As our content creation needs grow and evolve, the tools we use for authoring content need to grow as well. The same tools and approached that worked 10 or 15 years ago will struggle to meet our needs today.Craig Roth, writing in the Burton Group's Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog, recently posted two pieces discussing next-generation content authoring. In the pieces -- titled Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring and More on the Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring -- he discusses five key areas that need to be considered as part of any content creation strategy: Collaborative Authoring, Content Reuse, Living Documents, Freshness Preference, and Dangerous Findability.

Of these, Collaborative Authoring is probably the most self-explanatory. From the second post:

Content is increasingly being created in a collaborative fashion, with multiple commenters and sometimes multiple authors for a given document. Perhaps a fallacy was that there ever were authors working alone. Document creation has always been social and what is happening now is that increased collaborative capabilities and Web 2.0-heightened awareness of social work are feeding back to the way in which documents are authored.

The other trends he discusses are interesting as well. The Content Reuse trend examines the importance of organizations drawing on existing materials and updating them as necessary, rather than starting fresh each time.

The Living Document trend emphasizes the importance of understanding that content creation is an ongoing process, and that some documents are never "complete" and are continuously updated as needed.

Freshness Preference explores the idea that users now seek out frequently updated content over static content. This means users will gravitate toward content sources such as blogs and sites with frequent updates.

The last trend -- Dangerous Findability -- is actually more of a reminder of the risk of easily found content, and how this can open us up to many issues ranging from simple embarrassment to legal ramifications.

Roth's point is that we ignore these trends at our peril, and content creation tools must continue to evolve to work with and adapt to these needs.