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How Content is Like Light — And Why It Matters

Chances are good that everyone here has talked about “content as code”…and I get it. But the problem is that’s only half the story. Content has an important duality, one that makes it incredibly powerful as well as challenging to work with effectively. Just as light is both a particle and a wave, content is both “code” and…meaning.

If you concentrate only on one or the other, you miss the important stuff. Like the challenges of moving from ideas to structured content. Or the differences between working with content and creating content. And the importance of an environment in which everyone who has a hand in content can operate independently while still working in coordination.

Nicole France is a passionate customer advocate evangelizing new ways of thinking about content and organizing the work of digital business. It’s the wave of the future — and her mission is to make sure everyone knows why. She brings the perspective and critical thinking of an industry analyst and the first-hand experience of a practitioner. Before joining Contentful, Nicole worked as an analyst at Constellation Research and Gartner. She also held a variety of strategy and marketing roles at Fujitsu, Equinix, ITSMA, and Cisco. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Nicole enjoys the outdoors, flying small planes, and embarking on yet another house project in her spare time.

Transcript

Nicole France 0:19 Sean, thank you, and thanks everybody. I always feel super privileged when I get a chance to speak with a group like this, partly because it’s always such a fun and entertaining set of speakers and subjects, and also because I feel like this is the type of group where people are really eager and excited to play around with all kinds of different ideas, and hopefully that’s what we’re going to do a little bit of today. So Sean introduced me. It’s true, I have this great title of Chief Evangelist. I am totally not a dev, but I sit in micro marketing and I have this cool microphone, so I feel like that totally qualifies me to speak about a whole range of things I don’t actually know all that much about. So why not jump right into quantum physics? So No, seriously, let’s, let’s look at this analogy that I draw here for this talk, which is light. So light, it is illumination, it is energy. It is for anyone who has spent a little bit of time studying physics, also something that exhibits the dual properties of waves and particles. So if light is passing through narrow slits, it’ll diffract like a wave. If you have light hitting, say, metal object at a certain wavelength, it will collide with electrons and scatter like a particle, releasing energy really brings a kind of different type of meaning to the term atomic content modeling. But I think to borrow some words from someone who really does know what they’re talking about, what is fascinating to me about light is that the way that it responds is really a matter of the questions we’re asking it so it will respond in different ways based on the types of experiments that we’re doing, the types of approaches that we take. And that is something that comes directly from an excellent theoretical physicist and a professor at Dartmouth, Marcello gleiser, whom also lends us, whom I’ve also borrowed, I should say, from for this quote here, which is that light, as we know, is both particle and wave, and it is the fastest thing in the cosmos. It carries with it the secrets of reality in ways we cannot completely understand. But understanding its duality was an important step for our perplexed minds. And this comes from Big Think, if anyone’s looking for some really cool blog posts about all kinds of matters in physics, this is part of a series Breaking Down quantum mechanics. I’ll go back to this idea that this duality is something that actually took a while for science to determine. And it was in fact, a young Albert Einstein who was the one who identified the reality that light apps absolutely acts in these two different ways. Is the photoelectric principle, and this is the basis for what we now consider the duality of light, of course, one of the two papers that won him the Nobel Prize. So let’s think about what this duality looks like in terms of content. Because, as I put in my session description here, and I would love to hear from you, if you have not ever referred to content as code, we tend to say that a lot in content, especially content text circles, and that is absolutely true, but it also, very importantly, has meaning, and a lot of that is to do with context, so much as we Very briefly and extremely superficially explored the nature of light and the ways in which it behaves in these these dual ways, let’s examine the structure of content here, because I think it’s actually content structure that helps us to understand how we think of content as code, in one sense, but also how We can get a lot more effective at understanding code or content in context and therefore its meaning. So I’m going to borrow from a colleague of mine here who has spent a lot of time working on content maturity models, and let’s talk a little bit about what we do when. Structuring content, we’re effectively trying to label it, to define characteristics of the aspects of content that we’re working with, the elements or types that go into a content model. And we can define that at a range of different kinds of sizes and scales and degrees of complexity, and they bring with them in those different kinds of structure, varying degrees of meaning. So let’s take, for example, actually, one piece of this before I come back and blow it all up. You know, two things that are, I think, some of the most common types of content that we use anywhere and everywhere, image and text, right? So we could have a fairly basic, simple content model that really is designed just around this, and that’s useful, that’s useful from a standpoint of understanding what we might want to display, where, how it’s going to come together. And it might not necessarily be very fancy or sophisticated, but even with something that is as simple in structure at this as this, we actually might end up with some very, very different kinds of meaning. So let me give you an example. This is probably one of the most famous images from the surrealist movement of the early 20th century. It’s Rene Magritte. The title of this is actually the treachery of images, which gives you some sense as to his meaning. Susine Basin, Pip. It’s a picture of a pipe with a title on it. The copy that says, This is not a pipe. So image text together, actually a fairly profound statement or question, even for the audience, what does he mean? Well, it isn’t actually a literal or physical pipe. It’s an image of a pipe, and that actually raises all kinds of fascinating questions about, I would argue, the surrealism in everyday life, and it’s one of the reasons why this image has been one of my favorites for a very long time. But you can take exactly the same kind of structure, image and text and do some very, very different kinds of things with it that are arguably a hell of a lot more simple and entertaining even, but in a totally, completely different way. But let’s come back to this idea of the relationship between the structure, the descriptors, and the meaning. So we have what you saw before on the left, a bunch of different fairly basic elements. I mean, some of these things you can imagine put together do almost have some kind of meaning, like audio plus image probably means video, right? But you’re still making some pretty big guesses. So this is stuff on the left. We know something about these different things, but not an awful lot on the other end of the spectrum here, we also have something that has some inherent meaning, a web page. Okay, we know what that is, but we don’t really know what kind of web page. We don’t know what’s on it. We don’t know who it’s for. We don’t know what it’s trying to convey. So what happens is when we start putting these things together in more meaningful combinations that allow us to actually get to the peak of meaning here, which is really very much in the middle. So if you think about the combinations of things on the left, it’s maybe a hero image. We have a certain kind of text that is a table of contents or an introduction I mentioned video, so that’s not going to come as a huge surprise here. But we can also have a whole bunch of different kinds of text content that is addressing several very different things, like, what is the challenge, what is the solution, what is the outcome or the result. We can also have structure that is describing, actually, for example, what kind of web page we’re talking about. So let’s say it’s a resource library. We’re getting to higher levels of meaning, but this is all still pretty bitty as it were, right? These are little pieces or great big chunks, right? So a resource library that still is a pretty huge idea. And it’s not until we get to the context of connecting these things in some more significant, what I would call assets, that we actually begin to understand really what we’re talking about here. And we’re still talking at a fairly generic level, this is the power of structured content content modeling that’s done with some sort of relevance and meaning to the output that we’re trying to produce, the role that those outputs play. So case study, white paper, how to guide now we have a much clearer idea of what we’re talking about, and these things make sense as elements within a resource library. Well. Well, how do we think of this in a slightly different way, a slightly, let’s say, more visual way? All right, I don’t have the opportunity for audience interaction here, but I’m going to ask the question, what would you call this?

Chances are probably pretty good that you would call this a hero banner. And sure it is right, or, as Leo said to me earlier, an ad for progressive lenses. Yeah, it can be that too, but it’s actually all of these constituent parts that make it up as well. So it’s a guide on progressive lenses, what they are and how they work. I’m shortly going to have to read one of those, which is frustrating as hell, but there we are. It’s also the product categories, the things that describe the different types of products, women, men, both typically need progressive lenses, people that don’t identify as either of those kids. I’m kind of hoping not so much, but you never know. But we also have things like a promo up here, and again, this might or not, might not, be associated with the specific type of glasses or lenses that are being promoted here. We also have a product image to me. What’s really powerful about this is we get these layers of meaning because we can look at this visually, because we can see a representation of what all these constituent parts actually look like when they’re all together. And as important as that is for us to get the content modeling right, for us to be able to deploy the content in combination really effectively, the reality is that for anybody who’s trying to come up with a good creative approach to the promo, the banner, the audience that they’re trying to connect with this visual representation is actually really, really important to the creative process, because it’s not only the thing that allows us to QA something really effectively before it goes out in front of an audience. But actually, that visualization is a very important part of the creative process, the production process, if you will, in the first place. Okay, so let me dive into a little bit more about the structure, because I think this idea of visualization is something that we tend to get a little too hung up on as being only at the end point, I would argue that actually, even the way we think about structuring content is something we need to spend a lot more time doing visually. So by the way, everyone this is totally a closeted pitch for some of the cool things that I think Contentful is doing right now, but this is 100% stuff that I personally feel like is awesome, and one of them is this view of our visual modeler. So part of what you saw in that earlier slide with with the different types of structure is what’s coming from, what is modeled here visually, which is actually our maturity model. So this is where we’re trying to understand how organizations are working with content, structured content, composable content, headless, CMS, on a variety of different parameters with a whole lot of elements within each of those parameters to assess what their levels of capability and performance actually are. And what’s interesting about this approach to content modeling is really, in my mind, a couple of things. One is you can see the relationships between these different things in this model much, much more clearly and as you’re building a model or you’re refining a model, I think this is something that makes it far easier to really quickly assimilate. It also, frankly, makes it a lot easier for the different groups involved, whether it’s devs and designers or the content teams that are responsible for creating this stuff and working with it as well to understand and to collaborate effectively together in actually building out content models that serve everyone’s needs. The other thing that I think is pretty cool about this content model is that just by virtue of the way it’s created, you already know a tremendous amount about the specific content that’s within it, and I think that’s something that becomes incredibly powerful. And honestly, I don’t think there’s any better way of understanding that really quickly than by seeing these visual relationships. But content models are only one type of structure, right? There are lots of different kinds of structure, and where I’m going with this is to say, I think there’s a fundamental relationship between knowing and understanding and working effectively with the structure, and also knowing and understanding where that structure doesn’t. Necessarily mean need to be highly visible. It doesn’t need to be the primary parameter that we’re working with. Taxonomy is, for anybody who certainly has done things like navigation, for example, or information classification of just about any kind, is they’re really, really essential to getting this right. They seem superficially to be very easy in many cases, and yet the reality is often very different. Getting to a really good clean taxonomy is often a very challenging iterative process, and yet getting to that clean, really well defined taxonomy is one of the things that allows us to work really quickly and efficiently with all kinds of content and information. But you know, there are also things like design systems, by the way, evidently, no design system came anywhere near the making of this presentation. We also have in design systems a way of classifying visuals and ideas. And I think this idea of Structured Design is something that is becoming more and more critical. It gets especially cool when you use things like design tokens, but that’s probably a different talk for a different day. But there’s even more kinds of structure out there than the kinds of stuff we’re typically used to working with when it comes to anything in digital content.

This is a developer audience. I don’t need to explain structure and grammar here. It’s very true in the language that goes into the content, as well as the coding that is used to put that content anywhere and use it effectively. But we also have things like rhetorical structure, how you form an argument, how you engage in a debate. These are kinds of things that I would argue we probably don’t spend enough time thinking about when we’re actually designing and developing content. Some people do. Is one of those areas too, that I think is a helpful way of thinking about the kinds of structure that exist that we don’t always think about, and the kinds of structure that we might intuitively understand and know when it’s good or know when it’s not so good, but we aren’t necessarily consciously or actively using the structure and the way we put An argument together. For example, it gets even more interesting when you start thinking about the idea of storytelling structure. And I’m going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here around storytelling, because actually, I think this is one of those creative modes that is so so critical to really great and effective content, and not just content per se, and not even just things like advertising and marketing, but really the way we think about audience and customer engagement and all of the different aspects of the customer relationship that are ultimately part of how we build those long term customer fans and advocates how we build return customers and ultimately drive things like customer lifetime value that are the basis of really healthy businesses. These structures absolutely exist, and the people who understand how to work with them really effectively, can often do some really, really amazing things. So here I’m going to do a little pop quiz, because, you know, it’s not just physicists that I like to borrow from. I’m guessing many of you have probably heard of this guy, Marshall McLuhan. I’m sitting here in Toronto, so it feels about right that I should be quoting a Canadian philosopher and communication theorist. He is famous for this very simple and yet very complex statement. The medium is the message, something anybody working in digital content of any kind or digital products is probably at some point going to think pretty seriously about. But has anyone heard of another guy who’s talked about transmedia storytelling? This guy is Henry Jenkins. He’s kind of considered the grandfather, if you will, of this idea of transmedia storytelling. But what Henry Jenkins has really popularized is something that has happened for a long time in the entertainment industry and is increasingly being used by brands and the way they think about not only developing creative and the kinds of advertising that really entertains and engages audiences and doesn’t necessarily feel like they’re being sold or marketed to. But it’s actually the kind of thing that is informing how content is developed across a customer lifecycle, across all kinds of digital channels. So in the words of Henry Jenkins, transmedia storytelling is a process where integral elements of a fiction or we can think of a. Say, a brand story world get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. What’s really interesting to me about this, and if you read any of his stuff, and he’s got a great blog, he’s got several books as well, what he’s talking about is that there is such a kind of collapsing of popular culture, media and entertainment, in a way that all of these things are really getting more and more closely tied together and increasingly difficult to separate. So in essence, if you want to communicate effectively, especially if what the purpose of your communication is driving toward is engaging audiences and selling to them. You really have to entertain. So I find it interesting to think about some of the big entertainment franchises that have done an incredibly good job of this. And my guess is you’ll probably recognize this one. Yes, that’s right, everybody. It is, of course, Star Wars. So whether you’re talking about the three original films, the prequels, the television series, we also have video games. We’ve got cartoon series. There is, of course, always the actual physical places you can go to that are part of the world of Star Wars as well. I’m old enough to remember when that was at Universal Studios, and now, of course, it’s at Disney. But this has been probably one of the most successful franchises at doing this across all of these different kinds of media formats and platforms, and over time of just about anything. By the way, this whole approach is is much, much older than Star Wars. Arguably, the Bible was the originator of some of this stuff, but Star Wars as a franchise has done it incredibly well. Side note, for anyone who is interested in a little bit of trivia here, there is a guy named Leland. She whose job it is to manage the story world of Star Wars. Because, of course, every new element of the franchise that emerges is telling some slightly different aspect of the story, or the story of different characters, or different characters at different points in time. All of these things are drawing from the story world, but they’re also equally contributing to it. Now that has, for the most part, been extremely successful, but not always, because there have been a few things that really have been a little more missed than hit, rogue, one Star Wars crossover. Still a little bit wondering why anybody thought that was going to be an awesome idea, and I’m sure there are some people who are very, very happy about it, but for the most part, it was kind of a flop. It brought people into Nissan dealerships, but did not force them or encourage them to open their wallets enough to buy many of these cars also like mascara. I don’t know, I’m not seeing it, but the point here, to me is to say this is yet another type of structure that begins to get at some very, very interesting and sophisticated stuff. So on the left, what you see is a model for what is effectively kind of a knowledge graph around a story world. And this is something that I find really interesting as we talk about whether it’s a content graph in kind of a graph, database graph, QL, kind of context, or a knowledge graph, as in, really trying to describe the elements of content. And going beyond a content model really something that’s more of an ontological model about what we have and how these pieces interrelate, this gives us a different kind of context for thinking about the kinds of things that aren’t necessarily content assets or elements in and of themselves, but the kinds of things that actually form a foundational part of the creative process that we’re those, those reference books, those the story world, if you will, that we’re drawing from in order to actually build and create interesting, exciting new content, regardless of which types of audience segments or which types of platforms or channels we’re building it for. And on this other side, what you see is something that is actually a really complex kind of model for the relationship between the things that are in the story world, the expressions of that story world, and the different things that we’re creating, the different channels that they’re going into. And this added element that is super, super interesting, especially when it comes to doing any kind of audience engagement with anything digital, whether you’re an entertainment franchise or a brand or an education institution or just about anything else, and that is the interaction layer. Because part of what makes this stuff so effective. Is that there’s a really significant part that’s all about participation. And it’s that relationship between the storyteller, if you will, the medium of the storytelling, and the people that are the listeners, the participants at the same time in that story. If you want to think of something relatively simple. You can think about somebody like Ted lasso and the account that he had on Twitter come X, obviously a fictional character, and yet, there were plenty of people that were really, really eager to interact with Ted lasso on social media. So you begin to see where those interactions actually form as much a part of the story as whatever was in the television series that’s not on anything like the scale that Star Wars is. So I want to leave you with a few ideas here.

I hope I’ve made you think a little bit differently about not only the structure of content, and the many types of structure that apply not just to content, but the things we’re really trying to communicate and convey with content. I also want to raise a few questions about what this looks like in terms of the ways that we work more effectively as organizations, because I know, and goes back to Sean’s introduction about my role, being one of translator, really, between more technical dev teams and often the marketers or the content producers who are responsible for coming up with the stuff. We really need to find a better way of bridging these different types of roles and the ways that they can work together. And I think part of that is understanding, number one, what it is we’re trying to do. And for me, it really ultimately comes down to this idea of storytelling. And the reason I say that is because it’s not just the narrative. Stories are all about meaning. They’re about conveying meaning. The story worlds, whether they’re entertainment franchises or brand, story worlds, are really kind of where you start and build from, and that’s also the thing that we’re building back toward, because that’s, in a sense, the repository. It’s the reference source that helps to keep whatever we do over time evolving certainly, but still keeping to those core values and the core elements of the story that made it effective and compelling in the first place, or the brand compelling in the first place. The interesting thing about that is that they can start anywhere. It’s not about a specific medium. It’s not that you started with the movie or you started with the book. You can start with anything. And I think again, we look to the entertainment world and see that that is eminently true. I mean, the crossovers between film and video games are a great case in point, television. But finally, the other thing here is connected to this originating ideas, the core of what a great creative concept comes from. And again, I don’t just mean advertising campaigns. They usually come in some sort of context or form. So while I think anybody who has extensive experience in content modeling will bristle a little bit at the idea of too much reliance on visual builders, because these things often are at odds with each other. I think the fundamental reality we have to acknowledge is, for anybody who’s trying to come up with this stuff, there needs to be some visual component. There needs to be some visual relationship between what they’re producing and where it’s going, because that is part of the creative spark that actually gets us from zero to one. So let me leave some questions for you, and a little bit of an idea after that, I feel like, especially for this audience, one of the biggest questions that we all have a collective responsibility to tackle is how we can do more to benefit from this duality of content, yes, the functional ability to, much like code, deploy content wherever we want to, but also, how can we do that in a way that really helps to maximize that meaning, not only for the audiences that we’re delivering it to, but for the people that are all collaborating together to create it in the first place? I also wonder, you know what? What needs to happen for that meaning to come through, even for the people who don’t necessarily need or want to understand any part of that underlying structure and take your pick. You know, is it the code base? Is it the content model? Is it the detail of the design system? These things all have meaning for the relevant audiences who are really deeply expert in them. But. But they don’t, necessarily for all of the people that need to do the work that brings a lot of this together. So I’ll leave you with a an idea, a thing that we’ve been that we released last year, that we’re still continuing to work on, this idea that we actually have before us, an opportunity to create some more and more interesting and useful ways of actually helping to accelerate the creation process. And I’m not just talking about using generative AI here, although, certainly that’s part of that too. But studio is what we’ve called this. It’s the idea of bringing structured content and structured design together in a way that allows people to build without needing to rely on developers to code what they’ve built. It’s only the first step. And I think what’s fascinating is to think about whether this type of interface even is is overly complex for people that are just trying to get an idea out into the world to mock something up, to build something, to get it far enough along that they can actually go to their other expert colleagues and help them really refine and turn that into something that is awesome. So that is it for me. Thank you for paying attention to my jumble of ideas. Definitely not a physicist probably have far less organized thinking, but hopefully brought something that sparks a little bit of your imagination and creative thinking as well.

Sean C Davis 31:32 Thank you so much, Nicole, that that was amazing. And these there was some chatter going on while you were talking, and it was about how we can, we could talk about content structures and what we should be doing as developers to make that better. I’ve, I’ve gone deep on this over the last 12 years or so, and and I really like the perspective that you brought to this particular conversation. For folks, of you out there in the audience, we’re having some issues with the Q and A feature on Crowdcast, so if you have questions, just drop them directly in the chat, and I’ll keep an eye on that here. But I wanted to start really with kind of that idea you had near the end and just continue that conversation. So we really the picture I felt like you’re painting, is that what really matters is the story. Yes, the website, it has to work. It has to work. Has to be functional. We’ve we’ve talked on that earlier today, like it’s got to be accessible so everyone can get to it. But at the end of the day, whatever the thing is that the website wants you to do has to be compelling enough to make you want to do that thing. And the creative folks that are coming up with those concepts, they need this, I mean, probably different depending on the context, but that blank canvas and that ability that space, to come up with those ideas from your perspective, what can developers and and maybe even designers, folks thinking about design systems? What can we do to make that process easier, to make that story even more powerful, or just to give those folks the space or tools that they need to be successful?

Nicole France 33:22 It’s a huge question. I think it’s absolutely the right one, though. And I think it is a question of understanding your audience, and in this case, understanding your audience as perhaps a set of colleagues who are trying to do a complimentary job. I mean, we always talk about this from the context of understanding your audience, is it customers, or, you know, your internal stakeholders, or whoever it might be, I think it’s trying to think through the details of who is doing what here. And in some cases, you’re lucky enough to have a really, really sophisticated audience that you’re working for. I mean, you know, people who are really thinking deeply in terms of information architecture want a degree of detail that they absolutely need in order to do their jobs. Well, the people that are just trying to push out a whole set of changes probably don’t. And I think what it comes down to, for me is thinking about how we can abstract away unnecessary complexity, without getting rid of the necessary complexity. And I think part of that is recognizing that we don’t all have the same needs, and to some degree, that’s a function of different teams and different roles that have, you know, different types of capabilities and priorities. Obviously, some of that is individual, too. So, you know, one of the things that we were playing around with internally in a hackathon recently is, you know, what if the interface is, is chat, GPT, what if it’s conversational and it’s generative, AI, and we’re using that. Connected to our own design system and our own content model to actually try to produce mock ups of stuff, you know, like, what if studio is still too complicated, and what we actually need is something that doesn’t even make you understand the elements of the and you’re not getting into the detail of the design system, but you’re still getting all the components of the design system right. And for some people, that might just be way too much, or it might be that they need to know that in a certain context, but they don’t need to know that at a given moment in time or a given point in the process,

Sean C Davis 35:36 we’ve been having very similar conversations at Netlify, like, how can you start from this area where there’s no there’s no predetermined structure, any idea is valid. And then at some point, whether it’s AI or not AI, we have to transform that very loose idea into something that can fit within the structure of the code and the content, or we have to decide that we’re going to adjust that, which often means adding complexity. And at what, yeah, at what point in the process, do you see that shift happening? I mean, do you maybe I can ask this more specifically. What I’ve seen is that, if I go back to my agency days, that when we’re rebuilding a website, it feels like everything’s a blank slate, that we’re like, great. We’re throwing out the old website. We can start fresh on content models, we can start fresh on messaging, on visuals, on all of these things, and then we can and then we hand a website over to a client, and we might continue to work on that, but then it feels like we transition to having a little bit less those folks have less opportunity for creativity, because there’s increased cost in well, if we’re going To have to totally change the structure of a hero section now, you know, it’s X number of dollars to do that, versus getting it into the current system. So how do you think about maybe, maybe, what I’m trying to ask is, how do you maintain that that creativity over or the space for that creativity over time?

Nicole France 37:19 Oh, I would probably be much better off if I knew the answer to that question. Sean, it’s a tough one, and I think part of the answer is cultural, but I also think a lot of it can be positively or negatively reinforced by the tools and environments that we’re working in. You know, for one thing, like, why does it have to be so expensive, you know? And I say this, like, these are the kinds of conversations that we have internally a lot. How can we how can we change that so it’s not that hard, so it’s not that costly, it’s not that kind of time consuming. But having said that, I think there’s a natural principle that that really significant innovation and change tends to come in patterns or waves, right? So back to my light analogy. There are times where I think the focus is really on on incremental change, and there are other times where there’s the need for some far more fundamental or holistic change. You can’t do holistic change all the time. It’s exhausting. The cognitive load is way too high. And even if you had teens internally that could do it. The fact of the matter is, you’re probably going to exhaust your your audience as well, you know. So there, there needs to be a balance, I think. And it’s hard to know, but, but I think the key of your question is, how do you maintain that creative environment? And I feel like one of the big issues is, you know, how are we? How are we enabling people to be more creative in their day to day work and do less of the drudgery on one hand and on the other, how do we? How do we reinforce this kind of spirit of creativity and a willingness to run with a good idea when it occurs. And I, I think, in practical terms, one of the big answers is lowering the threshold on what it takes to make a change. And I probably could go on, but I’ll leave it at that love, that,

Sean C Davis 39:20 Love that! Yeah, I want to sneak one more question in here. We got one from Brian in the audience. Brian says I often find that it’s not done right, or that if it’s not done right, the taxonomy can be more constraining in the long term, forcing us to fit things into the grouping we thought we wanted, but not the ones we really need. What process do you use, defining the right content taxonomy.

Nicole France 39:44 This is where I get to say, I’m the Chief Evangelist. And that’s other people’s jobs. No, it’s a it’s, it’s a great one. And I think this is, this is something, again, we we talk a lot about internally and with a bunch of our customer. And partners too. And that is that back to back to cognitive load, for lack of a better description, I think there, there is a natural and necessary rate of change. So between taxonomies and content models, I would kind of classify them the same way. These are really the things that, to me, form one of the most crucial interfaces between the people and the machines and how we’re using this stuff. The machines can handle a much, much higher rate of change. So we can talk about things like dynamic taxonomies that are actually produced by generative AI based on a particular need or request that might be transitory, right? And I think, I think we will begin to see stuff like that happen, but the more consistent taxonomies are the things that are actually crucial for the people you know, whether that’s informing navigation on a website or that’s informing the way we classify our content and information, how we think of the gaps that we need to fill, et cetera, et cetera. And I think you’re never done. I mean, this is an ongoing effort, right? So there always needs to be some revision, some level of change happening to a taxonomy, likewise, to a content model, but there’s but there’s an appropriate rate of change. And again, it’s probably not constant. There are probably events that trigger or circumstances that trigger, a need to make an adjustment or change, particularly a significant one. But I think that’s the answer I would give. It’s recognizing that this is work that is a constant evolution. Thank You.

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