There’s a lot of loose talk about “modular” content on the Web. But done correctly, it enables publishers to reuse print information online without a time-consuming rewrite. Even better in the long run, it delivers information in an efficient and memorable way that makes it more genuinely useful than ever before.
Deborah A. Kenny, a vice president of the 40-year-old industry leader Information Mapping, Inc., recently taught a short course in modular content in a Webinar put on by the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Society for Technical Communications.
The principles underlying modular content arose out of cognitive psychology. To illustrate, Ms. Kenny asked everyone to look at a screen full of seemingly random words (field, existentialism, hockey, gear) for 20 seconds and then write down how many words they remembered. Most of us recalled five to seven, but a few recalled 10 or even more. Those were the people who noticed that the words fell into three categories: sports, philosophy, and cars.
And that’s the secret to modular content. You categorize content and then tag it, identifying the purpose and scope of what you’re writing, the audience for whom it’s intended, the technology with which the content was produced, and the content itself.
How do you categorize content? Remarkably, virtually everything you write for the Web (we’re not discussing novels or poetry here) fits into one of the following six categories:
- Procedure – How do I do something? Make espresso, manage a hedge fund, survive a tornado?
- Process – How does something work? An espresso machine, a hedge fund, a tornado. The big picture, probably with diagrams.
- Principle – What you must do. Rules, warnings, guidelines, policies, and other restrictions or requirements.
- Concept – The thing defined. What is espresso? What is a hedge fund? What is a tornado?
- Structure – What something looks like. Its parts and functions.
- Fact – All the rest.
Modular content is a deceptively simple idea. Producing it can be frightfully difficult. But clients want tidy packages of information they can store in content management systems and reuse for multiple purposes. Where there is market demand, supply will follow.
One Comment
The World Wide Web Consortium is involved in setting standards in this area. Standards will be essential for success in modular content. Open standards are best IMHO. See e.g., http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-cooluris-20071217/#intro
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[...] way to write copy you can repurpose easily. It’s called “modular content.” We wrote about it awhile back. If you want to learn what it’s all about, go to the venerable Information Mapping, Inc. Or call [...]