contentious.com

(NOTE: This is part 8 of a series exploring the results of the 2004 CONTENTIOUS Reader Survey, which so far has been completed by 195 respondents. See the complete index for more survey results. Additional results will be published in future entries.)

CONTENTIOUS already covers a lot of topics – but this blog is a work in progress, and I certainly want to keep my eye out for intriguing new topics of interest to my readers. Therefore, question 8 of my reader survey was:
What NEW topics or issues would you like to see CONTENTIOUS cover?

The 35 people who answered this question had some interesting ideas…

Before I get into the details, let me make a brief note about numbers here.

Since I first started publishing the results of the 2004 CONTENTIOUS reader survey on Aug. 18, 38 additional people have completed this survey. That’s fine – more information is definitely better in this case. In Parts 1-7 of the survey results I’ve focused on the original group of 157 respondents, since numbers told those stories and I wanted to offer a solid numerical baseline. (I’ll go back later and update those entries to reflect the total number of respondents.)

As of this writing, 195 people have completed the survey. This means that only about 18% of respondents had new topics to suggest. That’s interesting. I think it indicates that my current topic selection is already satisfying to most CONTENTIOUS readers – that is, the demand for new CONTENTIOUS topics is relatively minor.

Indeed most of the topics suggested in this survey were not, in fact, “new” topics for CONTENTIOUS. Rather, most of the suggestions are sub-topics within the general topics I’m already covering.

Below is the complete list of topics suggested via the reader survey, grouped by category. Keep in mind that each respondent could suggest up to five topics, which is why this list is far longer than 18 items.

I haven’t made any firm decisions regarding this list, except that I don’t intend to shift this blog any further toward technical details than it’s already gone. Content, communication, learning, and arranging ideas will remain my core focus.

READER SUGGESTIONS FOR NEW TOPICS

Here’s the list I’m mulling over…

Arranging ideas:

• information architecture
• The remarkable success of the wikipedia, and it’s content format and approach to content management
• Information sharing/ knowledge management/ content management – how they relate

commentary on business in general as it relates to knowledge/ information sharing

Audience issues:

• Do people really want substance? How to find the ones who do
• Empathising with the reader

Case studies & examples:

• content best practices
• Common content mistakes (with specific example)
• good and bad website stories

Content business & profession:

• skills to pick up to excel in the marketplace
• ever more on the writer’s role in web development
• Business models for online content
• Tips to build your writing business
• market demand (what content should I produce?)
• Content strategies
• Affiliate relationship building for electronic communications
• strategies for dealing with clients who insist on treating new media as if it were old (clogging up a website with “philosophies,” etc. that don’t lend themselves to being turned into pdfs)
• How to create a “following” of readers
• Where good contentworkers can find new business
• Communicating the importance of content to the rest of your organisation

Genres:

• Corporate communications
• environmental issues and blogs
• e-Commerce content
• Writing for government sites (clearing out jargon)
• Practical information: How to write articles for magazines and ezine
• more on weblogs and feeds
• Nonprofit foundation English: a language unto itself (and how to gently nudge it into reader-friendly copy)

Learning & training:

• more on e-learning materials
• ethics in training
• writing technical training
• Instructional or informational content - how not to patronise people

Marketing

• how communication topics integrate with marketing practices
• Online Marketing
• e-marketing: what sort of e-mails work best for specific purposes (related topic: how can all-text e-mail alerts compete with more high-tech modes of e-mail product marketing, or can’t they?)
• Structure of pages to improve position on search engines

News, journalism, media:

• analysis of mainstream news – how well does Google News do its job?
• news links to important announcements from orgs such as ASJA, NWU, SPJ ….
• Distinctions, if any, between for-profit and not-for-profit news organizations and their coverage

Style:

• How to write tasty about professions, products or services with a rather dull, expensive, academic, complex nature/image. E.g. financial products, solicitors
• More on creating substantive content
• Wireless access to online content – what’s important to know in preparing content
• challenges of writing for the global reader
• Is the Web dumbing down?

Technology & tools:

• Why do people STILL want to use IE? (Considering all holes and warnings…)
• The ability to generate private/password protected RSS feeds and how this is done
• Different tools and ways to make webfeeds (automatically, by hand, …)
• Use of Macromedia’s Collaborate
• DMS (I think that means document management system)
• Warinesses and work-arounds of CMS software limitations
• Sharepoint
• Mobile content

Web design and usability:

• Web standards and CSS
• accessibility
• User Interface
• usability
• Readability/legibility
• Designing content (fonts, line lenght etc.)
• Where does content fit into the User Experience Design trend

Writing & editing:

• more on writing for the web
• Online writing vs. traditional formats