Metadata and Taxonomy
Metadata for Customer Self-Service in Manufacturing
The problem of customer self-service is a huge one for manufacturers. You create products. Smart, innovative products that help our world keep turning. Your products solve problems, inspire us, or simply help us turn on the lights each day. The problem is the content. There’s just so much of it. From technical documentation to help Read More »
Here’s How Taxonomy Impacts Customer Experience
Your taxonomy strategy can make or break a customer’s experience with your product. Imagine opening up a restaurant menu and finding three choices: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Under lunch the description says: “culinary delight featuring local ingredients in a traditional meal with a modern twist.” The descriptions for the other choices are just as vague. Read More »
What’s The Big Deal With Microcontent?
What is microcontent? Microcontent refers to small, bite-sized pieces of content that follow detailed structuring rules and are rich in metadata. Over the years technical content has moved away from document-based to microcontent-based. This allows content to be reused and deployed in emerging technologies. It also makes customer experience better by making it easier for customers Read More »
We Can Write the Docs, but Does Anyone Read the Docs?
Who reads the docs anyway? You’ve probably heard a few presumptive generalizations about our industry. A big one out there is that nobody reads product documentation Before we cry “Well, why the hell not?” together, let’s climb into the brains of someone who might say this. Technical documentation is, well, technical. It’s a collection of Read More »
Is DITA Good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Everyone needs to know a little bit about SEO We are at the mercy of search engines. Websites like Google, Bing, Google, Baidu, and YouTube (owned by Google) have become as essential to online commerce as the sidewalk is to storefront business. It’s an inescapable fact that the searchability of your content is a crucial Read More »
Is Disorganized Content Making Your Chatbot Look Bad?
The back and forth between champions of DITA and Markdown is nothing new. Both are useful, but DITA’s structure is superior for maintaining large knowledge bases ready for complex systems like chatbots. Recently, we were asked about metadata in Markdown compared to metadata in DITA XML related to deploying knowledge content to a chatbot. Metadata Read More »
LEGO® Bricks & Metadata: Finding What You Need So You Can Build What You Want
LEGO® Bricks are cool. From childhood to adulthood, they never stopped being cool. I had several LEGO® brick sets. Once you have a bunch of different sets and you’ve already built them based on the model instructions, thousands of pieces would end up mixed together in a box. Which was awesome because then you could Read More »
Hot Take: Your Search Tool Should Be More Like Amazon, Less Like Google
Search tools basically think for us, finish our sentences, and sometimes push ads for things we’re fairly certain we’ve only thought about. Modern search tools are sophisticated and useful. They also tend to follow one of two examples. Google and Amazon. When it comes to your content management, Google might be known for its auto-fill Read More »
Using Metadata to Gain Insights About Your Content Repository
If you’ve ever read or written a blog before (who hasn’t these days?), then you’ve probably seen tags. Tags are like labels, usually appearing at the end of a blog post, that you can use to navigate to other posts with the same tag applied. Writers assign tags to their blog posts to provide information Read More »