WhiteShark5
commented
10 years ago Author: Garrett Moon Blog Post 2013
Adaptive content has a relatively simple goal: put great content in as many places as possible. In part, this is a definition for the future of content creation tools. In reality, it is also a workflow mentality that all content creators must adopt. At this point, we have no idea where, when, or how our content will appear in another decade. The publishing tools, readers and devices will all change. There are two ways to create content according to McGrane. There are BLOBS, and there are CHUNKS. Chunks are better, but before we understand the difference between the two, we need to understand the problem with blobs.
To start, blobs are presentation-specific, meaning they were meant for a single purpose or device. A magazine spread is a perfect example of this. The text, story length, images, and callouts are all baked together in one perfectly sized space. The design and text are one. This method isn’t isolated to only print, though. It is also seen online. Think about your typical blog software or content management system. What is the hallmark of these systems? The WYSIWYG editor of course. Some of the really fancy ones go even farther with slick drag-and-drop page creation tools. On the outside, these tools look great, but they have BLOBS lurking within.
WYSIWYG editors and page creation tools make a lot of assumptions about how your content will be used. Most of them return formatted and completed HTML that is specifically designed for the web. This is fine if you are on the web, but what happens when you need to port that content to a mobile device? That’s when things get messy.
Chunks treat content like content, separating itself from how it will be presented (i.e. its design). Rather than the addition of inline HTML, chunks include something called metadata. You can think of metadata as a series of instructions regarding how to interpret specific chunks of content. Rather than including information about the font, color, and size of a headline (like a blob would), chunks pass the headline as plain text while simply informing the device that it is a headline. That leaves it up to the device to interpret how it would like to handle that headline. The difference may sound subtle, but the implications are huge. It is unlikely that many of us already create content in chunks, or even think that way. That is exactly why this is such an important topic. It goes against the grain of our current content-creation habits and content management systems. The software that we use to power much of the web locks us into blobs. WordPress, the software that powers this and many other blogs is know for is dual-input system. A headline plus a WYSIWYG editors is the status-quo when it comes to online publishing. There are (limited) methods to use WordPress in an adaptive way, but few of us do. The simple two-input system teases us all to think in terms of blobs without making us aware of the downfalls. Adaptive content is all about seeing what your content can become, not what it is right now. It is an idea that embraces the ‘content is king’ mantra to the fullest. Great content can live forever, but only if we start replacing the blobs with chunks.
http://todaymade.com/blog/adaptive-content-chunks/