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NEWSLETTERS | OCTOBER, 2010 Content 101From Content 101 by Christopher Butler  By Christopher Butler I went to school with a lot of furniture designers. They made beautiful things. But they'd get pretty caught up in techniques—dovetail joints, lamination, etc.—and end up making pieces that simply afforded them the opportunity to use those techniques. You'd sometimes look at the results and wonder who would actually use them now that they were built. Furniture is meant to support and hold things; bookshelves for books, desks for paperwork and tools, tables for meals, beds, chairs and couches for people. A good piece of furniture is designed for its function, and as such may use some of those fancy techniques designers crave to try. Web design has the same relationship between technique and purpose, and like furniture, websites have one basic function: to support and hold content. But content is still a pretty mysterious thing to many people. Everyone gets that it's important; talking about content in terms of how important it is tends to elicit all kinds of specific questions, like, "What kinds of content?" "How much content?" "Can I use content from other websites?" and many more. And frankly, we have tons of content about content on our website that, in the aggregate, will answer all these questions. But in this article, I want to go back to the basics and look at the various kinds of content you might create for your website and examine best practices for each...  
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This is the best written and most informative article I have read on the subject. Thank you!
Hear, hear! Blogging is not dead! Great post.
Keep it coming man, you continuously produce great content yourself.
Very nice summary, Chris. I like the 1minute reads. One of the biggest challenge about content is that now there is SO MUCH CONTENT OUT THERE. I find myself almost overwhelmed by keeping up with it. So a clear message, great graphics, and nice oganization are a huge help. Thanks for setting the standard!
Marilyn: Thanks for the compliment! As far as "most informative" is concerned, my goal was to make this a survey of content (hence the title), knowing that there are many, many details that I'm not covering but that are covered in articles of their own in our archives. I'm confident that in our entire corpus of material—blog posts, articles, and webinars—is a university course on digital marketing.
Jacob: Blogging is here to stay. Thanks for reading!
Jami: Thanks! I'm glad this stuff is helpful to you.
Dan: The volume of content is the biggest barrier to getting at the most relevant and meaningful material. I have a system I use to do this, but it is beginning to sprawl as other channels (like Twitter, for instance) are becoming more active sources of important material. Thanks for being a loyal reader!
Really helpful stuff. About blogging, though, it's not a blog without comments or an rss feed? It seems like alot of blogs don't have comments anymore since people are doing alot of that on twitter and facebook now. Also, most people don't use rss because social networks bring them the info they want. Just seems like what's essential about blogging could be there without those?
Alex: I was kind of hoping my blogging qualifications would raise some disagreement... First, the RSS feed: You're right that many people don't use RSS. In fact, it really never took off in the way that it could have. The step of grabbing the feed URL, which has that look of "this isn't for you, it's technical back here" and then managing it with a reader (like Google Reader) was (and is) just too much for most people to be bothered with.
That said, I feel strongly that RSS is a great delivery technology and I will continue to use it until it is replaced by something better. Here's the thing: a blog carries with it the expectation of continual delivery, or in other words, the assumption that the author will produce content ongoing. So readership involves a committment, one that is made much easier if the blog is able to say, "don't worry about checking in, I'll let you know when there's new stuff to read." In that sense RSS is a courtesy. Today, one could conceivably replace that method of extending the courtesy with using another technology—say Twitter, for example—but RSS makes it just as easy for the author as it does for the reader. As far as I'm concerned, nothing has replaced it. Therefore, I'm going to be a stickler and keep it as a qualifier for what a blog must have in order to be, well, a blog.
About the comments: I suppose these aren't absolutely required. I read many blogs that I never comment on, which means I couldn't tell you whether or not they even would let me if I wanted to. In that sense, I suppose commenting doesn't matter. But, I do think there is something about the openness of commenting that is essentially "bloggy." One interesting thing is that Tumblr, a platform I use to "blog" (see I'm using it as a verb there) allows people to comment on my posts—which they call "replies"—but I can't reply to their replies. Strange, but would I call Tumblr pages blogs? Probably. So there's obviously some leeway here. Also note that an older post I wrote on allowing comments is one of the most commented-upon among our entire blog!
Thanks for the question, Alex! What do other people think?