Online Publishing for Scholars, Educators, Publishers, and Communications Professionals

Online Publishing

• For Scholars
• For Educators
• For Publishers
• For Communications Professionals

Course Objective:

To consider the basic issues involved in developing an online publishing program

Major Topics

1. Planning to Meet the Needs of a Particular Organization or Audience
2. Conceptualizing Online Publishing as an Educational Activity
3. Developing Content and a Content Model
4. Developing or Selecting Publishing and Content Management Tools
5. Conducting a Program of Research and Evaluation to Guide Improvement

Introductions

Course Staff

Course Participants

• Name
• Organization
• Online Publishing Goals/Audience

Logistics/Assumptions

• 4 Hour Meeting
• No Pre-Course Activities
• Post-Course Activities
• Emphasis on general issues and discussion today
• Specific information can be shared beyond today

Clear Goals

Sample Goals

• To make my work available to my students and others
• To represent my organization
• To meet the needs of my readers

Scholars

• To make research available
  • To students
  • To colleagues
  • To members of the press
  • To the general searcher

Educators

• To prepare electronic texts for students
• Contexts:
  • Courses
  • Programs
  • Workshops
  • Outreach

Publishers

• Taking an existing publishing program online -
  • Advantages: content available, development process in place -
  • Dangers: locked into print program, need to satisfy immediate business demands

Tension

• Needs of sponsors vs. needs of audience
• Sponsor - publicity, authorship, revenue
• Audience - ?

Defining Your Audience

• Who?
• How many are they?
• What do they do?
• What will they do with your content?
• What is the rhythm of their use?

Audience

• What does usability mean for your audience?
• What is compelling about your content for them?
• What alternative sources do they have?

Audience

• Utility of your content to your audience has implications for your revenue prospects
• Moving information into the decision-making flow yields higher value to your audience and greater potential to generate revenue

Design Digression

• Audience needs - simplicity, predictability, clarity, speed,
• Web developer needs - complexity, novelty, flash, obsolescence,
• What do you need?

Sustaining Online Publishing

• Mothership model
• Marketing other services
• Subscriptions
• Pay Per Item
• Advertising
• Sponsorship
• Content Syndication
• Hobby

Testing Assumptions

• Fortunately, online publishing allows you to learn a great deal about your audience with relatively little effort and expense
• This makes it easy to test the assumptions you are making about your audience
• You can experiment with different revenue possibilities

Key to Sustainability

• Minimize operating costs
• Integrate online publishing operations into other activities
• Keep technology costs under control
• Don't over invest
• Justify costs in terms of services to audience
  • grow the business, not the operation!

Online Publishing as an Educational Activity

• Why?
  • Education is a powerful technology
  • Education is increasingly attractive
  • You already know how to do this

Online Publishing as an Educational Activity

• What does this mean?
  • For the way you think about your audience
  • For the way you think about your own activities

Online Publishing as an Educational Activity

• Consider your audience or readers as learners
  • What are their learning needs?
  • What are their learning styles?
  • What do you want them to learn?
  • What do they want to learn?
• What lends itself to the online venue?

Online Publishing as an Educational Activity

• Consider yourself an educator
  • What do you have to teach?
  • Don't overlook the obvious
    • What are you teaching?
    • What are you learning?
    • What are you doing?

Online Publishing as an Educational Activity

• Employ traditional educational planning strategies
  • Identify learning goals and objectives
  • Specify scope and sequence
  • Consider diverse activities to meet the needs of diverse learners
  • Activate members of your audience as teachers and learners

Online Publishing as an Educational Activity

• Consider non-traditional possibilities
  • Less complete interaction
  • More continuous interaction
  • Less immediate feedback
  • More detailed feedback
  • Less flexibility to change course
  • More design control

Educational Approach

• Consider community education approaches for your online community
  • reaching entire online group
• Include focused formal educational opportunities
  • Workshops, classes, mini-lessons

Curriculum Frameworks

• Creation contexts - "Join me in my work"
• Transmission contexts - "We're back in school"
• Application contexts - "Let me join you in your work"

Convergence Possibilities

• Teaching
• Scholarship
• Publishing

Developing Content

• Online publishing changes only two things: Space and Time

Space

• Space appears to be unlimited - a world of abundance without page limits
• Initially it appears that you can just keep adding
• But there is something that is limited - attention

Space

• Placement is also limited
• Direct access is limited
• The computer screen is very very small

A Design Digression

• Page Design
• Keeping things "above the fold"
• Scrolling vs. clicking?
• Standard placements
• Deep linking - virtues and dangers

Managing Space

• Managing space is more complex in online publishing
• The increased power and flexibility of linking mean that you have more power to do things wrong
• We don't have the hundreds of years of print conventions to count on and neither do readers

Managing Space

• Planning content with space management in mind is essential
• Following online trends is important
• Consistency is key

Time

• Like space, time initially appears unlimited
• You can publish a new "edition" every day or every hour
• You can run 24/7
• But in the online world the limits of time are very severe

Time

• Users have great expectations for the use of time online
• They are unlikely to give any one site a great deal of time
• There is more competition for reader time online
• Any time spent must be repaid

A Design Digression

• The competition is brutal - Yahoo loads in 7 seconds at 28.8
• Implications for you
  • avoid elaborate designs that require time to load
  • avoid flash and splash
  • avoid heavy graphics
  • segment content where possible - IHT example

Examples of Good Design

• News.Yahoo
• http://news.yahoo.com/
• A pure news site
• Easy to navigate, superb organization, loads fast
• Content from Reuters, AP, NYT, USA Today - all in one place

Good Design

• International Herald Tribune
• http://iht.com
• Superb content presentation
• Excellent use of JavaScript to enhance the reader's experience

Good Design

• New York Times
• http://www.nytimes.com
• Lots of content handled very well
• Great job of archiving
• Note the content collections

Good Design

• Washington Post
• http://washingtonpost.com
• Well organized
• Less extensive top level display than NYT

Good Design

• CNET: news.com
• http://www.news.com
• Very well organized
• Great design

Bad Design

• Slate
• http://slate.msn.com
• Great content, terrible design
• One notable feature - keeping material from past week available from home page

Bad Design

• Salon
• http://www.salon.com
• Difficult to find your way through all of the content
• Too many places where too many categories are presented to the reader

Bad Design

• Food TV
• http://www.foodtv.com/
• Very poorly organized
• Search is very effective so the user can ignore the rest of the site

Bad Design

• Martha Stewart
• http:/www.marthastewart.com
• Hides most of the valuable content
• Looks pretty, but is not functional

Bad Design

• AERA
• http://www.aera.net
• "Where to begin?"
• "Hard to find content or anything else you might want."

Where does this leave us in terms of content?

• You needs lots and lots of content that is well structured and well organized to make good use of limited space and time
• You need a content development process

Content Development

• The more content you will produce, the more you need a well-structured development approach
• The more content you will make available to readers, the more you need a content model

Content Development

• Where will you get content?
• Write it yourself
• Invite authors, commission, assign students
• Engage readers
• Link to other sites
• Purchase content services

Structuring Content

• Developing a content model
• What is a content model?
• A standard way to structure content elements

Structuring Content

• Every article, paper, book, etc. has a set of more or less standard elements
• Least structured approach - every content item is treated as one element
• Move toward structuring - identifying more elements and handling them in a uniform way

Content Pyramid

Content Model

• No one correct approach
• Evolving meta-data standards - Dublin Core, SIF, GEM, DOD, etc.
• More elaborate models require more overhead o Models should allow you to do what you want to do with the content

Working with Content

• Present - display in whole or part
• Analyze - learn how it is being used
• Archive - store for later use
• Manipulate - re-configure or re-use
• Exchange - export, import, share, trade, sell or buy

Tools

• Range from:
  • simple html pages
  • to
  • million dollar plus content management and publishing systems

Tools

• What influences what you will need?
• Size and scope of your effort
  • from a single scholar's web page to the publishing site of a multi-national publishing company
  • amount of content, frequency of publication, number of actors, expectations of audience, revenue potential, etc.

Tool Options

• Do it yourself Html pages
• Home organization services - university, corporation, etc.
• Commercial free services - isp's etc.

A Digression on IP

• Ownership of intellectual property is increasingly a concern
• Be sure to understand the ip implications of using any facility - who owns the content?

Tool Options

• Build your own or buy?
• Files vs. database organization
• Multiple tools vs. an integrated system - content mgmt, publishing, workgroup, etc.
• Services vs. software (asps vs. run your own)
• Proprietary vs. open source solutions

Tools Investment Considerations

• Cost of purchasing o Cost of operating
• Cost of maintaining
• Hardware costs
• Control technology costs
  every dollar spent on technology is one less for content

Research

• On your audience
• On your content
• On your audience in interaction with your content

An Aside on Promotion

"If you build it they will not come."

An Aside on Promotion

• Strategies to Promote Your Online Publication:
  • Print Advertising/Advertise Content
  • Link to your own print publication
  • Position with Search Engines
  • E-mail newsletter

Special Challenge of the Invisible Web

• Content in databases is not readily accessible to search engines
• Design solutions - content collections on your home page to show major themes

Research

• Who are the members of your audience?
  • Membership models
  • Membership registration
  • Membership surveys
  • Individual movement on your publication site
  • Statistics on traffic - hits, page views, member visits, member visits over time
  • Problem reports, search data, etc.

TCR in 2001

• A look at one online education journal's audience