Adaptive Content is More Than Just Responsive Design

I came across this great presentation by Karen McGrane who talks about “Adaptive Content”. Content that can make its way onto various different devices and platforms more effectively to get more value out of it.

So… “Responsive Design” maybe? Well, kind of but Karen puts more of an emphasis on platforms and APIs. Citing NPR’s approach to getting their content everywhere, they called it COPE — “Create Once and Publish Everywhere”. NPR uses a CMS that has an appropriate amount of structure that allows them to provide meaningful metadata that allows the content to be re-used in a variety of formats: web, podcast, iOS, Android, and Radio.

Here’s the presentation:

And here are the slides:

Link: Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content via www.slideshare.net

This resonates with the Intigi team here because we’re very much an API-driven company with an emphasis on content discovery. Here are our key takeaways from this presentation:

• APIs are useful and important. They are becoming an increasingly important part in building publications and disseminating information.
• Meta-data on the content is important (e.g., semantic)
• Content needs to adapt to various form factors (so prepare distinct blurbs for each form factor rather than truncating a one-size fits all)
• Beautiful back-end software fosters great content