Tag Archives: Wordpress

Information Architecture (IA), Technology, Work

Information Architecture: An Afterthought for Content Creation Solutions

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Maximizing Digital Asset Reuse

Many applications that enable users to create their own content from word processing to graphics/image creation have typically relied upon 3rd party Content Management Solutions (CMS) / Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms to collect metadata describing the assets upon ingestion into their platforms.  Many of these platforms have been “stood up” to support projects/teams either for collaboration on an existing project, or reuse of assets for “other” projects.  As a person constantly creating content, where do you “park” your digital resources for archiving and reuse?  Your local drive, cloud storage, or not archived?

Average “Jane” / “Joe” Digital Authors

If I were asked for all the content I’ve created around a particular topic or group of topics from all my collected/ingested digital assets, it may be a herculean search effort spanning multiple platforms.  As an independent creator of content, I may have digital assets ranging from Microsoft Word documents, Google Sheets spreadsheets, Twitter tweets,  Paint.Net (.pdn) Graphics, Blog Posts, etc.

Capturing Content from Microsoft Office Suite Products

Many of the MS Office content creation products such as Microsoft Word have minimal capacity to capture metadata, and if the ability exists, it’s subdued in the application.  MS Word, for example, if a user selects “Save As”, they will be able to add/insert “Authors”, and Tags.  In Microsoft Excel, latest version,  the author of the Workbook has the ability to add Properties, such as Tags, and Categories.  It’s not clear how this data is utilized outside the application, such as the tag data being searchable after uploaded/ingested by OneDrive?

Blog Posts: High Visibility into Categorization and Tagging

A “blogging platform”, such as WordPress, places the Category and Tagging selection fields right justified to the content being posted.  In this UI/UX, it forces a specific mentality to the creation, categorization, and tagging of content.  This blogging structure constantly reminds the author to identify the content so others may identify and consume the content.  Blog post content is created to be consumed by a wide audience of interested viewers based on those tags and categories selected.

Proactive Categorization and Tagging

Perpetuate content classification through drill-down navigation of a derived Information Architecture Taxonomy.  As a “light weight” example, in WordPress, the Tags field when editing a Post, a user starts typing in a few characters, an auto-complete dropdown list appears to the user to select one or more of these previously used tags.  Excellent starting point for other Content Creation Apps.

Users creating Blog Posts can define a Parent/Child hierarchy of categories, and the author may select one or more of relevant categories to be associated with the Post.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Derived Tags

It wouldn’t be a post without mentioning AI.  Integrated into applications that enable user content creation could be a tool, at a minimum, automatically derives an “Index” of words, or tags.  The way in which this “intelligent index” is derived may be based upon:

  • # of times word occurrence
  • mention of words in a particular context
  • reference of the same word(s) or phrases in other content
    • defined by the same author, and/or across the platform.

This intelligently derived index of data should be made available to any platforms that ingest content from OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Docs, etc.  These DAMs ( or Intelligent Cloud Storage) can leverage this information for any searches across the platforms.

Easy to Retrieve the Desired Content, and Repurpose It

Many Content Creation applications heavily rely on “Recent Accessed Files” within the app.  If the Information Architecture/Taxonomy hierarchy were presented in the “File Open” section, and a user can drill down on select Categories/Subcategories (and/or tags), it might be easier to find the most desired content.

All Eyes on Content Curation: Creation to Archive
  • Content creation products should all focus on the collection of metadata at the time of their creation.
  • Using the Blog Posting methodology, the creation of content should be alongside the metadata tagging
  • Taxonomy (categories, and tags with hierarchy) searches from within the Content Creation applications, and from the Operating System level, the “Original” Digital Asset Management solution (DAM), e.g. MS Windows, Mac

 

Business

Equity Disclosure WordPress Plugin

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I’ve worked with someone from Freelancer.com to bring you the Equity Disclosure WordPress Plugin.  I’ve submitted this plugin to WordPress, and they have accepted it.  I think it is important for a writer to disclose their bias.  You may download, and install it manually here or from WordPress here. Warning: support is limited, we take no liability in the use of the program.  Happy blogging, and disclose your biases.

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Business, Technology

Microsoft OS & Google Cloud Platform: Owning the Shelf Space

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Google at this phase in their business and technology life cycle reminds me of Microsoft, as the trailblazers, when Microsoft was building all their products, and continually trying to own the shelf space of product sets in their desktop platform.  Now that the tides have turned, it seems their cloud platform is growing, and Google’s growth is dominant. Not only are they building out the architecture platform, but they are filling out their shelf space, building out their platform with their products, the mantra, building out the products that fit in their platform, with a preference to build verses buy, acquiring when necessary. The parallelism with Microsoft, and the desktop in the 80s and 90s scary in it’s cyclical nature.

Although Microsoft ‘virtually’ owned, and arguably continues to dominate the desktop, thick client, although loosing ground to a diversity of platforms ever since Red Hat brought Unix popularity, and Macintosh continued to grow in it’s popularity.  Look what happened at Microsoft, lots of stock options, lots of cashing in, and eventually becoming unpopular associated with a passion for their oligopoly, or as the antitrust put it, monopoly in the market of the desktop, owning the desktop platform.  Could that now happen with Google, and will we see the stock split, and other competitive offerings occur, forced by an anti-trust case by the government?  Ouch.  Well, there is no doubt, Google’s cloud platform and product set is growing.  Good for them, and good for us as consumers.  The difference, APIs, and expandability with the Google platform.  Has Google learned the harsh lessons of Microsoft, allowing the extensibility.  Will they run into barriers with partners, upgrades to the APIs, greed, and a movement to own the shelf space.

We will see.  Google, keep your cloud APIs extendable, expose as many APIs as possible, allowing third parties to easily compete and dominate the products within your architecture, even create open source code to your own products within the cloud platform, and promote as many third party products as possible leveraging all of the APIs.

The one thing I have seen so far, which is not a great sign, is trying to incorporate 3rd party products into your cloud where you have competitive offering.  I’d like to see Google step up, for example, and create widgets to WordPress to compete with their blogging platform.  Actively look to plug in third party products into your cloud architecture, avoiding the animosity third parties might have, and there won’t be a need for anti-trust down the road.  Europe is already jumping on that train with anti-trust.  I’d devise a group within Google that looks to integrate, and partner with small to mid size companies, and proactively include them into your platform.  Don’t give anyone a reason to target Google as a monopoly.

See also the article, THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google’s FTC Interrogation Not Analogous To Microsoft’s Antitrust History

Business, Technology

Grid and Cloud Computing Going Head to Head: Profit for You

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I was thinking about what was around before cloud computing.  I thought about mainframes and allocated computing cycles, then I thought about the SETI @ Home project with it’s transformation to grid or shared computing with Boinc.  Why did this seem to go by the wayside, or not maximized to become a secure cloud hosted by servers throughout the world.  A charge back model could have been created to allow users to receive monetary value for their compute cycles.  There are traditional answers which have halted it’s progress, however, there is a business model that allows anyone with a web host shared or leased, to turn a profit, such as Bloggers.

The world, from a personal computing standpoint, has progressed to laptops which have a highly utilized hibernate mode, which does not lend itself to leverage available compute cycles, because computers and the human processes that use computers are more efficient.  Laptops are just as powerful as our ‘old’ servers, and so our servers for project use have been relegated solely to the world of academia.

Although, I find extremely interesting, there is an opportunity where grid computing can have life once again, through blog hosted servers.  People who have blogs, which are hosted on servers other than WordPress.com or Google’s Blogger, have lower compute requirements for posting and serving up text and media then traditional apps hosted on web servers.  Hosted bloggers should be able to identify their utilization of their server, and calculate the ability to ‘lend’ server time.  In addition, a WordPress Plugin, for example, may be created as a User Interface, as well as a Boinc application interface.  A web server version of Boinc and a deployment binary package would need to be created and deployed on your web server.  At that point, WordPress APIs crafted as a plugin can be used to invoke the processing. Additional plugins or widgets for WordPress would allow for:

  • A widget on a blog side bar to display the results of a project your site ascribed to for grid computing, such as dynamic, refreshed charts and graphs
  • A plugin to embed short codes on blog pages to derive any information from the Boinc app client hosted on your Web Server.
  • A widget that allows YOUR customers to sign up, and short codes to display your charge back rates for allocation of your data streaming and CPU time.

Any project listed on the GridRepublic, or linked to by the Boinc Client from Berkeley is a potential client for your shared computing resource.  In fact, anyone, such as a game developer looking to lease cloud computing and storage resources may be a client.

The Boinc client hosted in a web server may, if engineered to parallel process, integrate in a cooperative of web hosted blog sites, for faster computing, and higher revenue margins.  This would be a phase two to the project, dividing up computing requirements to multiple servers.  An open source project for affiliate networking, and even Google Wallet, or coincidentally, PayPal, an Amazon company, may be used collect and then allocate funds based on a charge back formula to ‘affiliate’ web hosted blogs.  And this has never been tried before because?  Comments welcome.