Last week’s digest was written from Thailand, this week is from the UK and next week will be from Canada. All this traveling means that we’re a little short on time, but I’ll try to balance out the terse descriptions with some jolly good British expressions to give you a flavour (with a ‘u’) of our local environs.

Content Strategy

• Cor blimey guv’nor, if there wasn’t a load of old bollocks this week. There seem to be more content strategy posts than ever, but most are fluff, mind-numbingly basic or introspective meta-discussions on content strategy.
• LukeW provides the best value this week, with notes from Kristina Halvorson’s presentation at An Event Apart. There’s also a post-presentation interview with Kristina elsewhere.
• Content Strategy on a Shoestring Budget is a set of slides that is really more of a simple introduction to content strategy, with a strange furniture metaphor. The quoted 4 hours for a 300 page website inventory sounds a little optimistic to us, but they get major kudos for putting forward some real numbers. If there’s one thing content strategy needs now, it’s more specifics and fewer What Is Content Strategy posts (and, perhaps, weekly digests).

User Experience

• Would you Adam and Eve it? LukeW delivers for a second time this week with notes from the Crafting the User Experience presentation at An Event Apart.
• UX jumps the shark and appears as the main focus of a BBC news story, told from inside Google.
• Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience speaks a lot of sense, but it’s a shame that the self-serving author doesn’t do more to discuss low-cost, lean persona development; his take on ‘low cost’ is “this can be done over the course of three to six months rather inexpensively using a consultant for about $35,000“. We’ve put agile persona development on the list for a future Contentini post.

Cheerio!