Written by Malcolm Ryder
Welcome!
Introducing eXie in 60 seconds will show you what eXie does, how and why in only about a minute.
The overview will highlight your advantage gained by curating your content online.
Then, to see more, go to the eXie homepage, and go to other articles on the eXie blog, or sign up for a no-cost 30-day user account.
Written by Malcolm Ryder
The simplicity of eXie makes it immediately applicable by any user already having strong familiarity with the way their content has value in its ongoing usage.
See examples offered by many types of eXie users by clicking on The eXie Gallery.
Written by Malcolm Ryder
The great thing about having a fully mature Read/Write web is the number of different ways that we can share the content we have crafted. But this can also be too much of a good thing.
Where Stuff Is, and Why
It’s not unusual for some item of interest to show up in various guises, at any of the following locations. We took a shot at lining them up, noting what key difference one place might offer versus another. No apologies for obvious omissions, here… We’re just making a point: there are reasons why people do things so many ways. (Feel free to change the chart…)
Even more to the point, all of these options are so easy to use that a LOT of them get used, especially by anyone who has a frequent desire to get an audience for the content they have.
As a result, even though each event of content placement may be well-justified at the time, it is fairly easy to wind up with content scattered widely, outside of any overall plan.
What about your own files?
Do most people have that problem? No. The majority of the time, what we see above turns into someone collecting other people’s content, while people who are distributing it are fairly unconcerned about where it is.
But if you are a producer of crafted content, you care. You put effort into protecting the quality, relevance and best use of it.
And if you’re saving content, then you’re collecting it. Your collection is, essentially, the full set of locations you actually used to store the full set of items that you decided to save.
The problem occurs as those items wind up in locations that do not help us to keep track of them.
We “lose track” in several ways:
These issues all make it more difficult to know that the right content item can be easily found whenever it is next needed.
What makes matters worse, folders also tend to go through these same risky changes.
Whether most of your content is on a cloud drive or is spread about across the web, you may recognize the challenge we all have in common when it comes to the usefulness of our collections.
The way out of the vicious cycle is to tackle disorganization up front. And the best time to do that is when using the content will be rewarding.
Our idea is that we should make organization easy enough to make content usage rewarding.
This means focusing on how and why the content is needed. To see how we do it, go to Content Sprawl: Herding the Cats, Part 2.
Written by Malcolm Ryder
The Who Cares Test
You already have a content collection. Turn it into a store.
Chances are, the reasons why you found, kept, and then re-use that content for yourself include most, if not all, of the following:
As collectors, some of us are pretty focused on re-presenting what we’ve collected. We know we have an audience or even several audiences, and when we collect content we’re already thinking about an audience.
Whether your audience is Social, Professional, or Private, your collection is valuable because you have personalized your decisions about what to keep, right from the beginning. The question is, when you want to re-use the content later, will re-presenting the content show that your earlier decisions were good ones?
When you think of how many different things you do with that content — by selecting, retrieving and re-presenting it — you can see that you’re practically publishing to yourself and others. We’ve already learned to do that routinely through sharing content at work and through social apps. Additionally, we just like to revisit things that hold special interest for us to read, view or hear. In fact, even the method of sharing is becoming pretty much the same for private, social and work use.
Interestingly, those uses have at least one other thing in common: their demand is a kind that usually can be satisfied with material made new for the moment, as long as the audience can wait for it. So what?
Well, waiting is less and less tolerated. We’ll find that the difficulty of re-creating something while they wait may be large or small, but the greater the difficulty, the more likely we are to re-search for it instead. We’ll try to go find something suitable that we expect already exists. And when we find it, we’ll deliver it to the audience.
Taking stock…
That’s where our personal collection comes in. The more we’ve thought ahead about who the audience might be, the more likely we are to selectively store what we want to depend on at that later point when we need to “re-present” something. Our selective storing means that we can do less researching to get an item that we already know is high-quality.
In fact, except for risking the qualty, the best way that we could further decrease our own research burden is to let the audience research our collection themselves.
So, the last thing we want is a personal collection that is difficult to research!
Our new service, eXie, is designed for people who know that they want to rely on their own content collection to support valuable sharing of their content with their audience.
eXie is focussed on preventing and repairing the three main conditions that make collections difficult to research. These conditions occur and co-exist independently of each other. What’s worse, in fact, is how one problem easily leads to the next:
– too much content is kept speculatively or beyond usefulness
– items are stored out of context
– content organization is difficult to relate to current demand
– things get duplicated or recreated unnecessarily
The way we see it…
There are many tools available that help to tackle the challenge of finding an item, based on its subject, version, and apparent relevance.
We know that search results are, essentially, just-in-time collections of content, activated by the user’s selection criteria.
We also know that most of the time, search results get handled in one of two ways: an acceptable item is found within them, used right away, and the search steps and results are discarded; or the results are pruned down to one item and saved somewhere.
Of course, the emphasis in search is actually in the reason why an item is currently needed. But search does not address the problem of keeping a collection organized. Instead, indexing does.
An index applies certain terms to a content item so that its association with a context or other item is explicit. This means that searching an index is a good way to get to a group of items that we expect all have some relevance in common. A term in the index becomes the key criterion of the content search.
However, an index can itself present two challenges. One is that it can be idiosyncratic; its terms may make not make sense in the same way to all observers. Another is that as a collection of terms, an index may not systematically include or exclude terms.
What we want is for the index to systematically represent the mentality of the audience. To make that representation most easily recognized and used by the audience, we give it a visual layout that shows the mentality as a system. The visual layout provides the index in the form of a frame of reference.
Open for business
The two most common types of layouts providing frames of reference are taxonomies and catalogs. For most content collectors, creating a catalog of the content is a great way to develop an organized view of the content based on the expected purposes of the content. And for these collectors, taxonomies show the way that the audience distinguishes and recognizes what it wants.
In short, to create the catalog, use terms that reflect the taxonomy. With the right taxonomy used to create a catalog, you can turn your content collection into a content store where your expected audience confidently shops for what it needs.
Written by Malcolm Ryder
With eXie, you take a collection of content, organize the content into groups of ideas, and make the groups easy to see and find for ongoing later use.
The groupings show what contexts give importance to the variety of content.
Doing this with eXie can be easy because it relies on things we all already know how to do. But there are more basic and more advanced ways to do those things.
Most Basic:
If you have ever made an outline, you already have experience with taking a single subject and separating it into organized groupings of included relevant ideas.
And most likely, if you stored items in a set of folders in a cabinet or on your computer, your arrangement of folders looks pretty much like an outline.
Coming up with good, permanent “headings” or folder names is sometimes tricky, however. It’s not hard but it takes practice. Some of us are a lot better at it than others. We all know cases where the outline or the folder arrangement had become very inconsistent or had grown out of control.
Intermediate:
If you have made an index to a set of content, you have already chosen a group of key words that you associated to some of the content, to help expose how the content is relevant to certain other ideas. A “cat” might be indexed to the key words “pet”, “mammal”, and “deity”…
Today, many people do this with tagging and rely on their tags to help sort or group widely differing items of content that can have the same “importance” or “meaning” to the content user.
Indices and tags name a desired context of the content, regardless of what other grouping (like headings or folder names) may be used. Tagging is actually the practical way for most of us to create an index, but making good tags for other people is more difficult than you would expect. Tags tend to be personalized, and if they are instead very impersonal then they aren’t really needed because an index will already do the trick. Unfortunately, many people who use tags either don’t know the difference or just ignore the difference. Later this causes confusion for themselves and frustration for other people who want to use the content, if they find that the tags don’t mean what they appeared to mean. They feel like the index is unreliable.
Advanced:
If you have made a catalog of any group of items, you have already decided on how to distinguish the items by categories or types that make sense to someone who is trying to find a certain kind of thing. This is the same as having selection criteria or qualifications to determine where an item belongs relative to the other items in a collection.
The more specific and reliable the categorization must be, the more people need a taxonomy to provide consistent logic to the way things are classified.
The most advanced kind of content grouping follows a taxonomy that is appropriate for the target users of a catalog. This seems like it might be more complicated or difficult than less advanced kind of groupings. But it is not. What makes it “more advanced” is your familiarity with the knowledge and interests of the expected users. It is not practically harder to do.
Using eXie:
Using eXie encourages you to take the knowledge you already have about the content users, and create content groupings in a way that matches what they care about to how or why they typically care about it. By naming those two things, you can create a “frame of reference” that is easy to use and can be as general or specific as the user needs.
An eXie “frame” controls the logic that creates content groupings. As seen here, a grouping exists for any combination of the idea in a column and the idea in a row.
The labels of the columns and rows tell the user how to identify the context of the items of content that are available.
Because all rows apply to all columns, the regularity and consistency of the organization is easier to see and it gives the use confidence in being able to use the entire collection of content. It also strongly guides the further addition of more content to the collection without risking disorganization.
Finally, this single technique of organization is usable for any different kinds of subject matter and any different kinds of content users. You can always provide several different frames of reference to the same single collection of content. Your familiarity with your expected content user will help you select subjects and “cover the subject area” confidently.
Once you have begun using this technique with eXie, it is likely to give you more ideas about how to expand and master your ways of showing what you have collected, why, and how to navigate the collection — without becoming disorganized.
