So it seems, off the cuff, that the answer to Carr’s question must be, “Yes, yes, immediate access to information, tools and other people through today’s electronic media is, in fact, making us stupid.” I haven’t even read far enough into it to say that I am confident I remember Carr’s central premise — I first read the article when he wrote it 3 years ago.

[Brief pause]

OK, I’ve re-read the whole thing, and I’m still arguing with Carr.

Carr leans heavily on anecdote here, as he has to — there’s still precious little research about the long-term effects on humans of  being “wired” vs. not being so. Additionally, part of Carr’s point is that the move toward using artificial intelligence and relying on it in the ways we now do is systematizing our thought processes, or at least, our intellectual work in ways that are unnatural for humans.

Yet early in the article, Carr notes that reading isn’t intuitive for humans, either. While writing [and thus reading] was developed about 5000 years ago, human society is far older. Each human learns anew how to read — no one is born with that ability.

But I think the part that bothers Carr is the reduction in narrative. It is a human quality to make meaning of our world, to create a story where one did not exist. And deep concentration and deep reading greatly assist us in developing narrative. But developing the skills needed to sort, evaluate and synthesize the vast amounts of information available to people in modern society is also valuable.

I view many of the ways I use information, systems and technology today to aid me in clearing my brain for this deeper kind of thought. The more I can create routines and mechanize my information management, the less brainpower I have to devote to that — and the more I can devote to what I find truly valuable: pattern identification.

Finding the connections between ideas and information makes the original information all the more valuable. Pattern recognition is an essential skill in creating a narrative and telling a story — and in receiving a narrative or a story from others.

Metadata really can have several shades of meaning. If you want to start down the technical path, the Wikipedia entry on metadata is a decent place to start, but it will quickly send you in several, far more technical, directions.

But what I’m talking about today is pretty easy to understand and to see the value of. We’re going to talk about the basics of metadata for web content.

The basics
Metadata is information about your content. Let’s think about this web post as an example.

In WordPress, the software I use to run this site, I have two main kinds of content: Pages and posts. This is a post. I could define post to mean whatever I want, but in this case, I’m using the blog convention that a post is a piece of content that could live on its own page [like this], or can exist as part of a catalog and show up in different places, all depending on how I categorize it. [On the other hand, the pages on this website are just that -- single pages, whose content only exists in one place. Here's an example.] The fact that what you’re reading right now is a post is just a piece of metadata about this content.

I’ve put this post into 3 categories on my site:

• Content strategy
• Information management
• Metadata

So those are 3 bits of “metadata,” or information, about this post. [WordPress offers the ability to create and manage categories. That's a pretty basic feature, and unless you're just writing your site by hand in HTML, your software should offer that, as well.]

The date I published this is part of its metadata, as are the dates I’ve updated it. The fact that I did this, and not someone else who might have a login to my server, is also part of the metadata.

You can probably guess that some of these bits of information are captured automatically by my system, and some I choose intentionally.

Using metadata
All of these are pieces of information that I can use for my own purposes. For instance, if I wanted to create a category of posts I’d written about metadata, I could easily pull those together in my system, because I’ve thought to select the “metadata” category each time I wrote a post on that topic.

Getting more sophisticated
While it’s nice to be able to easily create categories, we’re not yet talking about real power. Here are two examples that don’t exist on my site, but that do exist on sites that are just a little more complex.

If you log in when you visit a site — say, Amazon — then it’s possible for the site to begin collecting information about you along the way, that it can match up with metadata about its content, and then it can give you a really personalized experience.

For instance, did you ever wonder how Google gives you localized results when you search for “restaurant”? Did you wonder how that happens? It’s automagically matching what it knows about your location [from your web browser....read more about how Google finds and uses your location here.] to the information it has about restaurants. It’s in a restaurant’s interest to make it easy for Google to do that, of course. Which leads us to….

Metadata schemas and frameworks
When you’re ready to go beyond the basics, you need to understand the schemas that are available for metadata. A schema is just a structure that a group of people has agreed to use in common. So if you’re talking about location, or library books, or video content, there are agreed-upon structures that other people are already using. If you want your data to talk to other people’s data, or be available outside your system, or even to avoid solving problems that have already been solved by someone else, you need to consider carefully how you want to use your content, and then evaluate the frameworks that may already be available to help you do that.

We see a related [though thankfully, very, very rarely life-or-death] issue in our content strategy work: The need for accountable content.

Accountable content starts with a business goal. [Just a quick note to say that your problem is not a good definition of your business goal. For instance, your problem is that your help content is hard to keep current and no one uses it. Your business goal is creating useful help content that reduces call volume by XX% this year.]

It’s too simple to say that everything else flows from the business goal, but it’s true. You have to make every decision about your content through the lens of your business goal. Should you write your own content? Should you license it? Should you hire a freelancer or seek a long-term relationship with a content development firm? Who will approve and manage the content? What kind of technology will you use? How will you measure the results? You’ll give better answers to every question with the business goal pasted on the wall.

We’ve worked with many organizations through the years that do not realize how much content they’re already managing, and the overhead they’re already putting into the process. Very few organizations don’t have content. Most don’t have the right kind, or don’t manage what they have well. The real opportunity sometimes comes in the ability to narrow down your content-under-management to only what truly serves your business need.

Is your content accountable? Is it working for you? Or are you working in service of your content?

I’ll warn you: Lovinger is really smart, and she talks on a high level. I hope I have captured it all accurately and made it useful if you’re not in the session.

Her overarching message: Get some great metadata, and use it well.

Nimble content must be well structured:

Nimble content requires tools, processes and standards.

Nimble content can be understood and used by machines…not just by humans. To be understood by machines, you have to have standards.

Some potential structures for organizing your data
The structure you apply to your content lets it be flexible once it leaves your hands.

• HTML5 is a great resource in making your content more nimble. You can describe relationships, types, titles, more in the tags. She references Mark Pilgrim’s great guide to HTML5.
• RDF stands for resource description framework, and lets you collect metadata into sets of triples. RDFa is a more recent framework that lets you embed similar code into your HTML.
• OWL is web ontology language. Ontology is a set of knowledge related to a domain, so this is starting to get into some serious information science here.
• SKOS=Simple knowledge organization system — a hierarchical way to express knowledge or relationships.
• Your CMS gives your information structure and separates the knowledge from the presentation.

Nimble content must be well defined.

Structural metadata defines your content. What information do you have about your content? You have types of content, and each type has different elements. [Events have title, description, start time, end time, etc.]

Content needs to have standards. Lovinger is referencing a number of metadata standards used in different fields. She starts with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, which is working to create interoperable metadata standards. She lists several metadata standards used in journalism, pointing out that sometimes you need to use more than one framework.

Some metadata around images: Digital cameras capture a lot of metadata. EXIF, exchangeable image format. Based on TIFF attributes. XMP, or extensible metadata platform is another. This one was created by Adobe but is incorporated into some other web standards.

Metadata standards for video: MPEG-7 is one standard, but Media RSS was created by Yahoo! and includes more details that are useful when you’re syndicating.

Metadata standards for social connections: FOAF – Friend of a friend. Describes a number of other items related to social connections. SIOC [pron. shock] – Semantically-interlinked online communities. Used more with forums and communities.

Metadata standards for products: Good Relations is a standard for products/ecommerce.

Nimble content must be well described.

Once you have structured and defined your content, you must use that framework to effectively describe it. Use your labels and tags well.

Oh, nice: She throws out a differentiation between these terms:

• Folksonomy: User-generated tags or categorization
• Taxonomy: Hierarchical structure for content
• Ontology: Hierarchical structure that incorporates business rules [Example: This can differentiate between the blackberry in your cobbler and the Blackberry in your purse.]

Lovinger is talking about machine-assisted tagging — systems that will suggest tags or terms to you and the user can accept or reject. This can help your folksonomy have more structure, for instance. And mentions that Drupal 7 incorporates RDF and RDFa.

I have purposefully avoided most business travel the last 2 1/2 years, while I was pregnant with and nursing my youngest child. I made a day trip here and there, but I avoided being gone overnight. [When I went to South by Southwest last year, I took my mother and both my daughters....exhausting and lots of fun, but not sustainable for your average trip.] But now my youngest has turned 2, and she does just fine when I’m on the road for a few days. So this spring, I booked several conferences I’d been wanting to attend to better network within the content strategy/IA/UX industry.

For quite some time, I’ve been lugging around a 15-inch MacBook Pro, an 8″ x 10.5″ x 2″ Franklin planner, and many days, a 14-inch [but damn heavy] Dell. After one trip this spring, I realized what I’d known in the back of my head for a long time, even as I carried all this stuff around in my car every day:

This is stupid.

I tend to be an early adopter on technology and I’m really comfortable with it, so I can’t give you a rational explanation why I was still carrying all that stuff around, especially the paper part. I’ve just always been in the habit of writing down what I have to do, so it was easier to continue to use the task system that has served me well for more than 15 years.

So after having to take way too much Advil to soothe my screaming neck and shoulders this spring, I decided it was time to go cold turkey on the paper planner. I’m also planning a computer change later this year, so I’ll have a much lighter, more portable machine when I’m on the go, but I knew the paper planner was a big part of my “stuff” problem.

The technology I’m using so far:

• Google Calendar: I use Google Calendar for both my home and work life organization. My husband and I started using it several years ago, before we got married, to keep track of all the schedules for the family. It is great, but offline access was a problem when I was traveling.
• BusyCal: I bought BusyCal for the Mac. With BusyCal, I can sync back and forth seamlessly with my Google Calendar, so my husband, my employees and everyone else [through my Tungle.me account] can stay up-to-date on my whereabouts. BusyCal gives me offline access and a few more task features than Google does. I use BusyCal for my personal task lists. [Why not iCal? This program is free on my Mac, but I've never liked it. My initial problem with it, several years ago, was that it only supported 6 or so colors for your calendars. At last count, I'm following or managing 20 calendars, so 6 colors didn't cut it. Now, iCal does seem to have support for plenty of colors, but there's still something about it I don't like. It was worth it to me to pay for BusyCal, but your mileage may vary.]
• Basecamp: My company uses Basecamp to track projects, tasks and to-do lists. I love it and use it daily, but I feel like I’m shoehorning things in when I put personal items here, or try to track appointments, so I’m still using other tools for these purposes.
• Moleskine notebook: Not only did I use my planner to keep track of appointments and to-dos, but I also depended on it for meeting notes. I got a large Moleskine notebook to have for this purpose, but I’ve noticed the same problems that Michael Hyatt details here. You’ve got to get those handwritten notes into your online system if you want to be able to track and manage the information. So I’ll likely look for the EcoSystems notebook he recommends [all pages are perfed for easier removal/scanning] when I finish this Moleskine.
• Evernote: Here’s where I’m starting to feel like I don’t fully have a handle on my new system. I’m using Basecamp, BusyCal and Evernote to manage different kinds of information. I feel like it should be easier to consolidate, but no one of them seems to be exactly perfect for my needs. I am currently using Evernote for meeting notes, but I feel like I could use it better. I’m eagerly reading posts like Michael Hyatt’s helpful ones on using Evernote to get organized to continue to inspire me here. [If you're thinking that Michael Hyatt has become my personal productivity guru, you're not far off. He has great insights on this topic.]

The upshot? I’m online, but I don’t feel settled yet in my new task system. The one thing I HAVE been largely successful at over the past few months [preceding my paper exodus by a bit] is getting my task list out of my email inbox. So I’m making progress, but I’m not done yet.

What are your best tips for managing calendars, tasks and information?

It’s as if each company said, “We need to get something out there with a QR code on it – and it doesn’t matter what it says or links to. Just get it out now, now. We only have two weeks till the event kicks off!”
Fail.

– From Paul Merrill. Get the rest at Shiny Bits of Life

QR codes [stands for Quick Response codes, but you'll never hear them referred to by the full words] are getting hot with marketers. Merrill’s right; they were everywhere at South by Southwest last week, but I’ve also seen them in print magazines and on ads in the subway in New York.

The idea behind QR codes is solid: You see an ad [or an article, or a product package, whatever] with a QR code, and you whip out your ubiquitous smartphone, scan the code and get delivered to a website where additional, fabulous information awaits you.

It’s the fabulous part we’re struggling with right now.

This is fundamentally a user experience problem. Marketers haven’t yet sorted out what is best delivered via your phone, or your computer or a printed ad. So right now, they’re throwing it all at you, every which way they can. Given some time and excellent examples, this kind of thing will sort itself out. The only potential problem is, if we become inured to poor QR code usage in the meantime, it will take a lot of work to get people to start scanning them again.

So marketers of the world, please be careful with your QR codes. Stop using them when you can’t be fabulous.

We’re talking about how to manage your RSS feeds. We subscribe to feeds that we mostly like, but everything in them may not be interesting. And it’s hard to keep up. And there are lots of feeds out there that we don’t subscribe to.

Some tips:

• Spend the time to categorize.
• Stuff you really care about at the top.
• Don’t try to read everything.

How do you find sources you wouldn’t run across?
The Tweeted Times. Takes links from people you follow, and people they follow, and displays in a newspaper format with most-tweeted stuff at the top. Great way to catch up on Twitter.
Techmeme. Good way to get a global sense of what’s popular.

Foster says the magic is in filtering. Sets up Yahoo! Pipes to filter feeds on keywords she cares about. She also uses PostRank to filter up the blog posts that have lots of comments or mentions.

Big fan of Yahoo! Pipes. You can filter on any kind of data that shows up in the feed. Downsides: Learning curve, sometimes flaky. And it could be killed by Yahoo!.

FeedRinse: Easy to use, not as flexible.
FeedDemon: Allows some filtering.
Many of the smaller services have gone out of business.

Foster has a lot of screencasts on her blog about how to use Yahoo! Pipes.

Simple filter: Gives Yahoo! Pipes two RSS feeds, a few keywords to filter on, and it will spit out one RSS feed that displays only the posts matching the criteria.

PostRank takes a feed and ranks the posts based on engagement. Then you can get the output as an RSS feed. Then, the PostRank info goes into the RSS feed, so you can use it again in Yahoo! Pipes.

RSS feeds should include title, author, dates, links, content, but many also include things like latitude, longitude, and lots more — but your RSS reader likely isn’t displaying that. Also, many APIs include even more data and can be turned into RSS.

So using Postrank, she runs 3 RSS feeds through PostRank and then takes those best-post feeds and runs it through Yahoo! Pipes and sorts by best posts overall on a topic she’s interested in.

She also uses Yahoo! Pipes to modify the format of RSS feeds. This is cool. You’ll have to pull her slides, but she has one that shows you exactly how she’s reformatting feeds to make them all look and feel the way she wants.

Now Foster’s talking about using APIs. She’s going to show us what she does with BackTweets. This service tells you who’s sharing links, regardless of the shortening service they use. They used to offer info in a feed, but don’t anymore. So now you can use their API to get it. She’s building a feed that will show her who’s talking about her posts on Twitter. It involves the BackTweets API, the Twitter API and Yahoo! Pipes. Get the slides to see all the details.

Also has a nice flow for doing a vanity search using Yahoo! Pipes. I’m going to check this slide out later.

Foster’s caveats:
Don’t ever use this in a production environment. Instead, write it in a real programming language with cached results and error-checking. You can’t build your business on Yahoo! Pipes.

Oh good audience questions: Can you manipulate audio and video files included in the RSS feeds via Yahoo! Pipes? Foster says, you can definitely pass that through into your output feed, but doesn’t know of any way to evaluate that info in Pipes.

Also, question from the audience prompts Foster to clarify that when you use RSS, you still have to abide by licensing and copyright restrictions that the original content creator has.

Conrad: Pandora has 8 billion thumbs up/thumbs down data, completely contextualized.

Walk says that YouTube knows a lot about where their videos are embedded. Talks about could personally review videos, or use algorithm to analyze videos, but they are also look at what the top blogs/sites are pulling from YouTube to understand what videos are popular with whom.

Walk: About 50% of searches on YouTube are “broad,” meaning the person is looking for an experience, not a particular video. Google has to figure out what the best videos are to help someone understand/experience a topic. It’s very different from trying to answer a question, like we think of in traditional search.

Camp: We want to get away from 10 blue links. We want to be surprised, have serendipitous experience.

Conrad: Looking at most common starting points a couple of years ago. One of top ones was called Christmas. The station was seeded with an indie rock band called Christmas. Oops. So then they started playing the station to see what happened, and it was playing all holiday music. The crowd had very quickly weeded out the data error by thumbing down the band on the holiday station.

Walk shares story of a teenager who told them that she wanted to know what her friends hadn’t watched yet on YouTube, so she knew what to share. It’s a hard problem, but they want to figure out what’s not yet spreading, but will.

Camp: StumbleUpon tests new, non-socially-recommended stuff in streams to figure out this kind of question. When you’re just looking at the social graph, you’re in a closed loop.

Ron: Social is really important in recommendations because of the trust factor. Getting a friend recommendation still beats the site telling you, hey “other people like you” like this.

Walk: Early on, they just trusted what the uploader said about what the video is. Now, they use a lot of technology to understand a piece of content. What does perfect metadata look like? What’s everything I COULD know about it? And then the challenge is, you take all that data to try to create an experience, not just spit out data.

Walk: One of biggest changes in perceived search relevance was when they started showing context for recommendations. Immediately, people thought recommendations were more relevant. And two, if the recommendation was wrong, they blamed themselves, not YouTube.

Conrad: Pandora has broken out of the PC into mobile and now car implementations. The difference in environment between listening at work via headphones to listening in the car with the whole family and lots of people making the music decisions is very complex.

Camp: StumbleUpon is often a free-time application, so their new mobile app [6mo old] is doing well.

Ron: Interesting patterns in how people are following people for recommendations. Some people follow only celebrities, for instance.

Camp: For analytics, they look at thumbs up/thumbs down, length of time on resource, comparing time to type of resource. SU has an 80-85% thumbs up rate.

Walk: You have to be careful with analytics. You don’t want to introduce features that push up your positive stats to the detriment of user experience.

Conrad: They religiously test all changes to the algorithms now, after making several changes in early days that “everyone” agreed would be great, that instead tanked numbers.

Ron: Recommendation is very vertical-oriented. The required data is so specific that it’s hard to have a general recommendation engine.

Camp: Also, UI affects what kind of data you get a lot, so that’s part of why people build the engines themselves.

Ron: We’re not living in a world yet where we’re bombarded by awesome recommendations and we have to tune them. Part of the problem right now is getting coverage for everywhere.

Camp: We do a combination of social and similarity in your recommendation list.

My notes below are paraphrases [my best efforts] of Park’s talk and my comments in italics.

So he is supposed to work with the government to figure out how to harness the power of data to improve public health in America. He’s going to describe several things they’re doing at HHS. Never been a better time to be an entrepreneur at the intersection of health care and IT. Amen to that.

There are new incentives + information freedom that add up to rocket fuel for innovation.

Starts with “meaningful use,” the new Medicare/Medicaid incentives that reward meaningful use — improving outcomes — of electronic health records [EHR]. Government is trying to send a signal to the industry of what appropriate, meaningful use of EHR is.

Meaningful use is the appetizer when it comes to incentive change.

The big enchilada is payment reform.

Obamacare [OK, he uses the formal name of the bill, the Affordable Care Act] is designed to shift from pay for services to pay for health and value.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Center is funding to identify ways that payment reform is already working, identifying experiments that work. Oh, I remember this. This is the part of the bill I was scoffing at, thinking it was too small-scale to make a difference. Park says that if Medicard/Medicaid identifies a working reform, then it’s a regulation change, not a law change, to implement it. That’s the secret sauce in this bill, it seems. The $10B to fund the innovation center has been “appropriated.” Hmm. I have to check on that. I thought that’s what the GOP is trying to de-fund.

Reforming payment systems
He’s got a really massive slide with a lot of actually useful terminology on it, but it’s a lot to capture and explain here. Gist of it is, there are a number of ways that we can improve access and reform payment to achieve savings and better health. Good. He’s posting his slides somewhere. More on that later.Updated 3/19/2011: Park’s slides from SXSW are now on Slideshare.

Information Liberation
Park enjoys saying liberacion in Spanish with great flair.
The Direct Project
This is a collaborative project to enable simple, secure tramission of health care data over the Internet. 60 vendors now implementing this solution according to government standard released in 6/10.

Blue Button
This allows any veteran or Medicare beneficiary to get an electronic copy of their own health information. Launched in October 2010 and more than 200,000 downloads so far.

So another initiative is trying to make the market more transparent. Healthcare.gov is part of this. It has a comprehensive list of all open insurance plans in the use, including pricing. They will release APIs of this data later in the year.

Next: Want to morph HHS into the NOAA of Health Data. Now this is kind of cool. They have already begun publishing data on the CHDI website. There’s some interesting looking stuff there. I will have to dive in further later. From a work session they had last year…Park says Tim O’Reilly said, you can’t make people find the data. The data has to find them. Now, Bing is using the CHDI data to show patient satisfaction data in search results when you search for a hospital. National Association of Counties helps counties set up public sites using this data, showing health information for their communities. Healthy Communities Dashboard. Community Clash is another site built on this health data. [Disclosure: Community Clash is a Healthways site, which is a client of mine, but I haven't worked on that site.]

Asthmapolis….lets you geographically track where you are having asthma attacks with a GPS connected to your inhaler. Soon will be anonomizing the data so we can have asthma maps to find hotspots.

This guy is rapid-fire machine-gun spewing health data projects at us. There is a LOT going on.

www.healthindicators.gov….downloadable data and available via API. Community health data.
data.medicare.gov….APIs to compare hospitals, nursing homes, home health, dialysis. Soon physician compare.
They are going to take Medicare claims files available to qualified people [ie., people who can handle privacy requirements, I guess] to do quality analysis.

MedLinePlus – Can send patient education materials in response to EHR queries via its API.

All this stuff is mentioned/linked on HealthData.gov. Oh, also includes a link to other sites offering free health data.

Mentions a brand new funding org for health apps: Rock Health.

For those who think health data, or any data, is a snore, please see Todd Park speak as soon as possible. I have never seen so much energy about data.

Now he’s talking about entrepreneurship and startups. “If you get the best people, you win.” Wants to get superstar talent focusing on health data. He wants you to contact him to do a health data camp or if you need help with health data: todd.park@hhs.gov or @todd_park. Is now begging people to email him. Please contact this man about health data.

Park is getting a real accolade from a guy behind me, who tells the room about the industry suffering through a decade of empty promises and now the past year of fabulous, growing access to government health data. Well said.

A much more recent post by Erin Kissane tackles the same topic from a different angle, making content strategy more of the umbrella.

I’d draw a bigger picture though. I’d put the business strategy umbrella over the top of the project as a whole. It’s got to define your work, no matter your discipline. To my mind, then, systems, development, UX, IA and content strategy all need a seat at the table to get from strategy through to executed product. There are a number of ways to make the process work — even how to define your business strategy. And depending on which process you use, one discipline or another may take a more prominent role.

In the end, I think the argument is largely academic. The critical thing is that the disciplines of content strategy, IA and UX all seem to get more respect now. When I started working on the web, there was design. And HTML. And then content, but in the “words-go-here” variety. Things have improved a lot since then — consumers have gotten much more sophisticated in what we demand from our web applications, and those of us in the web industry have responded to that. There are still people trying to execute web projects and applications without content strategy or IA or UX, of course. But if you want your work done effectively and well, you need all three.