social publishing

New modules makes it Easy for Marketing teams to use LoopFuse to track campaigns and measure ROI across their Drupal web properties

Forrester Research says enterprises interested in open source web content management should keep a close eye on Drupal and Alfresco. We agree. So does the Alfresco team. It's great to see the cream rising to the top.

Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.

Prominent open source contributors and industry veterans join social publishing pioneer

I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it's important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive.

But for all of those brands that don't want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers, your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you. They're going to do it, no matter what, either way.

That's social publishing.

It's pretty clear that the social Web is driving the demand for open source frameworks and with the mindset of "social publishing" continuing to be on Web agendas everywhere, look for community-led expansion and innovation to accelerate.

Smart companies realize the social part of the Web isn't leaving the party anytime soon and have made their demands clear. They want to be their own media companies, creating and distributing content globally on their own terms. If vendors can't provide the tools, they'll find their own.

The following are four significant impacts I believe social publishing will have on the CMS market.

1. Content management systems will become a niche application. Over the past couple years, I have loosely defined forum applications (SMF, phpBB), wiki applications (mediaWiki), and blogging applications (WordPress) as niche or subsystems of the Web CMS. Under Whatcott’s model, content management now becomes a pattern or subsystem of the SPS.

You and I have a dirty little secret. Many of the Web applications that we call content management systems (Web CMS) are not really content management systems. Huh? A lot of this confusion stems from the difficulty most of us have in answering what should be a simple question, what is a content management system? Scott Abel, The Content Wranger, has noted in previous comments that one of the problems in discussions about content management is that we really lack a common definition of CMS.

John Willis recently published a post that equates social publishing with social networking. While the post is pretty good, and I agree with most of the points, I need to correct the bit about the definition of social publishing. It’s way more than social networking. Let me explain.

Social publishing is a blend of three categories:
1) web content management
2) social software (blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, forums, etc.)
3) web app frameworks

Gartner, one of the leading technology industry analyst firms, published their list of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008 back in October 2007 at their Gartner Symposium/ITXpo event. I was at the event, but somehow missed the press release. Karthikeyan over at Seeking Alpha just posted a summary that brought it to my attention.