The need for great content curators has never been more urgent. And if you’re like most of us, you have tons of important content, such as documents, videos, spreadsheets, family photos…
But what happens when you can’t find the right content when you need it? It’s time you turn to eXie.
eXie was designed specifically to help you easily collect, organize, curate and share all your important information. And since it runs entirely online, everything is accessible from anywhere, anytime. eXie is a highly scalable cloud-based platform for planning, curating and publishing content collections without the cost, complexity or learning curve normally associated with applications of comparable purpose
If you have the budget, schedule, and travel all set, you can take advantage of live interactions in an immersive learning environment, which can intensify the transfer of knowledge to you from a provider.
But if you don’t, well, there’s your backup plan: hit the web to find similar stuff.
However… the difference between the conference experience and your access to the explosion of similar interesting content online is largely one of perspective. The conference has one. Without selectivity exercised and maintained from a clear point of view, the probability is that “surfing” and collecting online relevant content will have results that are far less predictable to find, reliable to trust, and punctually effective to use.
The answer: do what the conference organizers do: curate. Here is how one typical conference becomes a 24×7 online knowledge base — with a technique that applies equally well to any knowledge collection. Using the right tool, this becomes practical for anyone to do, on a personal level on up through a community of any size.
Imagine going into a warehouse where anything could be interesting but nothing is organized.
The first thing you’d want to do is get somebody to bring you things specifically for the reason you wanted them. Whatever your reason is, it represents how you want to use the items, and your next consideration is whether they are in a form that makes them useful the way you desire. Will you have to modify, arrange, or assemble them further, before you can use them the way you want?
Similarly, you might go into a store where there is a large supply of food ingredients. But they may still be a long way off from being a meal, especially the meal that you want at the time. It’s clear that having someone choose, prepare and organize the ingredients as a served dish would make you a lot happier.
Content is all about ways to experience ideas.
Most of us collect content for reasons that make sense to us; but when it comes time for others or ourselves to use it again, there’s a big difference made by how much processing has taken place to have it meet our need.
We can see a wide variety of things that can be done to match the content in our collection to the preference of a content user.
In the illustration here, activities on the left name many of the most typical ways that people expect to use content. On the right, we see many of the most typical places that someone expects to find content that has been cared for and prepared for ongoing or recurring use.
As content collectors or contributors, we are usually vary familiar with what these activities are like and what these results are like, mostly through the form that they usually take. What makes it all better is knowing how to make the form work best.
Shaping the content for use is where eXie lets you be the source of its final value, picking up from the level where content is just good quality ingredients, and finishing with where it is a good quality experience.
The beginning of that is curating — going into the collection with an audience’s point of view in mind and using that point of view as the selection criteria for what content will get forwarded to the audience. This will result in a more specialized collection that is a subset of the original one.
The specialized collection then gets organized internally to make it apparent why the content within it can be useful in a given way.
The ultimate use of the content is also a part of the audience’s initial expectations that help define how the focused content collection should be arranged for and recognized by users. Sophisticated or “rich” content usually consists of multiple items brought together — composed or coordinated for presentation in the same place.
At that point, the experience offered by the content can make all the difference between your content being merely adequate and being preferred.
Using eXie, you can easily present your content collection — in a view that always immediately shows:
how the audience refers to ideas — each frame labels what kind of thing is under consideration and why
where to get the content that relates to those references — each frame cell holds links to any chosen content from any online location
what most interesting other ideas are associated with the ones initially in mind — the “big picture” of eXie’s content frames confirms that selected content is distinctive yet not isolated from broader interests and choices
And because of eXie’s layout, the same view is equally useful to both you as the content provider and your audience as the content user.
The discovery that will occur is how the eXie presentation serves easily as any one of the typical forms used to deliver curated collections of content.
What do they have in common? What difference does it make?
If you put content online, or organize content online, you already know them and make them. Who doesn’t!
On the web, personal publishing is one of the most popular things to happen in the last ten years.
Putting it bluntly, having an audience drives online activity just as much as does any other avenue of “sharing”.
Yes, the major emphasis on sharing tends to be on “social” or “crowd” activity where the key is the excitement of many-to-many relationships.
Publishing, on the other hand, relies on the excitement of a one-to-many relationship. In current lingo, to emphasize the “approval” of the many, it’s already been canonized as having “followers”.
WHO CARES
But gaining and holding on to followers makes approval something worth looking at more carefully. What are they really approving, and why?
In the vast openness of the web, a related distinction is between the followers you have versus the followers you want – which is actually another way of asking the question, why do you want followers, and why do they want you? Are you in synch? Does it matter? How?
It might be argued that the biggest breakthrough in publishing has really been the mechanisms that allow people to track you without making that effort themselves. This used to be called “subscription” but the liveliness of the web – its “always on” character – makes the sense of being connected more important now than the sense of being served.
This is a difference that is about far more than timing. The issue that content providers are coming back to is that being served makes being connected worthwhile.
CULTIVATING YOUR CONTENT
Service is experienced in terms of timeliness and quality, and that’s where cultivation comes in.
When content is created for an audience, it is not successful just because it is deliverable. It is successful because it has been developed to have a capability to express ideason contact. The content has been given the means to be effective on its own; however, the content provider has anticipated the circumstances of its contact with an audience.
People have put time into cultivating their content in a variety of ways. Anyone who has created a gallery, album, playlist or portfolio has already made numerous decisions based on how they want the content to have impact in the future.
Each decision reflects the provider’s intent with an audience. These distinctive decisions are not exclusive of each other. In fact, as shown here, each easier decision (at left) becomes a step towards the next more deliberate and sophisticated decision (at right). This is true whether the item is texts, images, sounds, or any blend.
Beyond storage and search, Most content tools that we use, whether older or newer, intend to help us get to a certain level of cultivation.
PLATFORMS
So how did we get this far without talking about blogs and ebooks`?
Any continued investigation of blogs will show that they are a fantastic opportunity for publishing online with multimedia tools, but as “a form” blogs actually span every one of the four types of content cultivation just mentioned. This shows that blogging – and likewise any book — is actually a “platform” for publishing.
In that same sense, eXie is a platform for publishing.
When a collection of online content is linked to an eXie frame, the frame makes the content arranged, cataloged and sharable in a form that supports the provider’s intent — ranging from a content gallery all the way through to a content portfolio. The typical use cases, each offering a kind of organization for value, are recognizable in many varieties. Just for example:
We already know that other available platforms work. But with eXie, the breakthrough is in the way that its frameworks let you handle content items and give them their best value for users.
Regardless of the use case or variant, eXie lets the content provider use the same organizational technique to create the publication.
arranging the content collection
managed distribution of the content
and supplying strong recognition of how the content is intended to be valuable.
Meanwhile, the publication user, who navigates the content collection, has the same ease of content access — confident and convenient — for all of the uses.
eXie is an online solution that is already available and in use across the many publishing variants. There is nothing to install, and it is automatically upgraded continually to offer increasingly simpler use with the flexible power of its design. With your eXie account, your publishing can go deeper or broader, whether casual or formal, with minimal complication or technical burden. Your eXie account also connects you to other eXie users in eXieCloud, the eXie online user community.
What do all of those types of efforts have in common?
For one, each is done by someone who is interested in high-quality content AND who actually does something with the content they keep.
For another, these efforts are all cases of Content Usage — or Use Cases for short — in which the goal is to successfully deliver certain ideas to an audience.
The audience may be other parties or themselves, and it may be general or specialized, but the goal never actually changes. Each of the efforts has its own distinctive activities tied to where and how it is actually conducted. But as we’ll see here, they all have, in common, the same issues to address, as they channel the delivery of ideas from source to destination.
This chart makes us able to see the things that make it possible to succeed in delivering ideas. They are not peculiar to any one of the various use cases; this means that each case may look at how it gets things done and assess whether it has an important need to do things differently from how other cases get it done.
We all know that storage and search tools involve handling a wide variety of file formats, and that the same idea may show up in a dizzying variety of locations, forms and items. One key issue is to be able to confidently recognize which discoverable items actually carry the idea that we seek in a way that is best for our current purpose. Naturally we make time to focus on creating relevant content; but the more pressing problem in all use cases is that we cannot produce even a large fraction of what we are able to find, and the sheer volume and variety of discoverable finished items is a potentially huge burden to work through.
Still, we can assume that there will always be finished content available that people should try to use. What must also take place for a “successful” delivery of ideas is that the user can efficiently and reliably navigate to the best representation of the idea for the user’s occasion of demand.
With success in that part of the delivery, content usage exposes items that are better qualified for carrying key ideas in a way most likely to be valuable for the user.
Those items are more likely to be worth retaining for repeated use, so they also influence the decision about what else should be discovered and stored going forward.
The eXie solution offers a simple, highly visible technique for arranging, recognizing and accessing available content according to the value of its usage. With eXie, a collection of content can be viewed with an easy and consistent emphasis on how the meaning of the content is intended to be recognized, regardless of its source, format or age.
In that view, the value of the content is easier to manage by both the providers and the users of the content. With eXie, content providers and users have the same frame of reference for deciding what content should be available and used.Additionally, eXie can apply the framework in the same way to any online content being produced in any of the use cases. This of course means that eXie is useful in the same way by people in all use cases — and therefore is a standard “platform” for all of them.
The content collection in question may be about evidence, specifications, explanations, instructions, concepts, or examples of things. Regardless, eXie is equally effective in providing the collection with an organization of the content that guides effective navigation and recognition by the user.
