In organizing my own content, I’m working from the start and the end chronologically and making my way toward the middle.
In starting with early posts and working forward, I can move quickly and decide if something is relevant or not relevant. This also makes it easier to decide if swaths of content are not relevant, eg. I used to write about something a lot, I know it’s not where I’m going – all that content can get searched and removed/consolidated/archived.
In also starting with new posts and working backwards, I can see what’s been most important to me over the past few months within about an hour or two.
TBH, I am naturally very scattered. I have some trouble with executive functioning and organization. So I think a lot about organizing, how to reduce cognitive load, make things more doable, and I have to really break things down into small parts because I cannot multi-task effectively at all.
Here is the table of contents for how I’m initially organizing posts for some semblance of cohesion:
Of course, this still isn’t really ready for users because it’s still about me and what I’m doing vs them and what they need, but the process has led me to more clarity on how all the things I’ve been writing about are related (or not).
I’ve been tormented by the “what’s your big idea” exercise. What’s the north star you can keep coming back to as you wander off the path? Some of the cues are things like “I felt really strongly about this when I was writing it.”
I can look at those emotionally charged posts and find patterns.
I can also look at the work I was doing in learning how to develop better content processes for experts with content. Some of the technical posts fit together quite well to that end. Then there would be a more thinking type post about what data did I really want to surface technically? Then there would be some posts about more possibilities given something I learned about, like how you can mine voice assistant text and load the nouns and verbs into a graph that can be then queried for facts.
Learning about the power of graphs led me to better understand network effects and topology. Thinking about that in the context of a person with limited resources but really rich assets – ideas and value hidden in archived piles of content, meaningful human relationships leaving footprints in the form of mentions and links and podcast interviews, and other unexpected connections.
Well, all that led me to think about why we’re so limited as individuals when we have more and better tools than ever. We literally live in the future.
I can do things with a couple clicks that cost tens of millions in R&D and development to do in some enterprise 10 years ago. And yet, I don’t do those things. I think you’re like this too.
We can only attend to what we can attend to, so that personal infrastructure needs a lot of initial care to set up.
Anyway those are thoughts that bubbled up while organizing my content.
And here is a working draft of how some of the better more at least more original thinking type content might fit together, going from today back to March.
And then going from the beginning for technical content up to now.
Thinking through content decision making tool product development
(by exploring approaches to content analysis and organization)
Planning / Designing the content recommendations service
- What ongoing insights could look like – The bigger picture of a higher level content recommendations productized service
- What’s in a content audit? – looking at existing direction connections and potential/implicit connections between pages of content, based on how topics are related
Analyzing content
- Content Quality cheatsheet – summarizes page and site-level characteristics Google says they care about re content quality
- How do you value a page? – thoughts on how to value pages based on the metrics you have access to and care about
- Content feature first approach to analyzing content – Looking at content features to understand content quality (for sites with less traffic or other data
- Content audit process as enriching the gathered data with relationships for analysis
- Features at your disposal for analyzing your content – A list of content features we can pinpoint patterns around for organizing content
Organizing content
- Using tags to organize your content – Approaches for making manually tagging your own content more doable
- Everything is tagged, now what? – How to use existing labels to start organizing content into an info architecture
- Time scent – How article chronology can help us organize content
Why this work matters
On knowledge graphs (relevant for experts, e.g. personal KGs)
- Types of knowledge graphs (intro)
- Thinking through personal knowledge graph data – using a data modeling and simple cypher example
- Your own personal knowledge graph – Using content x audience insights as well as your social and other data to better understand your own context and opportunities, like where you fit in the world you are trying to influence and predict lower paths of resistance for access to influence
On leveraging your personal/professional/web-based networks
- On Personal Infrastructure – on the idea that there are the systems that help individuals function, and experts with content are missing the habits around the editing parts of writing processes
- Leveraging your personal and web-based network data
- How to make success inevitable – Sort of an example of how powerful doing human branding things with your personal network can be
- Types of Network Influence (part 1) – a description of how popularity in networks (centrality in topology) probably matters less than you think
- Types of network influence (part 2) – Invisible Bridge Trolls – exploring betweenness in networks and how those gatekeepers can help extend your reach in relevant directions
- Surfacing opportunities in your network for content amplification
Solving common problems with expert content with content organization
Exploring underlying problems experts publishing lots of content have
- Multiple sites, subdomains, and other bad decisions – a review of common mistakes experts with content make and why, looking at the problems with “best practices”
- Consolidating your websites – when you should or shouldn’t consolidate multiple websites you own and maintain
- Getting expert content to perform (for search) and why your approach through the lense Google’s quality guidelines make parts of getting expert content hard to perform
- The audience-problem expert-solution divide – thinking on the gap between what users want given a context of limited knowledge on a subject and what experts providing content for those users want for the users
- Lessons from research on a bad fit target market – Why your approach to communicating with your network (or creating content for an audience) predicts positive or negative outcomes
Exploring related solutions for experts publishing lots of content
- Watch content organization increase traffic – a case study on consolidating some blogs during a site refresh
- How experts can leverage their expertise to compete with bigger brands
- The SEO fix – An exercise for how to improve your pages by pretending Google is right that your content is less relevant than other pages outranking you
- From user journey to content organization – the follow up to the immediate above bullet, looking at user journeys to solve for that gap
- More tips like
- pulling your user journeys from your brain – looking at content as top, middle, bottom of funnel or lens of beginner-intermediate-advanced
- thoughts on complexity of thinking in terms of content funnels
- ways you can evaluate the value of pages
- how to start advocating for your best thinking
Technical side of research project related product development
- Early notes on visualizing a website with Neo4j
- Preprocessing data with Python for NLP
- Prepping Website Content Data for Graphing
- Neo4j from the command line – a walkthrough on using cypher-shell to work with a series of website data load scripts
- Visualizing a website with Neo4j and Screaming Frog data (Loading Screaming Frog Website Crawl into Neo4j Tutorial)
- Conducting a website audit with SF and Neo4j – basically a series of database queries in Cypher that can act as an SEO site audit crawl report type clone of Moz Site Crawl
- Prioritizing internal redirects to fix – a more specific example of a query should probably get rolled into the above guide at some point
- Less related, but looking at how to slice and aggregate issues by size from a SEMRush crawl report master CSV export in Google Sheets
- Crawl and scrape sites that require your login (ConvertKit example)
- Edit and write neo4j cypher load scripts for website data (Dev plan)
