Meaningful Data » article

Still here!

Rachel — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:47:00 +0000

Hi, hello, wait, don’t go!

I know, I’ve been woefully neglecting this blog. But here are a few places you can find me and my work:

Writing: I’ve written lots of posts on Scatter/Gather, a Razorfish blog about Content Strategy. Here are some of my recent favorites:

A blog post about a movie about a newspaper - thoughts about “Page One: Inside the New York Times”
How I Learned to Troubleshoot - things I learned from my college Video Professor
Q&A with Colleen Jones - author of Clout
ICC Wrap-up: What’s next? - report from the Intelligent Content Conference
ICC Day 2: What We Heard - report from the Intelligent Content Conference
ICC Day 1: An Appeal for Content Agnosticism - report from the Intelligent Content Conference
SXSW 2011 Q&A: Annalee Newitz - a pre-SXSW interview
User-Generated Chaos - reminiscing about my first professional encouter with the UGC trolls
The Communo-editron™ 2000 - why content can never be 100% automated
No, I’m not a Web Editor - why “content strategist” isn’t just a fancy name for “web editor”
Content Strategy Stories from the Frontline - a wrapup of SXSW 2010

Speaking: I gave a bunch of talks, and I’ve updated the My Presentations page with info and links to recordings (when available). Funny, because it looks like I did a lot of talks in 2010, and just one in 2011. I actually did a lot of talks in 2011, but many of these were panels, or were places where I was invited to cover topics that I had previously discussed elsewhere. Since there was no recording of these talks and the material wasn’t THAT different than what I’ve already posted, I didn’t see a reason to list all of them on the Presentations page, but if you’re curious, here’s what they were:

Make Your Content Nimble (a very brief version of the talk I gave at Confab) – Semantic Tech & Business Conference; London, UK; September 26-27, 2011
Semantic Web Media Summit Panel - Semantic Web Media Summit; New York, NY; Sept. 14, 2011
Nimble Content: Publishing in the Digital Age (a variation of the many Nimble talks I gave in 2010) – UX Melbourne; Melbourne, Australia; June 28, 2011
Empowering Your Audience Ambassadors with Semantic Publishing - Web 3.0 and the Future of Social Media; Sydney, Australia; June 2011 (on slideshare)
Social Media Content Gone Wild! (an update of a 2009 talk I gave at MIMA) – Social Media Club Sydney; Sydney Australia; June 20, 2011
The New Content Ecosystem (panel) - Semantic Technology Conference 2011; San Francisco, CA; June 5-9 2011
Make Your Content Nimble - Confab; Minneapolis, MN; May 9-10, 2011 (on slideshare)
Makers of Geek Documentaries: A Nerd’s Life (panel) – SXSW Film; Austin, TX; March 2011
Intelligent Content Conference 2011 - attended as a guest blogger; Palm Springs, CA; Feb 16-18, 2011
Faceted Search/Semantic Technology (panel) - AAN Web Conference; San Francisco, CA; Jan 28, 2011

Tweeting: Plus, you can always check out my latest thoughts (both profound and mundane) on Twitter – @rlovinger

I’m going to try to make my next visit a little sooner! 17 months is a bit too long.

FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report 2008

Rachel — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:44:36 +0000

Yes, I’ve been neglecting this blog, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been productive. My employer (which has changed it’s name back to Razorfish) has published another book, which contains an article by me about semantic web and user-generated data. You can see the whole, beautifully designed document online. My article is on page 60. Congratulations to my colleagues who also contributed to the book.

Quoted in the New York Times

Rachel — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:21:17 +0000

This doesn’t really have anything to do with central themes of this blog, but I was quoted in a Times article today, about the new walking and seating area that runs along 8 blocks of Broadway (including an area directly in front of my office): Front-Row Seats on Broadway, if You Dare.

My quote is actually the closing comment in the article. I’m not going to spoil it, though, you’ll have to read the article.

Digital Design Outlook

Rachel — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:32:51 +0000

My company, Avenue A | Razorfish, has published a Digital Design Outlook book, and an accompanying blog. I contributed an article providing a user experience perspective on the Semantic Web. I’m excited about the potential for bridging the gap between really powerful semantic technologies and elegant and effective user experiences. I think this is one of the major digital design challenges of the next few years.

For more details, read my article, The Semantic Web We Weave, on the Digital Design Blog.

Re-naming the Semantic Web

Rachel — Tue, 29 May 2007 23:19:19 +0000

One of the things I heard a lot of people buzzing about at the Semantic Technology Conference last week was whether or not the Semantic Web would be more accessible to people (as a concept) if it were called something else. Apparently people don’t like the word “semantic.” I sometimes forget that, and then I read something like this (admittedly fairly old) article about Tim Berners-Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The framing metaphor – Berners-Lee as Tolkien – is nonsensical. You could swap out any author who invented a culture with its own language and the metaphor would work just as well (or just as poorly). And, it’s ridiculous to imply that the significant factor of the WWW is that it’s based on an invented language; computer programming languages and markup languages have a long history that predates the WWW. In the end, this metaphor does nothing to illuminate the social, economic, and cultural impact of the Web. (It does have a handy subtext, though – apparently people who are interested in the underlying workings of the Web are nerds, just like people who are passionate about Lord of the Rings.)

With frequent references to “futuristc” and “magic” and “special codes,” the Chronicle article starts out by oversimplifying the concepts of Semantic Web and quickly shifts to steeping them in acronyms and dense technical jargon. If this really is the view of the Semantic Web that’s out there, then perhaps it does need a more consumer-friendly name.

I’ve been reading about these themes on Jeff Pollock’s blog today. I found it interesting that, four years apart, he had a post called Pedantic Web or Semantic Web? (2003) and another called Semantic or Pedantic? Web 3.0, Master Data, SOA and Data Integ (April 2007). Clearly this issue still hasn’t been resolved. Of course, if you read the complete posts, the question goes deeper than just what to call this thing. (Though, Jeff seems prepared to accept the emerging consumer-friendly term Web 3.0, and I have to concede that there’s a precedent there, which tends to speed up adoption of new concepts. As an added bonus, the term is ambiguous enough not to be either scary or exclusionary.)

The bigger question is how to get everyone to understand what the Semantic Web is all about. And it seems that people are finally getting around to the point where we don’t need everyone to understand it. This is apparent in the tone of Jeff’s two posts. The first one has a tone that seems to be calmly trying to explain a complex new vision of the world. Imagine all the possibilities, it seems to be saying. Four years later, he just gets down to business. Ok, you don’t have to get into all the wonder of it all, but here’s what you can do with it. The new tone is practical, unapologetic, and displays a good kind of impatience, I think.

Very few people are inclined to understand the magical codecs that make MP3s possible, but even my dad can load songs onto his iPod.

Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data

Rachel — Mon, 14 May 2007 21:14:48 +0000

What better way to start this blog than with a link to an article I recently wrote for Boxes and Arrows? The article is called Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data. I’ve gotten a lot of response from this article, which leads me to believe that there’s a growing interest in this field and the professional roles associated with it.