Archive for the 'Content Management' Category
January 17, 2006
Drupal Driven Web Sites
Gunnar Langemark has been highlighting numerous web sites that are published using Drupal, an open source content management system and community platform. If you are researching Drupal, you should review the sites that Gunnar has highlighted. Really impressive stuff.
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December 19, 2005
Can you get a bad grade on a Wikipedia entry?
I believe that Dave Winer would give me a low one based on his reaction to my incorrect attribution of coining the term ‘unconference’ to him rather than Lenn Pryor in the unconference entry I started. Sorry about that Lenn!
John Robb points out that Dave could have easily made the edit in addition to just complaining about it. A few folks have jumped in to clean up the entry some more since Dave’s post.
I think the point here is not that I didn’t approach writing a wikipedia article like writing a research paper. The point is that I got the ball rolling in about 5 minutes for a topic that really deserved an entry. 20 other people can each spend five minutes improving it and eventually you’ll have a nice solid piece. Is this a bad thing?
Update: Dave responds in the comments to John’s post discussing his concerns with Wikipedia.
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October 15, 2005
Using the Bottom of Your Page
Derek Powazek had a nice post a while ago on how to reward visitors who read an entire page:
When you’re designing pages - specifically content pages - what is the best possible thing that could happen? I mean after the user has bought a computer, gotten internet connectivity, figured out how to use a browser, and somehow found their way to your site … what is the single best thing that they could do?
Read. That’s right, read. And read all the way to the bottom of the page. In this business, a user that actually reads all the way to the bottom of a page is like gold. They’re your best, most engaged, happiest users. You know, because they haven’t clicked away. They did the best possible thing they could do, and now they’re at the bottom of the page. And how do you reward them?
With a copyright statement. Maybe, if they’re lucky, some bland footer navigation.
If you ask me, that’s just rude.
Read the rest of the post for the ideas on to provide value at the bottom of your pages.
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September 22, 2005
Mambo Schism!
Looks like the open source content management system, Mambo, has had a split among its developers, resulting in a fork of the code. Here is a nice summary from Enter Content Here: Mambo, Joomla
This kind of split is one of the risks of open source projects. I think it can also be a healthy, long-term, survival mechanism as well although it certainly adds some chaos in the short run.
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September 21, 2005
Leading from the Middle
Here is a nice piece from CMS Newswire on how web professionals often have to take on a leadership role: Why Web Managers are Leaders.
You’re in a delicate situation. You need to show leadership for your website, while at the same time not being seen to usurp the leadership of your senior managers. How do you bring them along? How do you make them feel that they are still the ‘real’ leaders?
This is a common theme in association management to begin with: how to lead while appearing to be led. Usually it is about working with volunteer leadership but the same techniques can be used internally by mid-level web leaders who are trying to get their execs to get behind the best ideas for the site.
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September 16, 2005
New Article: The Association Web Job Description
I have just posted an article I wrote that went out in ASAE’s Technoscope newsletter a while ago: The Association Web Job Description. The article identifies the major areas that should be considered when designing positions to support an association web site, including sample language.
You may also want to see the sample interview questions for content management positions that I posted a while ago.
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June 15, 2005
Knowledge Abundance
Gerry McGovern opens a recent article with an incredibly clear statement about the current environment for KM:
We are in an era of knowledge abundance. Traditional management theory focuses on knowledge scarcity. We need new management strategies to deal with so much communication and so much knowledge.
This is why blogging, RSS, newsreaders, wikis and similar technologies are coming to the fore now. They are effective tools for communicating in an environment of abundance. Love that quote! This will definitely be making its way into my presentations (with attribution, of course).
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June 12, 2005
Wiki that Project!
Here is a nice post offering four ways to use wikis for project management. It has suggestions for planning meeting agendas, real-time note taking, brainstorming and easy document maintenance.
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June 1, 2005
Content Garden Hoses
Photo by Nikolaus Büttner.
In the past I have always described the task of coherently organizing the flood of content that ASHA produces as trying to sip from a full blast fire hose. However, as I kicked around the idea with some folks at work as I prepared for a presentation, I realized that ASHA doesn’t have a single content fire hose. ASHA, which has dozens of decentralized content producing groups, actually has the equivalent of several hundred content garden hoses. Taken individually or in small groups, they are easy to manage. However, when you have 100 garden hoses pointed at you, you get just as wet as getting hit by a fire hose.
So there you have my deep thought of the day. I mainly wanted to share the photo above that I found on Flickr. I’ll be using it in my presentation. Very apt.
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May 21, 2005
NYT Paywall
David Weinberger provides a good analysis of why the New York Times putting its editorial writers behind a paywall is a bad move: Joho the Blog: The NY Times world of pain.
I just heard (!) that the Times is going to start charging $50/year to read its op-ed columnists. (That will also get you access to their archives.) I feel their pain, even as I think it’s the wrong decision.
The Times is watching its value erode. Electronic distribution is only going to become a bigger part of the picture, its readership is exulting in the exposes of the failures of the MSM to provide full and accurate coverage — the real story about the Newsweek brouhaha is why we are so eager to hear about ways the MSM is failing — and the authority of The Times is being challenged by a new news architecture that denies the necessity of having gatekeepers at all. In this face of all this confusion, the Times has made some smart moves, including giving a backdoor to permalinks to its articles and moving towards dynamically building “topic pages” that aggregate info”
MSM stands for main stream media. This issue is relevant to MSAs as well (main stream associations).
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