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.

In June I’ll be doing a presentation about report at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. And there will be other presentations and developments in the coming months.

What else? I wrote a couple other pieces for Scatter/Gather:

• Content Strategy Stories from the Frontline (SXSW wrapup)
• Busy Times for Content Strategy (CS Forum 2010 wrapup)

And I’m helping to organize two interesting events for Internet Week next week:

• Razorfish Screening: We Live in Public (by invitation only)
• Razorfish: Living in Public (open event, RSVP on Facebook)

Hope to see you there!

In the future, I’ll try to at least mention my S/G posts here. In the meantime, here are the posts I’ve written so far:

• SXSW 2010 Q&A: Fred Benenson - a pre-SXSW interview
• SXSW 2010 Q&A: Margot Bloomstein - a pre-SXSW interview
• SXSW 2010 Q&A: Rich Ziade, Arc90 - a pre-SXSW interview
• Content Amplifications - Made-up words in User Experience
• Parlez-vous Content Strategy? - Preview of the first ever CS conference: Paris, April 2010
• Kristina Halvorson: Content Strategy for the Web - A book review
• Cowboy, Ninja, Bear - A new take on a classic game 
• Are you my Elvis? - The New York Times Index, in semantic form
• Now Watch This: ‘We Live in Public’ - Robert Stribley & I discuss an interesting film
• Content Takes Stage: SXSW 2010 Panel Picker - Content Strategy panel proposals for SXSW 2010 
• What Makes A Content Strategist? - The qualities I’d look for in a CS
• Splitting Tigers, Lumping Rabbits - How to categorize
• IA Summit Goes Semantic - Talks about Semantic Web at IA Summit 2009
• Consorting with Content - A recap of the Content Strategy Consortium, March 2009
• Don’t Shoot the Messager - Fun with language

• Intelligent Content 2010 (Feb) – I wish I had submitted a proposal, but I didn’t. Hopefully I can go as an attendee.
• SXSW (March) – Nothing concrete yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll be involved with aspects of both the Interactive and Film portions of the festival.
• PAX East (March) – I plan to attend this Boston-based version of the popular West Coast gaming convention.
• Content Strategy Forum (April) – I’ll be co-leading a workshop and giving a talk at this 2-day conference in Paris, organized by STC France.
• Tribeca Film Festival (April) – Once the schedule is posted (sometime in the Spring), let me know if you need movie recommendations!
• ROFLcon II (April) – I’ll be attending this epic internet culture conference as it returns to its city of origin (Cambridge, MA).
• Semantic Technology Conference (June) – In its 6th year, the conference moves to San Francisco, and I hope to once again be a speaker.

Oh yeah, and I’m in discussions with some people to organize an exciting event of our own. More updates to come as plans get firmed up!

If you’re going to be there, come see my talk, Content Gone Wild! at 9:45 in Salon A. It’s part of the Strategy Track and I’ll be talking about the embarrassing kinds of things that can happen when you don’t have a good content strategy!

SXSW likes to have the community get involved in deciding what panels will be chosen for the conference, so they use this Panel Picker to let people indicate which ones are of greatest interest. It’s free and easy to register to vote, so please consider voting for these proposals:

• Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For – my solo presentation
• Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data – a dual presentation I’ll give with Rahel Anne Bailie of Intentional Design Inc.
• Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It – a panel I’ll be on, moderated by Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
• Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy – a panel I’ll be on, organized by Elena Melendy, an Independent Content Strategy Consultant
• Tales from the Basement: Makers of Geek Documentaries – a panel in the SXSW Film conference which I hope to moderate, organized by Jason Scott of Bovine Ignition Systems

While you’re in there, here are some other really interesting panels by some of my friends and colleagues. Please consider voting for these as well!

• Adventures in Text and Filmmaking: Making GET LAMP, Jason Scott, Bovine Ignition Systems
• Web Re-Design Cage Match: Refreshing the Online Experience, Anh Dang, New York Times
• Conserving The Web’s Social Ecology: Theory and Practice, Tim Hwang, The Web Ecology Project (plus a few other cool presentations by Tim)
• Your Cell Phone is Your Sugar Daddy (Controlling Diabetes), John Pettengill, Razorfish
• The UX of Mobile, Kyle Outlaw, Razorfish
• Social Networking for Dealers: Cultivate Relationships First, Mary Butler, Razorfish
• Context Strategy: Wrangling Content Gone Wild, Patrick Nichols, Razorfish
• Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie,Intentional Design Inc.
• Content Strategy FTW, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
• Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones,threebrick
• Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones,threebrick

There are many others that will probably be amazing, and I haven’t even touched on all the ones about the Semantic Web (will have to write a separate post for that), so get started voting now – you only have until September 4th!

Under Movies, you could see everything that was playing that week, read reviews, and check local theaters and showtimes. Ok, there are lots of sites and services that let you do those things on a mobile phone or smartphone now. Here’s the part I really miss – I could easily save any of the movies to “My List” and then, when I wanted to go see something, instead of having to search for it, or sort through everything currently playing in theaters, I just looked at My List and asked myself “What do I feel like seeing today?”

When I watched a movie, I would deselect it. If I didn’t get around to seeing it and it left theaters, it would automatically drop off the list. Very convenient. Each week, I’d sync my Palm to the computer (or sync it wirelessly, once I had the Treo) and the showtimes would update, and new listings would be added.

Why do all the current movie showtime services out there assume that I know exactly what I want to see and am willing to search for it every time?  Is it because most theaters in the US are playing the same half dozen movies on every screen? Is this problem I’m having unique to cinephiles in NYC?

I’ve spent several hours this evening looking for a mobile app – or even a mobile-enabled website – that will let me do this. None of the apps I found let me save movies. Of the sites I’ve looked at that have showtimes, a couple of them let you save movies to a list, but they have a lot of problems. Here are the two I tried.

Movieweb

On the plus side

• They have a very handy list of New Releases which you can view by week or month, going backwards or forwards from the current date. It even includes a lot of obscure movies, not just the mainstream ones.

On the downside

• It’s an awkward, multistep process to add a movie to your list. You have to go to the movie detail page, find and then click the button that says “add to my list”, and then select which list you want to add it to.
• The list doesn’t have any indication of the release dates or of whether movies are still in theaters, so there’s no distinction between current movies, upcoming movies, and movies whose runs are already over. You’d have to manually maintain that yourself.
• There’s no mobile version of the site, so on my phone’s web browser I had to scroll through tons of navigation, and the thumbnail image that accompanies each movie on the list makes it impossible to see more than one item at a time – not a quality I’m looking for in a list.
• The “showtimes and tickets” functionality of the site is not working. There’s a message when you go that page that says “This section is down for the moment being.” Aside from the fact that they made up a phrase, there’s no indication how long this condition may last. It simply states that they’re “upgrading the system for a more feature rich experience.”
• It’s possible to make an RSS feed of the list, so I briefly toyed with the idea of making the list, subscribing to the RSS feed of the list, and then looking at that on my phone… and then I realized that this is so inconvenient, it’s not worth the trouble, especially when after choosing a movie from your list, you’d then have to go to a separate website to find out where and when it’s playing.

Yahoo! Movies

On the plus side:

• I already had a Yahoo login, so it was easy to try it out without signing up for yet another service. 
• The lists you create include a column for status, which let you know if each movie is currently in theaters. 
• Clicking on the movie name takes you to a detail page which includes showtimes and, depending on the theater, the ability to buy tickets.

On the downside:

• While big movies with a designed page, like Angels & Demons, have a button that says “Add to My Movies”, most of the movies don’t have any way to add them from the detail page. So, you can’t just add movies while browsing around, you have to go to the list page and search for the movie there. (Confusingly enough, they do have an “Add to queue” button, which takes you to Blockbuster, where you’re asked to create another account).
• Whether you select one of the big movies from the detail page, or go to your list and search for a title, it’s still an awkward, multistep process, and you don’t end up on the list page when you’re done, so you have to find your way back if you want to actually see the list you’ve made.
• Yahoo! Movies does have a mobile version, but it’s so stripped down, it doesn’t let you see “complicated” features like the list you painstakingly made on their website. So, you can look at the list on a computer but not, you know, when you’re outside, where the movie theaters are!

Is it too much to ask for a mobile service that lets me easily manage a list of movies I want to see that are playing in my city? If anyone knows of an app or mobile-friendly site where I can perform this simple task, please let me know!

In the meantime, here’s some additional coverage of the event:

• IA Summit 09: The Power of Questions - Ian Alexander, Eat Media
• Favorites from the Content Strategy Consortium – Colleen Jones
• Curtain up: Content strategy debuts at IA Summit 2009 - Christopher Collette
• The Definitive Guide to Content Strategy for the Complete Noob – R. Stephen Gracey
• Content strategy in the house - Keri Majala, words are delicious
• The presentations, on Slideshare (more will be added over time)

My first post is called “Don’t Shoot the Messager” and it’s about a conversation I had about the discrepency between the words message and messenger. It even features a celebrity appearance! Go check it out, and then read all the posts by my brilliant coworkers.

Halvorson makes a case, early in the article, for content strategies that actually address the strategy of how content is created and used on a site. This seems like it should be obvious, but in my experience, content is often an afterthought on web projects. Content Strategists are often engaged after all the why‘s and how‘s have been defined, and we’re tasked with just finding a way to cram some content in there, and hopefully make sure it’s as useful as possible. This is a shame, because it means there are a lot of missed opportunities to incorporate effective content strategy planning into a project. (Though I have to admit that, in my own career, I’ve noticed a lot of improvements in this area in the past six months or so).

Then Halvorson defines several possible subdisciplines of content strategy. These make a lot of sense, but I have to wonder: in which of these would you find the sort of uber-strategy aspects that are described at the beginning of the article? The “Why?” aspect of content, for example. I think that’s one of the most neglected areas of the discipline because people tend to take content for granted.

I agree with her assertion that it would be difficult for any one person to be an expert in all of these subdisciplines. My approach has been to try to have a good working understanding of each of them, and deep expertise in a couple of them. Maybe when the discipline is more mature, there will be more specialization. Although you could make the argument that there is already specialization, it’s just that some of these subdisciplines are embodied in people in other roles – Editorial Project Mangers oversee Editorial strategy, Editors and Writers are becoming fluent in Web writing, Data Librarians establish the Metadata strategy, SEM experts get involved in Search engine optimization, IT folks take the lead on Content management strategy, and Publishers guide Content channel distribution strategy.

I think the strength of pulling all of these disparate activities into one discipline, Content Strategy, is exactly the perspective that we can bring as the person who is asking “WHY CONTENT?” Each of these subdisciplines will be so much more effective when they’re working towards the common goal of serving a well defined overall content strategy. The Content Strategist doesn’t have to be the person on the team who is the most knowledge about the technical ins and outs of the CMS, but she does have to understand the overarching goals of the content strategy, and how the CMS can and should support them.