Intelligent Content Conference 2012

I just came back from the Intelligent Content Conference held in Palm Springs. This is a yearly conference put on by Ann Rockley and Scott Abel. It was my second time at this conference and I was not disappointed.

I arrived on Thursday for Kristina Halvorson‘s keynote. As usual, Kristina was lively and engaging. This year, her presentation was based on the paradigm of Wall-E. One of the refreshing things that I enjoy about Kristina is that she always speaks about what she sees in the world of content strategy. And, this time around, Kristina sees that the time for content is now. The time for content strategy is now. With every passing technology development, the role of content gets even greater. These are truly exciting times to be involved in content.

I am anxiously awaiting the release of the second edition of Kristina’s book, Content Strategy for the Web. It is sure to be an engaging read, loaded with terrific information.

My favorite presentation was Mark Fidelman‘s, How to Capitalize on the Forthcoming Interactive Books Market Explosion. What I liked about Mark’s presentation was that he clearly explained the difference between enhanced eBooks and interactive eBooks. He showed us a number of examples, which really helped my understanding.

Mark picked out what he considers to be best in class examples of both enhanced and interactive eBooks. Here are his favorites:

• The Elements, by Theodore Gray
• Harvesting the Wind, by Al Gore
• Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein
• Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Rather than singling out the worst eBooks, Mark gave us the factors that send an eBook to his “worst of” category:

• Bad video quality
• Retrofitted content
• Poor user experience
• Dumping PDFs into an eBook format
• Low quality images
• Bad spelling (!!)
• No interaction

I also enjoyed speaking at my session on Shepherding Your Content for Operational Efficiency. I am glad we had time at the end for questions, as many good ones were asked. If you missed my session, but want to know how to get your content to do more for you, you can download the whitepaper.

As an added bonus, all attendees received the new version of Ann Rockley’s book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. The first edition introduced the path that so many of us are now following in the content strategy arena. I’m looking forward to reading this updated version.

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Val Swisher

Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Roche, and IBM. Her fourth book, “The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale,” was published in 2021 by XML Press.

Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.

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