I was in a meeting the other day, and someone from IT asked me a question that caught me off-guard. “Does having content that is consistent from one country site to another really matter?” he asked. “After all, there’s little chance that a user in the Netherlands is going to visit out sites in Turkey or the UK.  Our markets are every different.  So why does consistency matter?”

I had to think fast on my feet, because content consistency is just one of those things that I’d been taking as a given for as long as I’ve been working in web content.  It was like someone asking me why I construct my sentences the way I do: I just don’t think about it anymore.

I gave him the ‘killer’ reason for consistency:  the ability to share and re-use content without having multiple authors reinvent the wheel, which has both external and internal benefits.  Externally, it ensures brand integrity; internally, it’s more cost- efficient.

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I attended my very first UX (user experience for non-initiates) event in Paris ten days ago, during which I listened to information architect Paul Kahn talk about unstructured, semi-structured and structured data.

There was something about the title that appealed to me, and besides, what else was I going to do on a Wednesday evening?

Early in his presentation, he confirmed what I already knew:  people HATE filling in metadata, especially if it’s structured (that is, pre-defined, agreed-to, controlled).

And yet, some of coolest applications of data visualization today rely on structured or at least semi-structured data.

He gave a number of examples during his talk, all of them compelling, but the one I found particularly exciting was an application developed by Microsoft called Pivot (www.getpivot.com).

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