For the past several weeks, I've been hard at work on The Content Technologist's web experience. After all, if I'm going to be a web evangelist, I should probably have an up-to-date, cohesive website experience.
So here we go! A full redesign will likely arrive early in '25, but in the meantime check out:
- Brand new homepage! I realized how many subscribers we likely lost with the old low-friction, no-ask subscription system. If you're logged in, you won't see the prompt to subscribe, but new visitors will see a subscription prompt right smack dab in the middle of the homepage. Let's hope it improves the subscription conversion rate as intended!
- Updated bio, services, and approach pages.
- New courses subdomain
- A few new contact forms scattered throughout
I put most everything on pause while working on this update—course development, Let's Build a Website (ironic, I know), pretty much any non-LinkedIn marketing. And, as with all web development, reconfiguring my homepage took way longer than I thought and still has a few knots to work through (especially mobile width, which will be the death of me).
But I'm proud that it's done. And now: back to course development. I am very excited about Your Content Is Your Marketing. Even though I've yet to release the preview video, I promise: It's good! It's different! You will learn something!
A very short Links below... and next week I'm super stoked to pull apart the last stage of the Content Technologist approach: measurement.
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Content tech links of the week
- Internet pioneer Anil Dash writes about how "the purpose of a system is what it does"—i.e., the results and outcomes of a system outweigh the intent. Yes, yes, and yes.
- Wanna get real geeky and mathy about the semantic equations embedded in LLMs? Timothy B. Lee outlines new research about how LLMs work in Understanding AI. Even if you don't get past the paid jump cut, the sentence "Compute Paris minus France plus Japan and you get a vector for Tokyo." might help you understand the concepts of vectors and entities a little bit more.
- Max Read asks, "Does Google Know How Google Works?" and I couldn't help myself from jumping into the comments within 30 minutes of posting.
- Explore beeper emoji and other nuggets from the early history of emoticons, from Ginger Beardman.
- The team at Userlist outlines its process for creating better email campaigns, called Atomic Emails.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.
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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI
Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.
Remember Ozy, one of the big digital startups from the 2010s that turned out too good to be true? They're on trial, and NiemanLabs is reporting on the dishy media trial goss. It's fun ... and disappointing.