About Engineering Content
Engineering Content is about bringing a measure of discipline to how we use the word “content” and to how we then leverage that concept to design, run, and evolve ecosystems within which content engenders the shared understanding upon which human knowledge stands. It is both a very specific topic and one of general applicability. It is both theoretical and practical. And in the age of the smart machine, it is pressing.
This venue will be used to excavate and explore the idea of “engineering content” and to integrate it with other concepts relevant to how we manage our evolving organizations, our technologies, and ourselves.
The contents of this site will fall into two buckets - one public and free, and one that is private and paid. The content in the former bucket (public and free) will be more general, it will be shorter, and it will endeavour to be more broadly accessible. The content in the latter bucket (private and paid) will be more professional, more detailed, more contextualized, and dare I say more practical. The concept of two buckets reflects what I hope is a valid observation — that there are aspects of this discussion that have a broad applicability and there are others that will primarily be of interest to specialists. Creating two buckets ensures that the detailed nerdiness of the latter does not undermine the accessibility of the former.
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Why Consider a Paid Subscription?
A paid subscription is available for a few reasons, one touched upon above in the concept of two buckets. These reasons can also be read as benefits where my intentions line up with those of more specialized readers. These include:
Many of the concepts touched on in this site have a history behind them. Sometimes a long history. Insights into this history will be of interest to specialists who want to know more about, and indeed want to contribute to our understanding of, that history. The details around history, for example in how I have evolved my thinking about certain key concepts over the years (and decades), will be shared with paid subscribers.
Associated with the current state of key concepts will be models, frameworks, design patterns, and methodologies. In general, these will be useful for specialists. These assets are also something in which substantial investments have been made so their distribution merits a paid subscription relationship.
Active research priorities are something that will benefit from collaboration, and rightly or wrongly I believe that paid subscribers have attested to the seriousness of their interest in the topics and in this way the collaboration begins on a solid, shared ground.
Under the two bucket model, I expect that I will also be sharing a fair amount of video content and in this endeavour I further expect that the public and free channel will be the venue for shorter, introductory items whereas the private and paid channel will be for more substantive sessions.
A paid subscription is something to consider if any of these reasons resonate with you. If these reasons don’t resonate with you, it is probably a good thing to know beforehand. I might be inclined to invoke Dante and run a sign over my paid subscription offering that reads “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” I can imagine my more marketing-saavy friends intervening to discourage me from doing so. That might be one generative simulation that I should probably have attended to before setting words to the page.
Editorial Guidelines
In the preparation and sharing of content through this channel, I will be endeavouring to observe a few guidelines. I would say ‘rules’ but I do want to reserve some flexibility. Still, these guidelines are important to me and something I should disclose.
The content shared will be new.
Where I “re-publish” past materials, which is not entirely avoidable, I will frame them in such a way that integrates that historical material with current concerns.
A past blog had, for 20 years, been hosted on TypePad. Last year (2025) that platform closed up shop. It did not evolve into anything else and no migration path was offered. It simply disappeared. From my digital archives, I will prioritize re-publishing, and framing, key past posts that were referenced in various academic publications (those references now being broken links).
I will prioritize making a subset of my digital archives accessable (to paid subscribers) through an AI Chatbot interface so that these archives can be rummaged through by someone other than myself.
The images used will be photographs that I have taken, as an admittedly amateur photographer who occasionally captures something interesting.
The diagrams included will be ones I have developed. Apologies in advance.
AI will be used sparingly, but consistently. I often use AI as a developmental editor to challenge me on things I am writing, especially longer and more challenging things. I also use AI, with some frequency, to stylize diagrams that I have myself developed or that I have conceived of and then prompted and prodded AI to produce.
