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An argument in favour of taxonomy

We’ve been talking about the usefulness (or otherwise) of taxonomy in automated content management at Content Formula recently.

At its most basic level, taxonomy allows pieces of content to appear in the most relevant sections of a site.

For example if the Financial Times wanted to publish an article about a European government bailing out an energy firm with a big complex loan, the editor might decide to make the content appear in three different sections of the site – Europe, Finance, and Energy. Instead of publishing it three times, he simply needs to tag it correctly for it to appear in the three sections.

Among the disadvantages of taxonomy are that it can be over-complex where simplicity is required. And when you create a taxonomy it must mean something to the reader, and ultimately must speed his or her journey to the information they’re looking for. Creating meaningful (semantic) taxonomies isn’t always easy.

But this sentence from Nielsen’s Alertbox today is a great argument in favour of using taxonomy to make sure content can be found in the right place, at least in a big intranet:

“…at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity.”

The rest is here.

David Harbottle

Nanny state

We all remember the global furore early this year that followed the publication of the anti-islamic cartoons of Mohammed. The cartoons were orginally published in Denmark which led politicians there to trumpet the importance of freedom of speech as a fundamental building block of western society.

When it comes to images of much less explosive materials, the law in Denmark is very different however. Working on a recent project to develop a website supporting the Danish launch of a new coldsore treatment (a medical device by definition), the lawyer who was checking our content prior to launch advised us to remove a photo from the site. The image showed a herpes sufferer with a painful looking cold sore on the corner of his mouth. Apparently, images of wounds or injuries which are targeted at ordinary consumers are not to be shown for fear that they may frighten people.

There are other peculiarities in Denmark when it comes to consumer facing materials: when making product claims that are supported by clinical studies and surveys, the actual results of those studies must not be shown. We have launched the same coldsore site all across Europe, sticking to the “master template” as closely as possible. There are always legal technicalities, or even cultural norms that needed to be taken into account when rolling a site into a specific country. However, the legal review of the Danish site uncovered a lot of differences between Danish and EU law.

Dan Hawtrey