"Nobody has come up with a blueprint that says this is how social media must and will be used in all disasters, because it changes fast. We're trying to figure out how to get into conversations with the public without getting into one-on-one transactions, which would be next to impossible."
-W. Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The Grill: W. Craig Fugate, ComputerWorld, March 21, 2011.
Back in December I participated in a podcast with Alan Shimel from Network World where I was also joined by Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst from The 451 Group and Todd Barr, Chief Marketing Officer for Alfresco. The topic of the podcast was “Open Source CMS” but we also talked about “crystal ball” predictions for the CMS market in general for 2011. In the podcast, I mentioned that from DotNetNuke’s perspective, innovation in the content management market in the coming years will all be centered around 3 major disruptive industry trends…Cloud, Mobile, and Social.
“In progress.” When it comes to government, we hear those words a lot. It’s no surprise: meeting the needs of a geographically large nation with diverse constituents is challenging. Change and progress require time…and patience.
Technology is one area where progress is evident. Change is afoot everywhere, from optimizing government websites for mobile devices, to coordinated healthcare services and discussions about creating a national dashboard to share meaningful information. The goals are familiar:
"Until we learn that, in an increasingly content-centric world, we cannot continue to base automation efforts exclusively on a technology-centric model, agencies will continue to invest millions of dollars in programs and have little to show for it."
-Barry Schaeffer, Federal IT program failures: It's the content, stupid, Federal Computer Week, September 23, 2010.
This is a very cool product from salsaDev which takes us one step closer to the Semantic Web. The salsaAPI 2.0 helps turn unstructured text into smart content. The video below explains it much better than I or even the press release I've attached below. My thanks to Stéphane Croisier (Jahia and also a salsaDev Board Member) for recommending that I take a look at this product.
SalsaAPI 2.0: the next-generation content intelligence engine
Geneva, November 10, 2010 – salsaDev SA is happy to announce it just closed its Series A Financing round exceeding $1 Mio, with institutional and private investors. salsaDev is simultaneously releasing its new product, salsaAPI 2.0 (api.salsadev.com), leveraging the 2nd generation of its flagship technology. salsaAPI automates text analysis and semantic indexing on large volumes of information, helping organizations reach the next level of content intelligence.
The salsaAPI 2.0 offers a powerful RESTful API to index various sources of raw content, automatically enrich it with additional metadata and match it with texts of similar meanings. The product combines a comprehensive set of features into one single offering, including text analysis, intelligent search & discovery and content mining. As opposed to several competitors, the product can be used online or onsite and can be easily embedded within any 3rd party sites or applications.
Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.
Some of the options I am considering for this site include:
What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I've given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I've recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we're missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.
I usually stay clear of search engine optimization (SEO) discussions, but I think this video is worth your time. In the video, Corey Eulas teaches SEO tips, tricks, and best practices found to increase traffic from search engines. This talk includes examples with a look “under the hood” of a few actual sites owned by members of the audience. You will "discover how to enhance user experience and usability while making your site more search engine friendly".
Rita McGrath at Harvard Business Review has written a blog post on why she hates micropayments. Micropayments are financial transactions involving very small sums of money (see Wikipedia). For online publishing, a small fee would allow you to view the content for a certain period of time or for a certain number of articles.
Personally, I'm not sold on the concept of micropayments for content which is probably why I was lured to Ms. McGrath's article in the first place.
The idea has been around a long time — at least since the mid-to-late 90s — with both supporters and detractors weighing in. Millions have been lost by companies seeking to capitalize on streams of micropayments, almost all of which eventually crashed and burned. Myself, when confronted with a request to chip in 99 cents for a one-time glimpse at an article or $2.99 for a week's worth (as some of my local newspapers are doing) — well, I close that window and go away.
The author of the article discusses further the importance for any payment system adopted to consider "how the payment link of customers' consumption chains fits into their total experience". Micropayment systems have a tall order in that they need to be seamless, transparent, and achieve inevitability. Even grimmer for publishers, it's not only the micropayment experience that needs to be improved but also the non-micropayment systems too.
For the past few years, I've paid a yearly subscription to the Wall Street Journal for the print publication and the online subscription. With my yearly renewal coming up very soon, I've decided to discontinue my online subscription to the WSJ. Why would I do that? There are some very basic reasons to why I'm dropping WSJ.com. I rarely find myself reading the online content of the WSJ. I either already read the stories in the print version of the WSJ or I have found myself already familiar with the news story because I read a similar story posted elsewhere online. Stopping by the WSJ.com, unlike CNN or FoxNews, never became a daily ritual for me.
As most site owners do, I rely on content to sell my site on the Internet. I fully recognize the emerging trends of social or community sites such as FaceBook and Twitter attracting large audiences on the Internet. While I have been dabbling with how I can benefit by merging content and social media into a website, CMS Report remains mainly as a content site. If suddenly people lost interest in using the Internet to retrieve content then sites like mine would no longer have a reason to exist.