But once we’ve witnessed content strategy’s effectiveness at the project level, it’s time to take several steps back and examine our organizations. Because content strategy can’t be truly effective over the long term without an internal editorial infrastructure to support it. And that means widespread organizational change.

via Kristina Halvorson, Content strategy is, in fact, the next big thing « Brain Traffic Blog.

To push for quick word choices by playing down their consequences, I’ve watched more than one web professional shrug and say “We’re not saving lives here.” Sometimes, I even nodded in agreement. Not anymore.

Colleen Jones, A List Apart: Articles: Words that Zing.

To most people, editors are wordsmiths [....] but it is a very limited understanding of the role.

Prasanna Lal Das, An editor is not just a wordsmith.

He also says that ultimately MSN will customize its content to a users’ interests. Already, the site is testing topic-centric versions of its home page. However, Jorgensen says that the site could eventually automatically customize content based on a user’s behavior and interests. (more…)

The web is designed to be consumed by humans, and much of the rich, useful information our websites contain, is inaccessible to machines. People can cope with all sorts of variations in layout, spelling, capitalization, color, position, and so on, and still absorb the intended meaning from the page. Machines, on the other hand, need some help.

A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it.

via A List Apart: Articles: Introduction to RDFa.

Curation goes one step beyond aggregation by adding an active, ongoing editorial component.

Curation and aggregation are similar in but a few ways. They both want to take lots of content and put it in a place [framework, feed, database, etc.] and they both seek to separate the wheat from the chaff. Most importantly, they both require a strategy.

via Clinton Forry, Content-ment: Content Curation versus Content Aggregation: A Velvet Mr. T Painting.