In episode 104 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Sarah O’Keefe discuss Scriptorium’s Content Ops Manifesto.
“The bigger your system is and the more content you have, the more expensive friction is, and the more you can and should invest in getting rid of it.”
– Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

* Scriptorium’s Content Ops Manifesto
* Content operations (content ops)

Twitter handles:

* @sarahokeefe
* @PattersonScript

Transcript: 
Elizabeth Patterson:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about content ops and Scriptorium’s Content Ops Manifesto. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.
Sarah O’Keefe:                   And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
EP:                   And so we’re just going to go ahead and dive right in. Sarah, let’s start off with a definition. What is content ops?
SO:                   There are lots of great definitions out there written by people smarter than me, but the one that I really like is pretty informal. Content ops is the engine that drives your content life cycle or your information life cycle. So that means the people, the processes and the technologies that make up your content world. How do you create, author, edit, review, approve, deliver, govern, archive, delete your content? That’s content ops.
EP:                   So Scriptorium recently published a Content Ops Manifesto. And in this manifesto, you describe the four basic principles of content ops. So what I want to do is just go through those one by one, and I will of course link the manifesto in the show notes. So the first one you have in the manifesto is, semantic content is the foundation. What exactly does that mean?
SO:                   I wanted in this manifesto to take a small step back from hands-on implementation advice, and the things that we tell people to do, you need to go through and build out your systems, and here’s how you make them efficient and focus instead on the principles of what that looks like without getting too much into the details. And so with that in mind, each of these principles is intended as a guidepost that would apply for any content operation that you’re trying to build out. Semantic content is information that is essentially knowledgeable and about itself, or self-describing. Now this could be as simple as a word processor file, where you have some paragraph tags that say, “Hello, I’m a heading one,” and “Hello, I’m a heading two,” and “Hello. I am a body tag,” that kind of thing. So you need to have tags, labels of some sort that describe for each, whether it’s a block or a little chunk or a string of text.
SO:                   What that text is. Is it a heading? Is it body text? Is it a list or part of a list? That kind of thing. So that’s tags. Now, there are lots and lots of ways to do tags across every tool that you could imagine, but you need some sort of semantic labeling. Second, we need metadata. So we need information about the information itself. Usually this is classification tags. So things like, “I am a beginner level task,” or even, “I am a task. I was last updated on this date. I belong to this product or this product family.” So metadata provides you some additional context about the information and describ...