McCracken’s magnificent blog compendium on branding

What a superb idea: A one page PDF that summarises and organises a massive body of blog posts around a topic. That’s what ace blogger Grant McCracken has done:

I have published around 1.4 million words on this blog, and that makes any particular set of posts hard to find. Yes, you can do a key word search. But you still end up with a long list of posts and no clear idea of their relationship one to the other.

How, I wondered, could I do a compendium of posts organized for easier access. Organized in a PDF file, what you get is a single page that gives you a jumping off point for 40 blog posts….

Download branding_now_blog_compendium_grant_mccracken.pdf

Even more to my tastes, it’s in the form of a mind map…

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Image: part of Grant McCracken’s mind map “blog compendium” on branding

If you haven’t come across the work of Grand McCracken before this would appear to be a very good place to start. He’s an anthropologist and brand expert who consults for the usual top-of-the-Interbrand-pops brands, like Coca-Cola, Ikea and Kraft.

4 responses to “McCracken’s magnificent blog compendium on branding”

  1. Nice idea. I assume that the PDF file would be search engine friendly too?

    I have the same problem with my blog, and I am looking at a few alternatives to the standard WordPress search functionality.

  2. Nice.

    Been mindmapping stuff on this rainy afternoon.

    Be great if this was in Mindmanager format.

  3. @Darren – I think that PDFs are crawlable by Google now, but in any regards, I think the posts in the blog are nicely indexed in some previous posts Grant put together.

    @Curtis – I think Grant created it in MindManager – maybe suggest he publises the file on his blog?

  4. In a similar(ish) vein I have just done this – http://preview.tinyurl.com/4n6eku – to try and capture – via one page pdf and links – the essence of what I tend to find myself explaining to clients – i.e. why this thing is big and how easy it is to make a start on it.

    Would be interested to know if you think it works – or perhaps the whole thing should be a pdf without links back to a blog.

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