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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.

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Antony Mayfield

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

  1. Darren Cronian Avatar
    Darren Cronian

    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. Curtis James Avatar
    Curtis James

    Nice.

    Been mindmapping stuff on this rainy afternoon.

    Be great if this was in Mindmanager format.

  3. Antony Mayfield Avatar
    Antony Mayfield

    @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. Richard Stacy Avatar
    Richard Stacy

    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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