For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

Hiring is easy on paper. I am usually really good at hiring but this year I selected an employee that wasn’t right for our team. In retrospect I knew he wasn’t right after a few days of working with him but I had deadlines around the corner and no other candidates on the radar. After a month of deadline chasing it was crystal clear it wasn’t going to work—he knew it, I knew it and the rest of the employees knew it.  I compounded an already bad problem by keeping him on a project because of an impending deadline. Nothing makes a potential employee watch You Tube all day quicker than the combination of being paid hourly and knowing you aren’t getting hired FT. This mistake on my part led to: two late/micromanaged projects and  lots of do-over’s.

Scope Management involves more than saying, “that’s going to cost you extra.” I want our company to do great work. I want us to work on projects that allow our employees to shine and leave our clients thrilled. But the reality is when you are starting out you:

a. Need to build up your reputation and pay your bills

Which leads to…

b. Going above and beyond

And…

c. Sometimes doing too much out of scope work.

Scope definition at the outset of a project is usually clear if you did your homework. Scope-creep near the end of projects is the silent resource/profit killer that isn’t always as obvious. I said yes to out of scope work on a number of projects this year that neither made the client happy, saved time or made the project better.

A few times this year I let my frustrations become visible to clients and employees. When I give 100% and my 100% isn’t good enough I get flustered. When I should have given 100% but was pulled in too many directions I get frustrated—see the difference. There were a few meetings I was on where clients changed their mind, or vendors came unprepared, and my tone went to absolute shite. Passion may beget perfection. But unburnt bridges beget friendlier drivers. Ya know?

Not committing enough time to marketing and handshaking. I wear many hats at Eat Media, such is the life of a business owner and such is the life of business in its 2^nd year.  There are long-nights, business lunches, fires to douse, servers to reboot, proposals to re-do and credit card machine salesman to say “Please take me off your list,” to. During the past year I have been in one of two places—my desk and the whiteboard wall—good for work, bad for the sales pipeline. Face-to-face marketing and handshaking are absolutely necessary and I did not do a great job of being out there in 2009. I relied too much on our blog and Twitter and not enough on meeting people and creating relationships in person.

Not sticking to my strengths. Creative/CS and big picture strategy are my strengths. Content Strategy forces you to make many disparate pieces fit together and that jazzes me.  Unfortunately great Content Strategy takes time and time management can be a start-up’s worst enemy. You need to have laser like focus but be able to drop and roll for a fire at any moment. Once you have the fire under control you need to hand off the hose. I spent too many nights in 2009 editing XML, making love to Photoshop and making sitemaps.

Growth requires honesty. What were your 2009 mistakes?

—Ian

@eatmedia

This past weekend, I undertook the laborious task of sorting through stacks of The New York Times from 2009 and late 2008. From those countless newspapers, I cut out 21 stories, and whittled down the list to bring you what I consider the best of the best stories I read over my morning coffee this past year.

In Booming Gulf, Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies

By Katherine Zoepf, December 21, 2008

Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. ‘I’ve been doing this for four years,’ she said, ‘and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’

In a journalistic sea of black burqa news reporting, a refreshing look into the profession of choice for young, working women in the Persian Gulf—flight attendants.

Ex-Detainee of U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal

By Jane Perlez, Raymond Bonner and Salman Masood, January 5, 2009

Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months.

As the country anxiously prepared to welcome a new president (who vowed to close Guantanamo Bay within a year), The New York Times published this terrifying look into the six-year imprisonment of a Pakastani man never charged with a crime.

Iraqis Snap Up Hummers, Seeing Them as Icons of Power

By Rod Nordland, March 29, 2009

In a country with at least 20,000 Humvees and a war-weary population, who would think there would be a market for a civilian version?

An interesting look into the Baghdadi elite, and the not-so-culturally-different idea that driving an oversized SUV exudes wealth, power and confidence.

No Job and Soon No Benefits, Race to Help Son Stay Cancer Free

By Kevin Sack, April 20, 2009

‘You just feel that you’re at a loss, that you’re at your wits’ end.’ I ask myself, ‘Do I really have to lose my home to save my son’s life?’

When Danna Walker found out that she had lost her job with DHL, she was more worried about finding health insurance for her 21-year-old son who has been cancer-free for just one year, than putting food on the table.

This story made me want to send it to every member of the House and Senate, because if the Walker’s story can’t swing votes, nothing will.

You’re Name’s Not on Our List? Change It, Beijing Officials Say

By Sharon LaFraniere, April 20, 2009

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much. That is also why the government wants her to change it.

A new law in China requires each of it’s 1.3 billion citizens to replace their handwritten identity cards with computer-readable ones, Chinese citizens with uncommon names might not have any choice but to change their names.

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut

By Charles McGrath, May 15, 2009

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes.

Did Jack Kerouac invent fantasy sports? Doubtful, but the writer kept a secret pastime that none of his Beat counterparts had ever heard about: he “obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.”

Made in India, But Published In New Haven

By Peter Applebome, May 31, 2009

Alert readers of The New Haven Advocate and its sister publications in Hartford and Fairfield County may have noticed a consistency among the bylines in its newest issue: Annie Rani, Dev Das, Nidhi Sharma, Asmi Rana, Neha Bhayana, Shreya Sanghani, Vijeta Bhatia and others.

Peter Applebome’s “Our Town” column on outsourcing local journalism was the catalyst for a previous Eat Media Blog post. An interesting—albeit depressing—look at how the global job pool might very well be eliminating the need for local, on the ground reporters.

E. Coli Path Shows Flaw in Beef Inspection

By Michael Moss, October 3, 2009

Ground beef is not a completely safe product. . .

This article has my pick for the most-informed scare tactic report of the year. As a self-disclosed vegetarian, countless meat-eaters brought up this article to me, vowing to never eat ground beef (or, at least, non-organic ground beef) again.

—Wendy Joan

(Writer’s note: All headlines mentioned in this article are from The New York Times’ print edition. Photo by fraley_tera)

I ate my first Hershey’s Chocolate Bar in many moons the other day, and from the first bite, I knew something was wrong.

Hershey’s chocolate has always had a cakey texture to it. I could have identified it in a blind taste test no problem. But this bar wasn’t quite right. It was close, but an oily texture had crept in and was taking the edge off the sweetness. My palette was not fooled and it was not amused.

So I took a look at the ingredient list to see if something looked off. It did. One of the sub-ingredients for the milk chocolate was the acronym PGPR. A quick search of the Internet revealed those letters to stand for polyglycerol polyricinoleate. It has been many years since I have taken organic chemistry, so it was unnerving to see a completely unidentifiable compound had migrated into an American icon, the Hershey Bar. My Hershey Bar. The Hershey Bar I would purchase as a treat while I was living abroad because it tasted like home. Say what you will about the quality of Hershey’s chocolate, but it’s one of those things that should never change. It’s American comfort food. The menu at McDonalds may change in countries around the world, but a Hershey Bar was a Hershey Bar no matter where you bought one.

And now it was not. It had been adulterated, and in a very underhanded way.

Another glance through the Internet revealed that PGPR is a non-ionic surfactant made from castor beans that in 2006 was added to the chocolate recipes of both Hershey’s and Nestle as a substitute for the more expensive cocoa butter. Now we were getting somewhere. My chocolate bar had been injected with ersatz cocoa butter with the hope that few people would notice. (I can totally understand Hershey not wanting to have PGPR spelled out on the package since it contains the word ricin, a poison that’s also derived from castor beans.)

But I had noticed and I was pissed off. I headed for Twitter to tweet my dismay to Hershey, but, to my astonishment, Hershey isn’t on Twitter. More swearing ensued. A quick look at Hersheys.com revealed a complicated contact form that wanted me to part with a great deal of personal information. The swearing reached another decibel level. But before I could get too mad, a fire erupted in the office and I spent the rest of the day putting it out.

I awoke the next morning with a start, realizing that I’d left a half-eaten open Hershey Bar on my desk. Our office is in South Florida. Like every other structure in this humid, subtropical climate, we have ants. I pictured my desk swarming with millions when I arrived, the scent of fried ants wafting from my smoking iMac.

I flipped on the lights and saw that my desk appeared as it had when I’d left, Hershey bar sitting there in the open wrapper. There was not an ant in sight. I sat down and picked up the Hershey Bar to put it in the trash. One dead ant fell out of the wrapper. I saw two more lying on my desktop.

I tried not to jump to conclusions.

Then I had a grand idea: Maybe the fact Hershey bars with PGPR now kill ants is actually an unadvertised feature. I was getting added value here and didn’t even know it. Hershey’s just hadn’t figured out how to market a combination chocolate snack/pesticide.

So Hershey’s, you have a big problem here. Not only do ants find you product unpalatable, but it appears to kill them. Is my evidence anecdotal? Perhaps. Does that matter? No. Will I be buying another Hershey Bar again? No.

So what are the content strategy takeaways?

1. Being cheap is never a good content strategy. Maybe you get to make a fraction of a penny more on each chocolate bar, but you’ve ruined your product in the process.
2. Don’t make it hard for people to get in touch with you. I should not have to give up my phone number and birthday to a submit a question on your website.
3. Being a huge, iconic company without a social media presence is insane. McDonalds has 11 staff members on its Twitter team. Look at what Dell has been up to. It’s not too late, but get with the program.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

Content Strategy is not Copywriting. Design is not Window Dressing. Information Architecture is not Boxes and Arrows.

Content Strategy (CS) isn’t a new practice, but it may be the most comprehensive practice, and one made possible through the maturation and morphing of many puzzle pieces—editorial, print, digital, design, CMS systems, SEO/SEM/search, IA/UX/IxD and advertising.

When done correctly, Content Strategy requires practitioners to follow every piece of content, in every direction, for every use case and optimize the message in order to support business goals. That last line is the anvil in the pillowcase—“in order to support business goals.” Long gone are the days of wanting a website because brick and mortar businesses were “old hat” and Red Herring was four inches thick.

Results matter. And if the downturn in the economy has taught us anything, it is this: Seeking out short-term gains are fools’ errands. Content Strategy, or at least the type Eat Media practices, is firmly rooted in a long term strategy we call “What Then?”

It goes like this:

“Let’s do a content inventory”

“What then?”

“We should tag it and see how it aligns with new biz strategy.”

“What then?”

“There’s going to be a boatload of content that doesn’t fit anymore.”

“What then?”

“We need to create a sustainable content cycle to support their message.”

“What then?”

“We should look at the CMS and see if it will support this new taxonomy.”

“What then?”

“We need to look into how their Social Media strategy is tied into this message.”

“What then?”

We zoom in and out, micro-to-macro until we have looked at a client’s content problem from every angle and we reach this:

“Traffic and sales are up. Way up.”

Getting to this result is all well and good, but how do we know, how well our CS work has actually performed? When paired with SEO/SEM, we can definitively tell what was clicked on, in what order at what time. When Content Strategy is paired with a quality information architecture plan, we can see measurable results that align with how information is organized throughout the site. Similarly, when partnered with tried and true user experience techniques, Content Strategy speaks volumes, and subtleties in button placement and checkout behaviors shine clear as daylight.

But on its own, not so much. The analytics attributed to Content Strategy remain an asked and unanswered question that many of us are still quantifying.

Listen up, Content Strategists

In order to make the leap from buzzword to boardroom, Content Strategy needs to do more, fast. Without analytics, measurement and a crystalline clarification, our relevance is not rising outside our circle. We are simply defining and redefining what is and isn’t CS—erecting and mending fences. While we (me included) think CS is the cat’s meow, many of the decision makers I talk to have a hard time discerning IA from UX from CS from “whatever the programmers are supposed to do.” This is where our work should be focused.

Here are my propositions:

1) I only differentiate IxD from UX by scope.

Go ahead slaughter me for this!

2) UX is its own animal. UX’ers initiate the kind of changes featured in Smashing Magazine. I speak some UX but feel it should be more intertwined with CS.

Someone may have written the speech, but UX is the face and the voice. And that’s just fine with me.

3) The best programmers I’ve worked with are uber-keen on message and user experience. As we begin to build leaner, more targeted applications and websites we need more programmers (front and back-end) to think more about content.

One programmer/friend is the best copy editor I’ve ever known.

4) IA can, but probably shouldn’t operate independent of CS.

See below.

5) CS and IA are the same thing, or at least they should be.

I, for one, cannot do CS without doing IA. You start talking about CS problems and I open up OmniGraffle/ConceptDraw and look for the nearest whiteboard. I start thinking about relationships and content life cycles and wireframes. I recently spoke with Karen McGrane, President of Bond Art and Science and this is what she had to say on this the CS/IA relationship

“I think all those ‘word’ functions should be owned by a single role, and the content strategist has a broader sense of ownership across a site. I could also make the argument that IA and CS are really the same role and you should recruit for whichever one (or both) will help you attract the right people. But in the long run I would imagine that information architecture would be seen as a function of CS rather than a role and a job title of its own.”

—Karen McGrane, President, Bond Art + Science.

Project-by-project practitioners develop, organize and choose the appropriate tools and tactics. While it is impossible for one person to excel at all these fields, it is time that we ask more of ourselves, and one another, in bridging the gap between practices. In my mind, IA and CS fusing into a single practice will deliver more a comprehensive, cost-effective solution with richer, more measurable results together than if they are separate. There will be less inter-dependency confusion within the practices, client’s business goals will be better supported and analytics will be more practical.

Without content, the web would be a search box and a check out cart. (Both the search box and the check out cart have been successfully monetized.) But all the stuff in between (content) requires fewer experts with broader skill sets, not more experts with more finite expertise (which requires longer integration and usually much more duct tape).

Signed,

Eat Media, “Pointing out the elephant in the room since 2003”

—Ian  @eatmedia

Too many articles and blogs (ours included) have set out to define Content Strategy, called it King, whitewashed it as “content marketing/SEO.” Some have hyped it with agendas and sales pitches, others with heartfelt enthusiasm for the buzzword d’jour.

The more I think about Content Strategy, the more I see it centered in and around project scope. As budgets tighten, content measurability logic matures and ROI has a smaller and smaller proof of concept window. Defining a robust scope for CS-related projects is paramount for all involved.

For the Client

At the simplest level, scope defines what the vendor is going to accomplish for price of the contract.

In my experience, there are four client attitudes about scope:

• Those who see the value in digging to the root of the problem and do have the budget
• Those who see the value in digging to the root of the problem but don’t have the budget
• Those who don’t see the value in digging to the root of the problem
• Those who don’t see the value in digging to the root of the problem because they don’t have a budget

And there are two strategies clients administer for scope definition:

• The formal RFP process (Scope is brought to the table as part of RFP)
• The relationship process (Client comes to table with loose scope and the practitioner digs deeper)

For the Vendor

Scope defines what the vendor is and isn’t responsible for.

I’ve spoken with some other agencies and this is what I hear about scope:

• Clients with  the bigger budget get the better end-product
• There is cheap, good and fast—pick two
• I’ll work with you as much as I can, but at the end of the day we all need to make money
• There are no problems, only opportunities, but opportunities cost money to investigate

On the vendor side, there are two methods of scope definition and estimation.

• Plan for the worst and price accordingly
• Price reasonably and define what is and isn’t included, and carefully outline rates for out of scope work

The problem with these methods of thinking about scope (for both parties) is that the balance between the “best solution” and the “appropriate price” are at odds. The RFP is often not broad enough to get to the heart of the problem. And the vendor can only solve what he/she has access to, both politically and financially. So what usually happens is the client will cut what doesn’t seem relevant, fit the budget, or have a clear ROI. And the vendor will reduce services/deliverables to maintain profitability.

Scope Management

Scope Management, a content strategists’ most powerful tool, is often as much about Change Management (a.k.a. getting everyone to agree that there is an elephant in the room) as much as it is about Content Strategy. Proper Scope Management empowers the vendor to perform the difficult, time-intensive work and empowers the client to tackle real change at the root level. A project may be RFP’ed for a new website on an existing infrastructure—while the answer may lie in a CMS assessment that is outside that scope. Scope is not about padding the bill, it is about finding the best solution and implementing it.

Content Strategy is the tool that unearths and assembles the puzzle pieces spread across legacy systems, marketing agendas, newsletters, content, code, DB’s and design.* CS will grow in proportion to the depth it digs, both across other practices and intra-project. The marriage of Scope Management and Content Strategy requires content strategists to push for the deeper digging and clients to be open to a little more work for a much greater return.

*Not all the puzzles pieces are listed. And there is no picture on the box.

—Ian

Twitter me @eatmedia

Is it ever OK to lie with your content?

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

It has never been easier to gather audio. Free editing programs (like Audacity) and recording device applications for many cell phones make it possible for anyone to gather audio without additional financial obligations. For many print writers, the transition to audio storytelling is intuitive: at the very core, it’s your story, narrated by your voice, with added sound to set the scene.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Know your device because if you don’t, you’re not going to have any audio to edit. Before you start formal recording, it’s important to spend some quality time with your device, getting to know its wants and needs. Will your phone interfere with your recording? How often does your recorder need its batteries changed? Will a light wind ruin an on-the-street interview?

Be familiar with the sounds that your recorder picks up—some are more forgiving than others when it comes to throat clearing, distant traffic and air conditioners. When it comes to unnecessary noise, it’s more effective to prevent it the field rather than editing it out later.

Travel Light and Arrive Early. Resist the urge to overpack and keep your gear to a minimum; it makes you much more accessible to the people you’re interviewing. I can get by with my recorder, a pair of headphones for checking levels and a spare set of batteries.

If you’re covering an event, arrive early to collect ambient noise of guests arriving—in a pinch, ambient sound makes for a great way to set the scene or transition from one idea to the next.

Talk to Everyone in the Room. If you’re at an event, like a rally, town hall meeting, etc.—it’s just as important to gather interviews from the event-goers as it is to record the speeches from the event. Talk to attendees before and after the event, and catch up with the speakers for their impressions. When you’re in the field, you’re not entirely sure what your story is yet, so it’s best to gather as much information as you might need for your story to take form back at your desk.

Organize Your Audio Files ASAP. As soon you’re back in the office, download your audio and label your files. Believe me, you’ll forget. Give everything a listen through to discover all the details you missed while navigating through the field, get a feel for your content and start putting a story together!

Happy recording,
—Wendy Joan

Still not using social media to its full effect to promote your content? Well, maybe you can take a lesson from the President.

A couple Sundays ago, President Barack Obama pulled a what’s known as a “Full Ginsburg” by appearing on all five major Sunday morning political talk shows on the same day. Obama was plugging his healthcare reform package, and hitting all the talkies at once, and although politically risky, was really the only way to spread his message far and wide.

Why? The multiplying effect.

• Obama makes his plea on each of the news shows. Most politicians, policy wonks, assigning editors, and the entire staff of Politico are watching.
• The first round of stories and blog posts come out that afternoon. Other bloggers and commentators weigh in.
• The first round of response stories gears up and the second round of stories moves on smaller news outlets. The number of readers and commentators grows.
• And so on and so on and so on.

By Monday morning, anyone who follows the news knows what Obama’s healthcare plan is.

So for your next blog post, I want you to try what I’m going to christen a “Full Brogan,” named after social media marketing maven Chris Brogan.

Your blog post starts with you. It will be read by the usual visitors to your blog, but unless you are Seth Godin, that’s probably not a really large chunk of the populace.

So seed the post all over the place: via your Twitter feed, on your Facebook page, on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Fark. If you are feeling really jaunty try Mixx, Newsvine and Sphinn, among many other choices. All this Johnny Appleseed activity comes with a two-part caveat. If you are not already a member of one or all of these communities, you are going to have to join; and likely, until you’ve spent some time there listening, adding to existing conversations and starting some of your own, it’s not likely that the pebbles you are tossing in these very large ponds are going to make waves of consequence.

But if you keep giving and keep sharing quality content, eventually, the multiplying effect will take over. In August, I seeded a blog post on MIT’s Personas project around on several sites. The next morning, I checked the hit count on our blog and the numbers had gone through the roof. We’d had three months worth of hits in one day. A look slightly deeper into the blog stats saw the bulk of the traffic coming from one source: Reddit.

Determining why the post got so much attention gets a bit trickier, but it ties into how you take care with making your contributions to social media sites and not just start seeding willy-nilly.

Make sure you write a descriptive headline. This may be the only part of your material that gets read by most people and is likely your only chance to hook them.

If the site has communities within the community (like Reddit), take the time to find the right one to post to.  If you have a story about programming, but you place it in the general story pool, you may miss the core of your audience.

Pay attention to the metadata requested by the sites, especially tags, keywords and summaries. It’s should be obvious, but it bears repeating: This is how people will find your contribution when they search within those sites. (And this should not be any extra work; you should have created this data at the same time the story was written, right?)

Finally, all this is not to say that you should ignore Mother Google by failing to keep up with your SEO best practices. It’s not the active seeking of content consumers that you’re doing through your social media seeding, but it’s still important (and requires much of the same metadata).

Let me know how your “Full Brogan’s” go.

—Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Art from http://www.timboucher.com/

Years ago I lived in Rhode Island and worked at an MIT startup, the commute was painful—5 1/2 hours a day—but the experience was worth it. Downtown Providence was an up and coming city in the late 90′s and Newfangled Graphics had the coolest sign in town. A ‘This Old House’ + small-press nerd + web fashionista wooden sign that implied, “Yep, we’re that good.” I didn’t know much about them back in 1996 but I have come to love their work and methodology. Here we are 13 years later and Mark O’Brien and the smart folks at Newfangled Graphics are now Newfangled Webfactory but still going very strong. In this video they talk about their Grayscreen prototyping process.

Grayscreen Prototyping video by Newfangled Web Factory.

For the last four weeks of so, I’ve been practicing a good writing habit. As soon as I get into the office, before I check my emails or agenda for the day, I write for ten whole minutes.

Week one was automatic writing. Lately, I’ve been assigning myself little writing assignments for my ten minutes.

This morning, nearly fresh out of ideas, I turned to Google for a writing prompt. I had NO IDEA how unhelpful the results would be. Here is a sprinkling of the most appalling and least helpful:

1.    Poking fun at you, a relative gives you a dubious award at a family picnic. In a twist, you accept the award and give a short speech. Write the scene.

2.    You are running for president of the writing community. What promises do you make to swing voters in your direction?

3.    When was the last time you saw a coaster? What meaning of the word ‘coaster’ inspires the best memory for you?

While these prompts might meet with some success at a senior center writing seminar, content writers need more meat, more action. If we’re going to spend time writing for ourselves, before we start a day of more writing, certainly we can find a more provocative muse than a coaster, or the prospect of being president of the writing community.

Here’s a prompt from the notebook of yours truly, inspired by my recent fascination with historical fiction.

•    Choose a story from a news source of your choice. (Sparse, AP wire or police blotter stories work the best for me.) Write a scene based on the characters involved in the news story, either leading up to the main event of the story or explaining what happens after the news story comes out.

Do you set aside time to write for yourself? What do you do to get your wheels turning?

—Wendy Joan