About
Josh Anderson has built a career at the crossroads of content strategy, structured authoring, and information architecture. After earning his Master of Information in Canada, he joined Precision Content in Toronto as an Associate Information Architect, where he helped organizations rethink and restructure how they deliver content. Today, Josh brings that expertise to Paligo, with a focus on structured authoring languages such as DITA and DocBook, as well as broader content strategy and information architecture initiatives.
His journey began in Japan, where he taught English for a year before returning to the U.S. to work in digital marketing, specializing in content publishing and SEO. This early experience with communication and strategy laid the foundation for his shift into information architecture and technical content.
With over five years of direct industry experience, Josh has spoken at multiple conferences and taught courses on information architecture. He continues to share his knowledge and passion for helping teams build scalable, intelligent content systems. More about his work and experience can be found on his CV.
Why are you passionate about structured content and CCMS?
I really enjoy setting up systems that can publish your content flawlessly and style it the way you want automatically. Being able to author complex content and deliver it in various formats to diverse audiences is highly satisfying. Structured authoring languages are built in a clever way, and I enjoy learning the ins and outs of them.
How do you see AI and automation changing technical documentation?
I think that the primary audiences for technical documentation will become LLMs and AI agents. It will become rare that people track down and read the source content itself; they will increasingly rely on having the information distilled to them by a chatbot. Therefore, the technical documentation itself must be written with a clear structure and rich semantics so that machines can process and understand it accurately.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a team just starting with structured authoring?
Establish patterns. Be consistent. Use the same elements and attributes the same way each time. Establish a habit of auditing your content to regularly check that different authors aren’t writing in wildly different ways. Consistency will be key for being able to update your content in bulk in the future, import/export it to other systems, or feed non-contradictory information to AI systems.
Over the past couple of years, I have become an avid movie buff and try to take advantage of opportunities in Toronto to attend film festivals or see movies projected on film prints. I am very active on Letterboxd and my personal website, where I keep a monthly diary of what I watch.
