Content Management Matters ™

Akmin technologies has launched the newest version of their private label online website building solution SiteGalore and this one is packed with lots of enhancements and a number of useful features straight from the Google itself.

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger's job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren't for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

But it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation.

This trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.

So maybe it's not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google's Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia's education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

Salesforce.com and Google have made a pretty big announcement this week. They now have a global strategic alliance. This alliance comes after the news of an integration service called Salesforce for Google Apps -- a service that integrates Google Apps with Salesforce.com and their newest venture, Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs. According to CNET, this is just another step in Saleforce's plan to take down the mighty Microsoft giant.

In this guide we show you how anyone can build and embed simple web widgets.

It's free, extremely easy and takes about five minutes to roll out your first creation. One of the best things about widgets is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content. More mashing means more community and more buzz around your brainchildren. For those who love to play and live in the WWW sandbox, this article is for you.

For awhile now Google has offered businesses a hosted site search they can use to enable search on their websites without purchasing some expensive search engine. It was called Google Custom Search and it was good, but basic. Now they've come out with some enhancements to this search that will improve the quality of the search results along with a change in the name.

Think about the last time you saw an ad in a newspaper and went online to learn more about it. Come to think of it, think about the last time you read a print newspaper. New research suggests it's more common than you think. Actually, it's 50 percent more common.

There are a number of ways to get targeted news, relevant to your niche, to your website. We've tried most of them, and the new NewsBar Wizard from Google News AJAX Search API is easily the best to date.

Simply enter the keywords you want to show up in the feed, copy the code generated by Google, and embed it to your website. The result enables visitors to view the latest headlines from each of the listed terms at a glance, and click quickly between news for the various search terms. The widget displays the results without any heavy-handed branding, flashy effects, or unnecessary load times. In short, it's Google doing what it does best -- giving us unparalled results faster than anyone else.

We show you exactly how to embed this fantastic new capability onto a WordPress -driven website, but the principle will be largely the same for most other content management and blogging platforms (if you use static html, it'll be easier again). It's a CPP situation (copy javascript, paste, pray...). You know the kind.

Here's where to get the Google NewsBar Wizard.

And here's the full lowdown, with embedding directions:

Google announced today that they were opening up their online web site, Google Sites, to anyone who wanted to have one. Previously this service was only available to companies using Google Apps or to people who wanted to host their websites with Google but still had their own domain. Now, any registered Google user can sign up for a free website, prompting some to call it "Geocities 2.0", naming it after the ubiquitous free website provider of the mid-late 90s.

Zoho really wants people to try out their applications. They have opened the doors to users with Google and Yahoo accounts to access Zoho applications without having to create a new username/password. Is this Zoho's step towards the OpenID? Or a ploy to steal Google Apps users away?

There's a survey report out that ranks the best Web 2.0 development platforms by the people who actually use them. The big surprise is that Microsoft tops the list of developer platforms with providers like Google, Amazon S3 and Yahoo trailing behind. In the same survey last year, Microsoft ranked last in some areas. Wonder what has changed so quickly?

Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks is always sending interesting stuff to my trusty Thunderbird.
His latest exposition is a timely call to arms regarding the Social Web, and is worth five minutes of any Webmaster's time. In essence, Bob's argument is that some version of open social (all rights reserved, Google Corp.) is happening, and that all you Webmasters are going to be dancing in the streets when you see what this thing will do. If, that is, you wake up in time and get to grips with what it means. And part of that, according to Bob, will mean that you're going to have to get savvy with Social Application Servers like Ringside's.

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?

For those attending the upcoming Gilbane conference who are more on the geeky side of the spectrum, get stoked: Udi Manber, a Google Vice President of Engineering, will start off the annual San Francisco conference on June 18th at 8:30am with a discussion on Google's search quality and continued innovation.

While Google's success is generally thought of as being a result of their use of link activity and PageRank to supplement keyword search, this is in fact just one of many signals that help provide users with most relevant results. Udi Manber will share valuable info on improving search that should be relevant to everyone in the tech industry.

"Udi Manber is the engineering vice president in charge of this ongoing, and necessarily secret effort (on improving searches). What Udi is able to share about improving search will be interesting to all, but especially valuable to knowledge workers whose need for quality search is critical," said Gilbane Group CEO Frank Gilbane.

The Gilbane Conference, now in its fourth year, has gained a reputation as a forum for bringing together vendor-neutral industry pros that share and debate the latest information technology experiences, research, trends and insights. Topics to be covered in depth will include enterprise search, text analytics and content globalization and location.

Details on the Google keynote session as well as other keynotes and conference breakout sessions can be found here.

Google's done it again, to the surprise of few, coming in as the top brand out of a list of 100 composed by research and consulting company Millward Brown. This is the second year in a row Google has topped this list, and if you want our two cents, it won't be the last.