On this week’s calendar: the Autumnal Equinox. Or as I like to say, the beginning of the end. Now that it’s fall, my mind drifts to dazzling topics like, raking leaves, saying "sayonara" to the sun, and that hard-coded alarm I still hold on to … first semester. Since nobody wants to read my complaining about Minnesota weather, I’d like to celebrate fall learning with a couple of content tips.
Tip #1: Content is more than copy. Around here, we love words. But what we really love is content — and there’s a difference. When we talk about content, we consider copy, meaningful imagery, metadata, user-generated, error messages, video, audio, graphs, charts, etc. You know who illustrates this concept well? The New York Times. Check out the Multimedia page and you’ll find photos, interactive graphics/features, text, audio, video and a lot of other cool stuff.
Tip #2: Speaking of graphs and charts, consider infographics. Bring together words with visuals. Do it to inform, entertain or inspire. We have a resident infographics junkie on staff. Her name is Christine. And she finds and circulates some goodies. Here’s where we go hunting: GOOD’s FFFFOUND! page incorporates the best of the web and the Transparency archive is a "graphical exploration of the data that surrounds us." Flowing Data "explores data visualization" in the Infographics Archive.
Tip #3: When I said "a couple" of tips, I really meant it.