Content Management Systems - CMS

Designer Tyler N. Thompson conducted an experiment to redesign airline boarding passes for finding information quickly in the crowded, hectic airport environment. Here’s his original boarding pass, and one of the reader-submitted redesigns:

Figure 1. Current Boarding Pass

Figure 2. Redesign by David Yoon

(Via Graphicology and Timoni Grone)

Kevin Maney points out that, unlike books with their varied and descriptive covers, e-Reader devices conceal the identity of what you’re reading:

…the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person. Likewise, the books lining your living room or office can tell others about your interests and background. But on the Kindle, no matter what you’re reading, all anyone else will see is an unchanging plastic device.

(Via Clive Thompson)

“Mind readers wanted.”

This is from an actual Digital Asset Management (DAM) job description posted this year. Really. More on that later in this post.

Several people have asked what are typical DAM job descriptions. Here are some actual DAM job descriptions and knowledge shared by DAM professionals on the job market today.

All this takes people as part of the equation with process and technology.

Your best bets are

What are you looking for when filling the human resources gaps with the people needed to help manage your organization’s digital assets? Well, here are a few DAM job descriptions. There are no hard and fast rules, but rather guidelines. Any of these could be staff or contractual positions.

• Administrator (DBA)
• Business Analyst (BA)
• Consultant
  • Either an internal, permanent staff for daily (ongoing) consultation OR an external (temporary), outside perspective looking in with a fresh viewpoint
  • Advisor, coach and/or functional role
• Information Architect
• DAM Director/Digital Asset Manager
  • Support DAM system and users
  • An industry expert in the field
• DAM Specialist/Coordinator
  • Organize and upload assets
  • Metatag assets
• Archivist
• Librarian
  • Organize and upload assets
• Engineer/Developer/Programmer
• Help Desk
• Intern
  • Temporary position (more on this in a future blog post)
  • Willingness to:
    • Learn about DAM
    • Work on metadata
• Project Manager
• Taxonomist
• Metatagger (aka “Metator”)
• Analyst
• Archivist
• Assistant
• Database Administrator (DBA)
• Data Entry Specialist*
• Engineer
• Librarian
• IT Specialist
• Marketeer
• Project Manager
• Sales
• Taxonomist

Some of these positions may be combined

IDEAL FOR THESE PROFESSIONALS

• Art and Photo Buyers
• Channel Program Managers
• Corporate Communications
• Creative Services
• Graphic and Packaging Design Services
• IT Program Management
• Licensing and Clearances
• Localization Managers
• Marketing Communications
• Multimedia, Media Archivist
• Photo Librarian
• Sales Support
• Technical Documents Manager
• Web Content Specialists

A large international shipping organization asked me what kind of position they needed to fill for a certain gap in their staff/process they had identified, but were not sure what qualifications they needed to list in a job description. They did not need an engineer, but rather a very computer literate person who can understand the technical information and can get the job done regularly (aka a geek)

While some job positions may use Digital Asset Management (DAM), there is an increase in the need for people who may work full-time on DAM within an organization. We’ll explore several of these positions may do to give you an idea what some organizations have as far as talented resources who do this work.

Clerk, data entry,

Digital Archivist

Today, Job Description should include the high level business needs which this role will be involved with Digital Asset Management.

Digital Asset Management is a business need, not just a technology or another database.

Here is the direct way to get answers you need for potential candidates to fill an “Asset Librarian” position:

“Please include the following questions and answers on the first page of every resume submitted:
1) Have you worked with an Asset Management System, where, how much?

2) How much experience do you have creating Metadata Schema?

3) Do you have any training experience? what type?”

Patrick Wintour, describing new British PM David Cameron in The Guardian:

Cameron feels at least iPod, if not iPad generation: relaxed appearances on the networks, dinner with Washington Post columnists, and meetings with all the key congressional leaders…

Whitney Hess:

Inspiration is necessary in order for aspiration to grow. But only until we’re filled with aspiration, self-initiated and self-defined, do our careers, and lives, really begin to transform, allowing us to transform those around us in turn.

East Houston Street, 7:17 PM – Presidential State Car (top right) followed by secret service car.

FDR Drive South, 8:55 PM – Presidential State Car (left) following secret service car.

FDR Drive South, 8:55 PM – NYPD squad cars and secret service SUVs follow the President to the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

I promised last time to show a simple way to render CRX content as PDF. The technique in question involves using a PDF form as the readymade container, into which form data is imported using XFDF. The latter is the XML version of Adobe's Forms Data Format, which in turn is a file format specifically designed to allow import and export of data to and from PDF forms.

The way it works is simple: Suppose you have a PDF form that you want to populate with data. You merely need to create a small data file (in XFDF format) and put it on the server. When a user requests the data file (which has a mimetype of "application/vnd.adobe.xfdf"), Acrobat Reader (or the Reader browser plug-in) detects the fact that form data will need to be imported into a form. The XFDF file itself contains a pointer to the actual form to be used. Reader fetches the form, then imports the form data into it, and renders the result as a PDF file containing the data. It all happens transparently to the user, and the user need only have Acrobat Reader (not a full copy of Acrobat Professional).

In the example I'm going to show below, we generate the XFDF file dynamically on the server, via a script called (what else?) xfdf.esp. We'll get to that in a minute.

The example we're going to talk about assumes that there is content in CRX (under a path of /content/films) that looks something like this:

This particular content node is named terminator_2. It lives under /content/films/ in my CRX repository.

Notice, in the above list, that there is a property (at the bottom) called sling:resourceType, set to a value of "films." This tells CRX to look under /apps/films for any scripts that might be necessary to render the content.

In previous blogs, I've shown how to write scripts that render this content as HTML, SVG, or CSV. Right now, what we need is an XFDF renderer. That turns out to be pretty easy to set up.

First, we need to create a PDF form to hold our data. In the Acrobat Professional forms editor, such a form looks like this:

Kevin C. Tofel explains how simple branding transcends category names used by industry insiders, and captures a place in the public consciousness:

Such simple branding and product awareness goes a long way toward helping Apple sell products. Look at the iPad, 3 million units of which the company has sold in just 80 days. Instead of floundering around by trying to define the device as a keyboard-less smartbook or a tablet PC without native handwriting capabilities, Apple gave it a definitive name with specific, usable functions and in the process — as I noted when the name was first unveiled in January – cornered the nascent smartbook market before that market even got started.

WikiLeaks is building a system that would enable any website to host a form for collecting disclosures:

The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy.

WikiLeaks hopes this system will help journalists and others who receive specific submissions to study and report on those submissions in depth, because a massive collection of raw information that’s not studied and reported on will get little or no attention:

Once Wikileaks confirms the uploaded material is real, it will be handed over to the Web site that encouraged the submission for a period of time. This embargo period gives the journalist or rights group time to write a news story or report based on the material.

The embargo period is a key part of the plan, [WikiLeaks Advisory Board member Julien] Assange said. When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he said. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

Ken Auletta:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing.

© Roy Zipstein