Getting Ready for Intelligent Content

Content is intelligent when it is structured to be easy to find, remix, and adapt for use and reuse across multiple channels by both humans and computers. Traditionally, intelligent content workflows have been large complex operations marketed towards larger companies and enterprises with larger content management needs, but as content platforms and their demands proliferate, intelligent content has become increasingly relevant for all creators. In this article, we’ll define intelligent content, discuss the elements of intelligent content that exist in tools common to many creators, and we’ll share how work is progressing on a new media creation tool, LightWeave, that will use intelligent content to amplify the creativity of any creator.

Introduction

According to Patreon’s State of Create, there has never been a better time in history to be creative—yet creators are enduring more and more obstacles to becoming successful. Problems with unpredictable income and increased volatility online mean creators are spending more time on menial tasks and less time actually creating. Platforms are demanding more frequent content in varying formats, while at the same time making it harder to reach followers. If you’ve been interacting with any content platforms, you’ve likely felt that it’s hard to stay afloat, especially over the last few years!

This is where intelligent content can help amplify your result as a creator—by making your content easier to find, reuse, remix, and update at scale. Historically, mainly larger companies and enterprises with complex, large-scale content needs have used such workflows to create and manage marketing and technical content across multiple brands and platforms. But today, everyone has complex large-scale content needs for all types of content on an ever-increasing number of platforms. Everyone needs intelligent content.

What is Intelligent Content?

Intelligent content is content that has been structured to make it easier to find, use, and adjust for both humans and computers alike.
In the words of Ann Rockley, who originally coined the term intelligent content:

Intelligent content is designed to be modular, structured, reusable, format free, and semantically rich and, as a consequence, discoverable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.
This makes creating intelligent content sound like a lot of work, but you’re likely already using tools that contain elements of intelligent content within them. Below, we'll look at some examples of common tools that have features of intelligent content—features that you can use to amplify your reach and get more out of what you create.

Modular & Reusable

Why make the same thing twice when you can just make it once and then reuse it when needed? Having one “source of truth” for your content means you don’t have to hunt down every place where you’ve used something to make an edit. Audio, images, and video are already easily reusable, but you can apply this to every step in your creative workflow. For example, lets see how this has been applied in a number of popular tools:

Notion (Text & Tables): Notion is a block-based documentation platform. Here, you can copy and sync blocks of text that behave as one single copy when edited. This feature is perfect for things like addresses, notifications that need to appear on a number of pages, or any other type of content that needs to be visible in many places or updated frequently.
Figma (Design): Components are groups of layers that can be instanced and reused. Updating the component updates all of the instances, so adjustments only need to be made once. Instances can also be variants, which use the same design but with different text. Great examples of components in action are thumbnails, where you have the same background, text style and other graphic elements, but the details of each are different.
After Effects & Premiere Pro (Animation): Templates provide a great chance to package media into a reusable form. Live Text templates in After Effects go the next step by letting you edit the text even when imported in Premiere Pro. These templates are great for things like lower thirds, graphic overlays which provide more information about the video you’re watching.
Lokalise (Localization): This localization software, like most others, stores your content as strings. Strings are words, sentences, or paragraphs that have a fixed meaning. After being localized, you can use them as placeholders in an article, calling the required language when needed. Because the meaning is fixed across all localized languages, they can be used and reused with confidence, ensuring that the author’s intent stays intact in no matter what language you're using.

Taking care to make your content reusable in as many aspects as possible from the start can save an enormous amount of time and effort over the length of a project.

Structured & Semantically Rich

It’s tempting to throw all of your resource files straight into a folder and leave everything for later, but any time saved now is lost with interest as soon as you try to find these files again. Making sure your content is well structured and semantically rich will ensure it is easy to find—for both people and computers.

Structured content has, among other things, consistent file naming, and is placed in a consistent and predictable folder structure. This of course makes files easier to find for human beings, but it also makes it easier to automate processes. For example, on Mac, you could use the built-in automation app Automator to copy photos from your camera, rename them, and copy them to a folder based on a string you provide, drastically reducing the amount of manual labour involved and priming them for use in further automations later. This is possible on Windows as well with third party tools. If you store many of your files online, it may also be possible to automate them with tools like Zapier.

Semantically rich content has abundant metadata that gives you more information about the files and how they were created. Modern software and hardware will typically add relevant metadata to files when they are created and edited. This can include the creation or last modified dates of a file, GPS location, applied software and hardware settings, and much more. This metadata helps to make your files more easily searchable and sortable. You can view some of this information by right-clicking and selecting Properties on Windows, or Get Info on Mac. There are also metadata viewers, such as EXIF viewers for images and video or an ID3 viewer for MP3 files.

It’s also possible to add metadata yourself through the use of tags. Both Windows and MacOS have file tagging built into their file management systems. Tags are versatile, and easy to edit, and give you multiple ways to group your files without having to physically move them. Consider tagging based on project, date, production status, language, location, content, theme, or all of the above!

Format Free

Format-free content doesn’t have any style information, making it easy to add styles to match any project. The most common example is that of the headings in Word Processors. When editing in Google Docs or Word, you can create a heading by making the text bigger or using a different font, but the proper way is to use headings, and then define the style of the headings separately. By declaring headings in your document when you want to change the style, you only need to worry about doing it in one place, and the style will be applied everywhere. Here are a few other examples of format-free content:

Websites: Websites have CSS style sheets that define the appearance of elements on the page without affecting the actual information itself.
Presentations (Slides.com, Powerpoint, Google Slides): Style guides help keep presentations orderly and consistent by removing the need to work on every slide individually. What’s more, updating the style guide will also update the style of every presentation using it at once!

Moving Towards Intelligent Content

Recognizing the intelligent-content practices that are available in common tools you already use in your workflow and adding more when possible is a good step towards being able to focus more on creating instead of everything else!
If you’re interested in learning more about intelligent content, and how we hope to harness it for all creators, please sign up for our early-access waitlist below.

We need your help.

We believe in a better future for content and content creators. That’s why we’re building a new technology, LightWeave, to make it easier for everyone to create intelligent content. We believe in building this technology in cooperation with the community and we deeply value our conversations together.

If you’re interested in learning more about intelligent content, and would like to join our user community, click the blue button to get more information.

LightWeave