behind the surface structures we need?
How will we tag items so that they are part of the structures?
How much time and resource do we expect to get the backlog tagged and to tag on an ongoing basis?
How will we review, evaluate, and renew our approach?
He says that professionally tagging content is more important than social network tagging, because the content has to participate in another structure outside of the social one, and you must have consistency at the base of the information.
"Information strategy tells you what you had better be doing. Information structure tells you how you had better be doing it."
He feels that content writers and structurers (and us, as part of that) need to take control back from the IT people and drive the metatorial process.
Boiko is always worth reading and hearing if he comes near your town.
He has a course up at winhost.ischool.washington.edu/courseBook - go take a look!