Overview: Online Architecture

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…

"whole new publishing and technology system ... continually iterate on the site and take advantage of new technology trends ... instead of seeing major redesigns in the future, users will see more incremental changes" Key question: are the native ads clearly ads? - New York Times redesign points to future of online publishing - Jan. 8, 2014

"we essentially write new content that we then throw away at the end of the day. Content shouldn’t die by design... topical contexualization... means guiding readers through large, convoluted news topics. ProPublica’s topic pages get us closer to contextualizing huge topics. For every major series that they cover over time, there’s a landing page…

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…

"What colors have you chosen for your marketing materials? What were your reasons for making that particular choice? Was it because you liked those particular colors, or did you have a particular marketing message in mind? While visual appeal is an important consideration, your color choices could be sending a specific message to the people who vi…

When designing a logo for your business, it's important to take into account the way people interpret color. It's the right time to ask, what kind of emotion do I want my brand to convey?

Nice example of a hub, this site

"The disconnect is that Drupal is not a Content Management System (CMS), nor has it been one for some time. Drupal is a Content Management Framework (CMF), from which you can build a CMS tailored specifically for your needs." A good intro to where Drupal is now, a thoughtful exploration of the issues surrounding its development, and a necessary c…

Exactly 11 years (give or take a month) after we figured out how thematic architectures on EUROPA could support online conversations with what we called the 'interested general public', the EC rediscovers it all over again: "This would give us the opportunity to reach interested audiences, and create a space for real engagement. It also means shi…

"Wondering how to begin creating an organic search strategy at your company? What’s a good way to integrate your company’s various online components, such as the website, blog, or YouTube channel? Perhaps we can help! In under fifteen minutes, I outline a strategic approach to SEO for a mock company, Webmaster Central, where I pretend to be the SE…

"Concept search allows users to specify a concept and documents that describe that concept to be returned as the search results. It is a technique to identify potentially relevant documents when a set of keywords are not known in advance. SearchBlox uses text clustering, which is a technology that analyzes a document collection and organizes the d…

It's not strictly necessary to rebrand bloggingportal, but everyone I've spoken to thinks it's a good idea, so why not have a little competition?

Some of the comments to my initial post showed me that I have to show, not tell, what I mean when I refer to technologies like semantic analysis and faceted search. So, a quick video about faceted search and the role it could play in helping people find opinions and ideas on EU policy via a rebooted BloggingPortal.

What it says on the tin - 4 basic SEO strategies.

"For anyone that is building links or actively seeking out backlinks for their site, one of the most important things to keep in mind is the look of your backlink profile. The term backlink profile refers to the list of links that are pointing back to your site from external sources. It is important to consider what this list looks like to search …

Some good advice in reaction to Tom Forenski's "Did Google just kille PR" meme ... "Google did NOT kill PR. Maybe they are at war with SEO companies, they are perhaps at war with bad PR companies, too. Good agencies do not feel the need to keyword stuff press releases. Good “content” strategies do not need the filler content of keyword stuffed pr…

The first site launched (in 2011-2012) on the EC's Multisite Drupal7 Platform, thus pioneering EC Drupal Platforms in terms of technology, user requirement defitinition and governance.

Some of the drupal websites my team and I launched for the EC's energy research programmes.

Next time you prepare your design brief, please watch this first:“What if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? They’d brief their agency and let them do it. Sorta. Welcome to corporate creativity, where groupthink and endless revisions help good ideas get executed.”

Migrating and relaunching the ACP Courier magazine website using semantic analysis and launching two community-oriented Programme websites for the ACP Secretariat.

A longer version of an article I published recently in NewEurope

Constructive discussions generally require good discussion documents. One of the Commission's major contributions to any European online space should therefore be a EUROPA that supports the conversations

Project manager and architect of a successful pilot to reorganise EUROPA along thematic lines, so people could figure out What the EC did, Why and How, in areas of interest to them, without studying its labyrinthine internal structure.

Part of the pilot Thematic Portal project I ran while at the EC’s DG INFSO, the Newsroom CMS was the first cross-EC CMS, and involved launching user ‘INFSO accounts’ before Google had 'Google accounts’.

Update (15/5/2022): the default Hub Homepage is now "All the Stuff you Like, Think and Do about Everything, Anytime...", so your HomePage will not be empty as soon as you publish your first item.Original post follows:---The content you're creating is not showing up on your Home Page because your Home Page only shows Highlighted item…