Content Management Matters ™

Remember when you were a kid and you spent the summer at camp, lying in the sun, hiking, grilling and just plain having fun? Or maybe you just wished you were one of those kids.

Here's a camp that doesn't have the sunbathing, hiking or grilling. No, this camp is nothing like that at all. This is WordCamp. And the fun? Well, that's completely up to you.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools in use today; partly because it’s free, partly because it’s fairly straightforward to use. Now Google ratcheting up the analytics game with their latest feature set in the analytics tool shed: Google Analytics for Bloggers.

Six Apart has just announced the creation of Six Apart Media and Six Apart Services divisions. The real news here is the Media bit. The Media operation is an advertising network -- not unlike Federated Media -- that will open up to participation from some percentage of the blogosphere, regardless of what technology the typing monkeys are using. As part of the news, 6A have nabbed NYC-based consultancy, Apperceptive. The acquisition forms the basis of Six Apart Services, which is really not about traditional consulting services, rather it's about helping bloggers monetize and grow their properties, while 6A Media gets a long term cut.

Hey, hey, look what they've done...it's Vox flipped inside out.

Shiftyr, which stands for 'Share Your Feeds Together" is a service that attempts to mix a feed reader and a social networking site all in one place, where you can share your feeds with your friends and find similar feeds. This all sounds great, except for one crucial error: they started re-publishing the feeds of sites without the publishers' permission. This allowed search engines to index the feeds -- similar to what "splogs" do -- and essentially take traffic away from the original site and diverting it to Shiftyr.

Bloggers were not very pleased.

San Francisco-based Six Apart -- makers of Movable Type, sellers of Live Journal -- have just unwrapped a lovely new piece of technology. Some call it blog fire-hosing, but we'll go with rather heavier metaphors and say their new Blog It FaceBook app is double barrel publishing fun. It's buckshot blogging. It's strafing the blogosphere. It's like going hunting with Cheney -- you know, pull the trigger once and you get two birds and all your friends, right in the face.

It wasn't that long ago that we brought you an exclusive view of 7 really Superfly Plugins for Wordpress. But low and behold our ever resourceful colleague John appears to have missed a couple key ones. Now he said we could call him a dufus..but I don't know...

Instead, we offer up 4 more that should whet your appetite for WordPress, particularly around marketing capabilities. Just for fun, we'll give you the other seven as a reminder to John to get with the program.

Imagine that you work at a job where you are at risk for weight gain because you spend so much time sitting down, you get eye strain from staring at the computer for so long, you are expected to produce work on a regular basis, and you are at risk for carpal tunnel from sitting in uncomfortable office chairs.

It probably sounds like any run of the mill desk job, but apparently the New York Times thinks all of these are new afflictions that only affect professional bloggers. In a recent article, they take the recent deaths of 2 technology bloggers as an indication of the dangers of being a professional blogger.

Naturally, the blogosphere is abuzz with reactions.

Whether you have MOSS 2007 or WSS3.0, you have the ability to create a blog site for your company intranet, department, internet and so on. But the blogging site and capabilities that come out of the box with either version of SharePoint is less than stellar.

Now, however with the final release of the new Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) you actually have some blogging capabilities that provide a pretty advanced looking – and functioning – blog.

What better a way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon than to create a list of ways to use a piece of software -- 48 ways to be exact. The author, Raj Dash. The software, the famously popular WordPress -- more than a Blogging platform according to Dash.

According to Dash it’s WordPress customization capabilities that enable the blogging platform to morph into so many different solutions. For example, the ability to create custom themes, custom fields and custom code for custom fields and custom/widely available plugins all allow WordPress to be so many things to so many people.

He does say that WordPress is best suited for small business or low-volume uses as a content management system. So when reviewing the list keep that in mind.

Dash breaks his list down in to several categories including:

• Basic Uses
• Website/WebServices Clones and Alternatives
• Prologue Theme/Plugin Package
• Custom Sites
• Other

In going through the list of 48, there are a lot of existing examples of where a specific use has already been done – which is good to see it’s not all pie in the sky. Mind you, many of the suggestions can also be applied to many other blogging platforms or CMS Systems, so saying they are “unique” might be stretching it a bit.

A couple of examples that caught our eye were twists on some popular sites today and just some plain cool ideas:

• A Geocoded newsite – new stories are represented as icons on a Google MyMap. Click an icon and the news story pops up.

• A network hub/feed aggregator – Using the RSS Feed Importer plugin

• Twitter Clone – Using the Prologue Theme/Plugin

Have read through the article to review the entire list of 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress. Anything there catch your eye? Have you ever tried one of these and found success or failure?

Movable Type, on it's trek towards full fledged CMS'ness, just got a little closer. Today saw Mark Carey's announcement of MT Forum -- a MT add-on module which delivers fully functional forums that are loosely based on the behavior of the popular phpBB system.

Does this addition bump the MT Community Solution -- the other way to build forums with MT -- off the table? Let's have a look.

The gang at Six Apart has just announced a new extension for their Movable Type 4.1 Commercial and Open Source publishing platforms. It's called the the Action Streams Plugin and by tying together data from all manner of social networking providers it moves you one step closer to the open social web dream.

It's official, Moveable Type Open Source (MTOS) 4.1 Stable has been released to the market.

We've been keeping you up to date about MTOS since we heard about it in August. In December we gave you an overview of the new open source version.

It was just last week that MT4.1 RC1 was released. So the guys and gals over at Six Apart are moving fast.

Blogging has certainly held its own as a popular social media platform, so it's no surprise that new blogging sites are popping up left and right. Add Profy to the list. Well into the second week of its alpha launch, Profy's integrated solution supports a full range of advanced AJAX blogging applications.

It's official. Movable Type v4.1 has taken another definitive step toward production. This means the real deal is not far away. There are a few changes from the beta release, but for the most part -- she's looking fit.

Okay, so you've heard the news right? A-List blogger Robert Scoble gets kicked out of Facebook for running a new Plaxo beta script that scrapes his “Friends” (name and email address) from Facebook and inserts them into Plaxo, only to later be let back in.

Should Scoble be allowed to get his data out of Facebook in the format he chooses? Is it even his data to begin with? Does the data belong to Facebook’s? Is it yours? Who owns your data anyway?