Faceted Classification

In a faceted classification system, you tag your content with a specific set of attributes. You then provide different arrangements and sorting of the content based on those attributes.

For example, if you have an online paint store, the set of attributes for your faceted classification system might include brand, color, texture, shine, thickness, and cost. You can then allow users to navigate the paint products by each of these attributes.

Sarah Maddox notes that in Matthew Ellison’s Turning Search into Find presentation at the AODC 10 conference, he gave an example of faceted classification with the shoe store sportsshoes.com.

Faceted classification system

Many times faceted classification systems allow you to combine and narrow down the attributes to get closer and closer to your information. Sarah notes that

Matthew introduced the concept of the “scent of information”: If people can see that they’re getting nearer to the information that they’re want, they’re quite happy to keep combining facets to narrow down their search.

Faceted classification and faceted search systems are actually quite common on the web. When you search for something on Google, the left pane provides a list of facets that you can use to limit the search results to a specific category of information.

Google's faceted search

In the above example, I searched for “undercover agents.” Using the facets, I can limit the results to show images, videos, news, discussions, shopping sites, maps, books, or other formats that contain the words “undercover agents.”  This is the way Google has categorized the different types of information it indexes.

Amazon also provides a faceted search. When you search for a product, such as Beauty and the Beast, you see a list of facets in the sidebar to narrow the results.

Faceted browsing on Amazon

Grooveshark also provides a faceted search based on the term you search for.

Grooveshark's faceted search

Navigation Features

The most popular sites on the web may not all be set up with faceted classification and faceted search, but they do offer other types of navigational features. These other navigational features could informally be called facets, but according to Peter Morville, author of Search Patterns and Ambient Findability, these organization systems are more like features rather than facets. But they still organize and arrange the content into structures that aren’t based on hierarchical topic containers. Here are a few examples.

Hulu allows users to choose among the following:

• Gallery content
• Channels
• Most Popular
• Recently Added
• Collections
• Trailers
• Spotlights
• TV
• Movies
• Search

Wikipedia provides users with these navigational features:

• Featured content
• Current events
• Random article
• Today’s Featured Article
• In the News
• On this day
• Today’s featured picture
• Categories
• Index

The New York Times provides these features for navigating the content:

• Today’s Paper
• Video
• Most Popular
• Times Topics (like an index)
• Categories
• Most E-mailed
• Most Blogged
• Most Viewed
• Most Searched
• What We’re Reading
• Reader’s Recommendations
• Most Recent

Coming back to Amazon, when you view a product on Amazon, you get a ton of interesting navigational features for finding more content:

• Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links
• What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
• Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
• Tags Customers Associate with This Product
• Customer Reviews
• Customer Discussions
• Look for Similar Items by Category
• Your Recent History

You can see the wide variety of faceted classification, faceted search, and other navigation features on the web. Why don’t we borrow more of these faceted navigation models to provide alternative organization systems for our help content? Why is it that, despite the abundance of these alternative navigation systems, most technical writers still stick with a traditional topic-based, hierarchical folders? In contrast to many sites on the web, the organizational structure of most online help files hasn’t changed in 20 years.

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Although Gladwell’s Outliers has been criticized for drawing generalizations from a “flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories,” and his argument borders “social predestination,” according to the New York Times, Gladwell’s conclusions do provoke a lot of thought and self-reflection. If you look at the reasons why you’re a successful writer, you may find it was due more to circumstance, practice, and upbringing than any gift you were imbued with from birth.

For example, rather than this model of success:

Common misconception about how success happens

This is really what’s going on:

The real story of success

Practice

Gladwell says most experts accrue about 10,000 hours of practice before they develop their talent. For example, the Beatles spent two years in Germany playing long hours each day (8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a good chunk of the year) before they became famous. Bill Gates spent hours and hours programming (20 to 30 hours a week), skipping athletics and even sneaking out at night to get in computer time. Although Mozart was skilled at the piano, he didn’t start writing his own compositions until he reached 21 years of age (prior to that, he mostly played compositions that others wrote). If you add up all the hours of practice from those who possess talent, and compare them to those who lack talent, the numbers explain a lot.

Timing

Gladwell relates several examples of people who were successful because they had the right skills at the right time. For example, William Joy (who wrote Unix) learned programming before it became popular. Just about the time he accrued 10,000 hours of programming practice, personal computing arrived, making the scene perfect for someone with his skillset to exploit the market.

As another example, in the 1940s and 50s, lawyers skilled in dealing with hostile takeovers and litigation suddenly became highly sought after, whereas years earlier the practice was considered shady. Those lawyers who accrued the practice before the skills were valued after became wildly successful.

Culture

To illustrate the importance of culture in success, Gladwell relates a story of a Colombian pilot who most likely crashed a plane because, even with diminishing fuel, he wasn’t assertive enough to stand up to the intimidating control tower agents and demand to land. Cultures that encourage passive submission to hierarchy, or who phrase their questions in subtle, vague euphemisms, may find themselves at a disadvantage in some situations, such as the airplane cockpit.

Other times, your culture works for you. For example, Gladwell explains that Asians who spent centuries working in rice paddies, a type of farming that requires meticulous care all year long, passed on this work ethic to their posterity. Many of the inheritors of the rice-paddy culture apply the same diligence in their schoolwork. This diligence, of course, brings more success.

Upbringing

The way you were raised, namely with wealthy or less fortunate parents, also plays a role. Gladwell explains that when wealthy parents drive their children to the doctor, they tell their children things like, “Johnny, now if you have any questions, be sure to ask the doctor. This is your opportunity to talk to him about any health problems you’re having….” And so on.

In contrast, the children of poor parents may feel less entitled to this same questioning. Instead, they accept what the doctor tells them straight out, without surfacing concerns or criticisms. Gladwell then uses Chris Langan, a genius with a 195 IQ who wasn’t able to succeed in college, as an example. Langan failed to get a PhD (his goal) not because he lacked intelligence, but because he had a mentality to passively accept the conditions and limitations others imposed on him. Langan ended up dropping out of college because he couldn’t convince his teachers to accommodate a simple change in his schedule (a change he needed because his truck broke and he could no longer get to campus early in the morning).

My Story

I found it impossible to read Outliers: The Story of Success without looking more closely at my own story of “success.” Obviously I’m not a success like the people mentioned in his book, but I am a professional technical writer with a well-known blog and podcast. How did I manage that?

First, I wrote extensively in junior high, high school, and college. My father, a lover of literature, frequently put books in my hand, established a model of reading, and shared his passion for literature and ideas. My mother made every effort to open opportunities for me, sometimes working two jobs to help pay for my undergraduate education.

After college, I continued writing daily through a three-year MFA program at Columbia. Rather than study fiction or poetry, I studied literary nonfiction, particularly the personal essay. It was my good fortune that I graduated with the degree I did at the time I did. When I graduated in 2002, the blogosphere erupted. It was the perfect time for someone with skills in short personal essays to flourish.

My foray into podcasting follows a similar pattern. Although I don’t have an audio engineering background, much of my success in podcasting comes from my interviewing skills, from my ability to find people and get them to open up. From 1994 to 1996, I spent two years as an LDS missionary in Venezuela, interacting with strangers ten hours a day. Each morning we ventured out into unknown barrios, knocking on doors, talking with people in the streets, talking with people in their homes, befriending members and anyone we came in contact with. It was a social immersion in another culture, but it was also training ground for podcasting, because although I’m generally shy and will keep to myself, I feel completely comfortable approaching strangers and interviewing them in a conversational, natural style. I developed a skill that became extremely useful at the right time.

My facility with WordPress also fits into the equation. I’m comfortable with WordPress and can create websites fairly easily, but it wasn’t always this way. As a composition instructor at Columbia, I created a website for my students because I saw the value of student-to-student interaction. I then created an elaborate website teaching at the American University in Cairo. I spent months painstakingly figuring out how to do technical things. I also had a sister in graphic design and a brother-in-law in interaction design that I could occasionally rely upon for information.

More valuable than specific technical knowledge, though, I learned how to solve technical problems. I learned patience to search forums, persistence to query search engines, and a trial-and-error mentality that encouraged experimentation as a solution. This ability to continue plugging away at a problem, especially when the answer isn’t easy, is a skill incredibly useful for IT (and it’s what enables people to excel at math, according to a study Gladwell cites). When I stumbled upon WordPress, I already had hundreds of hours working with websites, and I brought that skillset to the existing scene and combined it with my writing and interviewing skills.

Besides timing and practice, I also attribute some of my success to lucky opportunities. When I applied for my first job in technical writing, the writing portfolio I submitted included an article about protein, which I’d written as a copywriter for a health company (a job I got through a connection from my techie sister and brother-in law). The hiring manager had a PhD in biology and could see that what I wrote about protein was, in fact, clear and accurate. Not only that, she knew it was a difficult concept to write about. It was precisely because of this article on protein that I was hired, even though I had no experience in technical writing. It was a lucky connection that opened up an opportunity for me.

I’ve also been fortunate to never have technical writing jobs that required more than 40-hour work weeks. I frequently hear about people routinely working 60-hour weeks, which would preclude any spare time for blogging and podcasting. Instead, even with three kids, a wife, and other commitments (such as being a scout leader), I manage to have most evenings and weekends free.

And speaking of that wife, she turns out to be another huge factor in my writing, since she not only writes in an engaging way that motivates and inspires me but also helps create a safe writing environment in our home. When I turn on my computer, she doesn’t pull me away to mop the floor (not usually, anyway). Instead, she joins me and we write together on the couch, sharing thoughts and experiences with each other. When I married her, I never anticipated that our lives would be this way, but it did and has made a significant difference in finding time to write.

Not all of my background, however, works positively toward success. If there’s one thing I’m conflicted about, it’s my lack of a sense of entitlement. For example, I’ve always felt hesitant about returning items to stores, about raising my hand to offer criticisms or complaints in large groups. I sometimes devalue my contributions at work. Frequently I’m content to accept my surrounding conditions and the status quo because either I don’t think I can change it, it requires too much effort, or I don’t care.

After reading Outliers, I find myself acting more assertively. I catch myself when I’m being passive, or when I don’t feel qualified or entitled to something.

I realize that a sense of entitlement is usually looked at negatively (certainly it can lead to arrogance and pride), but not having any sense of entitlement can be stifling. People who don’t feel entitled to anything lack confidence and self-esteem. They accept their conditions. They do what their superiors tell them. They lack ambition and don’t challenge the status quo. They second-guess their worth, attributing any modicum of competence to other people and circumstantial factors. It’s a self-defeating, trapping mentality that limits your ability to succeed because you don’t feel entitled to success.

My point is not to give a biography of my life, but rather to illustrate Gladwell’s point: if you start looking at the underpinnings behind your success, you can start connecting the dots to see how you arrived where you did. It usually isn’t that you have a knack for a certain profession, but that you acquired the necessary skills through practice, upbringing, environment, culture, and lucky opportunities.

Outliers reminds me of a scene from the movie Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon, playing a poor teen from the South side of Boston confronts a rich MIT student. Damon tells him, You were born on third base and you think you hit a triple. In other words, we often over-attribute our writing successes to our natural talents. But really, those talents and abilities came about through a series of explainable, fortunate circumstances that we should recognize and be grateful for.

Resources

Buy Outliers: The Story of Success from Amazon

See Malcolm Gladwell’s blog

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I find it touching that someone would think of me while reading the article. Actually, I read a sneak peak of the article in yesterday’s Blog Herald. It made me think hard about how much I’ve been posting lately.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

…

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said.

The article exposes the negative physical effects of blogging not often mentioned — sleep disorders, weight loss/gain, nervous breakdown, and heart disease. In the addictive drive to write more and more posts, the blogger often embraces an unhealthy physical lifestyle.

My Response

If I didn’t have blogging and podcasting as my hobbies, I would probably lead a more active lifestyle, would go to sleep earlier, and might be more productive in all my other endeavors.

Anytime that any hobby, be it blogging or basketball, begins to hinder your health, stop posting/playing so much. Unless you’re making a living from it, no hobby should detract from your mental/social/physical health.

On the other hand, blogging and podcasting energizes me and makes me enthusiastic about life and my career. Since my wife also blogs, our blogs have given us a lot to talk about.

Blogging gives me a sounding board and a space to publish my thoughts. The rewards of blogging are numerous — interacting with others, engaging in exchanges about the latest trends, thinking analytically about the day’s events. It makes life a lot more engaging.

Most of all, blogging gives me a space to write and allows me to express the creative side of me that is often left dormant during the day with technical writing.

A Solution?

How can one put aside the negative effects of blogging? I’m not a model example of what I’ll recommend, but here are 5 tips I’m trying to implement:

1. Do the most important things first. Whatever your priorities are, make sure you do them before you begin blogging. This is a principle, I think, common to Getting Things Done and Covey’s 7 Habits. If you have a goal to track your budget, get exercise, clean your house, read scriptures, play with your kids, or finish a project, make sure you do that before you start typing that post. You may find that, after finishing what’s important, you lose the energy to write the post. It works the other way too: if you expend energy to write a post at the neglect of what’s more important, you lose energy to do what’s important. Don’t let your priorities get out of whack.
2. Always give priority to sleep rather than your blog. If it’s past your regular bedtime, click Save and return to the post later. It’s always good to give yourself 24 hours of space between writing a post and publishing it anyway. I guarantee that a post written and published in haste late at night often turns into a regret the next morning.
3. Make your posts shorter. More and more I’m convinced that long posts aren’t read. I find myself timing out on most blogs after 1.5 minutes, which matches my own readers’ habits as well. If you have a long post, break it up into several posts. Or start alternating long posts with short ones. This method still keeps you in the rhythm of writing without compromising your physical health.
4. Listen to podcasts while you exercise. If you’re so addicted to blogging and podcasting that you can’t lift yourself from the computer chair to get some exercise, start listening to podcasts while you exercise. You’ll still feel like you’re immersed in Web 2.0, and while listening you’ll also be generating ideas for new blog posts.
5. Make other activities more blog-like. Let’s say you have a goal to read the scriptures each day, or to track your eating habits each day. You can give each of these activities a blog-like spin. For scriptures, I have a Ning group I created that automatically posts a chapter a day. I add my comments below the chapter/post, and friends I’ve invited sometimes participate. With weight loss, you could use SparkPeople, which includes online calorie counters, teams, daily posts, and other interactive features, to make it feel like you’re engaged in blog-like activity.

Do you have any tips to avoid the physical dark side of blogging?

…Much of the really appealing blog content is being generated by former “non-leaders” — those who have valid, insightful opinions, and who have become recognized in our profession through their blogs. (see comment | see Alan’s blog)

In other words, people who don’t hold high-up leadership positions are often the ones with more interesting blogs.

At first this seems a contradiction: one would think people in high-up positions would have more interesting content to share. High profile leaders are often key decision-makers, flying across the country for important meetings, working all day on proposals, acquisitions, organizational strategies, and new initiatives. Shouldn’t they be overflowing with interesting content, while the rest of us wait for them to speak?

Actually, although leaders may be privy to interesting information, many are crippled from sharing it in an edgy way because of their role. They face higher public scrutiny, may have little desire to write, and have to concern themselves with the political effects of their posts.

When corporate leaders blog, their words are scrutinized, fact-checked, quoted, and read by hundreds of people — including employees, shareholders, board members, organization members, media, the competition, and critics. The wrong tone, a biting remark, or an unfounded assertion can create a host of problems.

Consequently, many leader blogs water down their content to make it agreeable. The sanitized text lacks the edge that would make the blog successful. Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, explains:

“Many corporate blogs are pretty boring. They’re just not going to be as edgy, generally, as a personal blog, or as the Technorati top 100 blogs, many of which are written by professional writers … .” (see “Corporate Blogging” from The Engaging Brand, an interview with Debbie Weil — podcast hosted by Anna Farmery)

I associate “edgy” with a variety of meanings — sharp, witty, critical, authentic, unrepressed, suspenseful, advantageous, clever, front-line, radical. John August, a prominent screenwriter who has worked on films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish, defines edgy as

A term used to describe a story or writing style that is unusually unsettling, exciting, or dark. Everyone claims to want edgy material, but then they end up making generic comedies. (my bold)

An edgy blog post, then, is one that is both unsettling and exciting. It may present alternate viewpoints, make you rethink your assumptions, and even hint at a darker world view.

Because the consequences of writing unsettling, exciting, or dark views may surround the leader in controversy, leaders gravitate towards safer, more boring content.

For example, in the November 2007 STC News and Notes, president Linda Ostreich makes the following opening statement:

My first six months as president have been nothing like I had envisioned. I have learned a lot about myself, my colleagues, and the Society, and although the reality has not been like the vision, it’s been satisfying and productive.

An eye-catching intro, but can she elaborate on what she means by “nothing like I had envisioned”? Provide detail for unrealized expectations? Explain the sudden resignation of a key officer? Express her frustration for certain proposals? Convey her possibly radical opinions on other matters?

Not really. At least not without extreme tact and euphemism.

I enjoy the messages in Linda’s News and Notes, but people would be outraged if the STC president or any other leader wrote a post like this. (Not that I would consider such a diatribe an example of “edgy,” but it’s outside the bounds of any leader’s decorum.)

In another scenario, can you imagine the U.S. President, George Bush, writing a blog post that contains sloppy sentences, poor grammar, extreme right-wing positions, and thoughts that suggest he’s spent time watching the Simpsons? No, the U.S. President’s blog (if there ever is a real one), would be carefully sanitized, toned down, washed free of anything exciting, unsettling, or dark.

So much more weight rides on the blogs of leaders. Newspaper reporters can use their words as fodder. John August finds himself quoted for a “vulgar” post in the New York Times. The NY Times reporter writes,

Instead of confronting the studio executive, Mr. August returned home and wrote a vulgar blog entry about what he would have liked to say. One part of it that is printable here said: “Everyone knows the C.E.O.’s are talking out of two sides of their mouths.” (see New York Times article)

How would you like to be reading the morning newspaper and discover that your quick post the other night was quoted out of context in a major newspaper, and they called you vulgar? Everything you write can and will be used against you in the media and blogosphere.

Additionally, if you change your ideas on an issue, you’ll have to carefully crawl through old posts to update your position. Or if you state a position on an issue, readers may corner you into a more extreme position than you really hold. Darren Barefoot, a popular blogger, explains:

This is one of my frustrations with this blogging medium. If I write criticizing one aspect of a particular thing, you tend to get pigeon-holed as unilaterally opposed to the entire thing.

Beyond the problem of public scrutiny and boring content, many corporate leaders also lack writing skills in the first place. They don’t have “blogging DNA,” Weil says. (Granted, there are some exceptions, such as Jonathan Schwartzberg’s blog and Richard Edelman’s blog.) But blogging is ultimately writing, and it takes an articulate, creative person to craft interesting posts on a regular basis.

In contrast, leaders are often outgoing organizational gurus, people who know how to get things done, manage departments, create and follow through with strategies and initiatives. They’re company leaders, not writers. To think they will suddenly take to the keyboard and spend a good chunk of their time writing is nonsense, especially if writing is not their strength.

In fact, over dinner tonight my wife pointed out that many leaders may be paralyzed with fear of public humiliation about their lack of writing skills. A leader may be a brilliant speaker and a motivational coach, but when he or she tries to communicate the same ideas in writing, the words fall apart, they lack coherency and sound cliche. Leaders are highly successful people. Will they really jump head first into a text-heavy medium where they won’t excel?

While leaders might feel condemned to be boring by the weight of their role, non-leaders have free reign of expression. Non-leaders can be as edgy as they want, and their edginess gives them an advantage among readers. They’re perceived as being more true, authentic, real — all the qualities blogs require to be worthwhile.

Many people praise blogging for finally leveling the playing field: everyone has a free voice, and you don’t have to be a leader or big name to get your ideas published. But the playing field has moved beyond level — corporate leaders actually have the disadvantage. This is the era of the non-leader blog.

The only problem is that one can only stay a non-leader for short time. As the non-leader’s popularity grows, he or she may transform into the very position that would cripple his or her voice.

—-

credits: photo from the Onion