Content Management Matters ™

Friday, May 9 2008

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site’s success.

Gilbane Group Inc. an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of information technologies since 1987 has announced the general release of Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends, and Best Practices, a comprehensive study of the growing market for digital editions of periodical publications.

Before we divulge the results of the study, let’s take a moment to make an educated guess about what revolutionary information could have been gathered about newspapers and their online counterparts. Would it reveal, per chance, that more people than not are reading the news online? Or perhaps that more technology publishers are going online and abandoning print? What about advertising revenue? – could it be that it’s more lucrative online?

Following in the great web 2.0 tradition of having a cute name and throwing some awesome launch parties, New York based Drop.Io has started to make a splash on the scene after receiving their second round of funding in March and opening themselves up to the public. The question remains however, what exactly is the site and why should we sign up for yet another 2.0 service?

Thursday, May 8 2008

Ahh, our insatiable need to spend hours viewing online video, whether it be our favorite episode of The Family Guy, or that hilarious commercial on YouTube. Yes we definitely are a world of watchers. And organizations are getting smarter everyday figuring how to use this vice to their advantage.

Online video search engine provider, blinkx, aims to help those organizations by providing the blinkx Advanced Media Platform, a video content management solution that will “unlock the potential of video assets and maximize their monetization”.

When Xobni was formed in 2006 by two graduate students, it sought to improve, enhance and otherwise fix Microsoft Outlook.

Now, it’s taking its efforts even further with a new tool that plugs into Outlook. Their software, free and downloadable, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages easily searchable and readily available.

West coast CMSers, it’s time to get yo’ summit on. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars have announced that the 2008 CM Pros U.S. Spring Summit will take place on June 17, in conjunction with the fourth Annual Gilbane San Francisco Conference which is June 18-20 at the Westin Market Hotel in San Francisco. The summit will offer attendees an in-depth forum for discussing the business and technical side of managing and delivering dynamic content.

No matter how you say it, MindTouch has announced the release of MindTouch Deki Wiki “Jay Cooke” v8.05.

Driven in part by the requirements of Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community, the open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform known for its innovations in internationalization/localization, search and user experience, has aimed its sights on revolutionizing multilingual content management.

Wednesday, May 7 2008

Quantcast this week launches a service which enables searching of websites according to key readership demographics. The new facility enables marketers to enter a list of demographic parameters, and returns a list of websites whose readership matches those criteria. As an example, if a marketer is targeting black male readers, over 40, with an income over $60,000, then Quantcast’s new service serves up a list of websites which attracts that audience, and also tells you whether or not the site accepts advertising.

Better yet, the service is free. Just sign up and target away.

Can print media survive the transition to the Internet?

It’s an awkward question at best, whose answer has seemed quite dismal over the past year. But now, with a struggling economy and fledgling print audience, International Data Group (IDG) has sought a probable answer.

Google has released an addition to their RSS aggregator, Google Reader. The addition, “Note in Reader”, acts like a bookmarking tool that is then transferred to your shared items in Google Reader. Unfortunately for Google, this has been done (with incredible success) by other companies already. Can Google compete?

Virtualization has been taking the IT field by storm, but where is it headed? The theme of November’s 4th International Virtualization Conference and Expo is “The Next Generation of Virtualization”. They are welcoming submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not just on how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is altering the way businesses run IT in a fundamental way.

Rackspace’s cloud computing provider Mosso announced they were introducing an Internet based storage solution called CloudFS as a complement to their recently launched, The Hosting Cloud. CloudFS is poised to be a competitor to Amazon S3 and Google Apps.