Content Management Matters ™

If you were unable to attend BlogHer's conference in San Francisco last week, never fear. BlogHer, the community for women who blog, have announced that they are taking the show on the road in a spectacle called the Reach Out Tour 2008.

They will be condensing their annual event into six one-day extravaganzas in Boston, DC, Nashville, Greensboro, Atlanta and New Orleans. BlogHer will focus on topics that seem to resonate strongest in each city and look for your local bloggers to lead the discussions. The one-day conference will also feature a broad range of topics and speakers, cocktail parties for networking and socializing, and a little bit of local flavor.

We all know that blogs and blogging are a shockingly effective means of sharing your most ingenious thoughts and building or participating in online communities.

Right. You got that message a while back. But considering that there are a number of options to choose from, the final step of getting going can still seem a touch daunting. We've put in a little spadework and here's a quick guide through the woods for the rest of us.

The BlogHer mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment and women are lining up at the virtual door, eager to participate in Web 2.0 applications.

Recently, the results of the BlogHer/Compass Partners 2008 Social Media Benchmark Study were revealed and they show great new insights into the power of the blogosphere and the significant role it plays in the lives of U.S. women.

It’s getting the point that if you aren’t using some form of Web 2.0 in your online endeavors that you are behind the game by about a year. Web 2.0, and particularly the social aspects of it, is the fastest growing web setup around. Remember when YouTube sold for more than a billion dollars (and it had only been live online for about two years)? It was all because two guys wanted to create a social environment that they and their friends could share videos over.

Compendium Blogware is a Software as a Service, organization-oriented blogging platform. This means that it concentrates on SEO, customer relationships and sales conversion, and incorporates administration features like editorial controls, restricting employees from posting anything they shouldn't.

The makers of Compendium held a webinar last week, in which co-founder Chris Baggot offered some advice to organizations regarding blogging for the coming months:

Chances are if you are a business traveler, you've endured your fair share of airport delays, bad airline food and less than stellar customer service. The culmination of these experiences has expanded, like anything these days, into mediums supported by Web 2.0, blogs, specifically.

According to Forrester Research, in the second quarter of 2007, 21 percent of business travelers who use the Internet read blogs - not just ones about business travel, but also those involving sports, business, finance and other topics.

Nobody should be surprised that with the beginning of a new year comes a whole lotta predictions about how 2008 will role out in the big wide world of the Internet. These ones are all about Enterprise 2.0 and are from Dion Hinchcliffe, the guy with the really nice Enterprise 2.0 graphics. Here's an overview of what he thinks will happen this year

The list of new challenges that are presented by Web 2.0 initiatives is quite extensive. One of the most critical challenges, though, is credibility. In the absence of credibility, and/or integrity, your content becomes worthless.

Web 2.0 empowers us to leverage the collective intellect. When information is posted in good faith, it can drive value for everyone. That collective intellect is the basis of open source. By building on ideas and premises that have been set forth, it's possible to develop better ideas faster.

The mandate has come down from on high that your organization needs some Web 2.0 tools. However, since you are tasked with implementing Web 2.0 technologies internally, what we are really talking about is Enterprise 2.0.

So you figure you will just throw up a wiki or setup a forum and call it a day, right? Wrong. There’s some thinking that needs to go into this implementation if you really want it to be successful, and these six lessons will help you understand how to approach Enterprise 2.0.

For "legit" print journalists, the day of reckoning may be approaching more quickly than any of us would like. A survey by web CMS vendor Polopoly reports that, according to European newspaper execs, 40 percent of published content will be user generated.

In the next three years.

Because of this, blogs and other "new media" commodities will become increasingly critical to the news-making populace. And with this trend, personalized online advertising opportunities are also expected to improve.

Today Traction Software released TeamPage 3.8, an enterprise blog and wiki solution.

To give you a sense of what you can expect from the offering, founder Greg Lloyd illuminated its muse.

"[Our customers] challenged us to further improve ease of use, scalability, management and the real need for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration 'at the edge' -- with customers, supply chain partners, sales partners, legal and other professionals -- as well within the core of the enterprise. We're extremely proud to have met this challenge.”

Enterprise Web content management developer Day Software has launched Communiqué Advanced Collaboration (CQ AC), a Web 2.0 collaboration tool aimed at managing social media. The new collaboration technology integrates with the company's existing Communiqué Web CMS, and incorporates a host of nifty features run off an impressive-sounding Java driven, JSR-compliant bedrock.

PaperThin has announced the release of CommonSpot Version 5.0, the latest upgrade to the company’s flagship Web CMS.

The release introduces a new authoring interface that includes RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, XML publishing and rendering capabilities.

Oh good. Newspapers and blogs are finally getting along. Or so says the LA Times.

Sure, newspapers still talk behind blogs' back, dismissing their whiny opinions and misinformation, but they know that they can drive in the revenue as well as anyone, so they're willing to post and plug them.

There may be nothing sacred left in the eyes of newspaper purists, but then again, this is online media, and nothing is truly sacred anymore. "Any new information source is a potential competitor to a local newspaper. Smart newspapers are figuring out they don't have to fight with those competitors -- they can make alliances with them," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review.

Following closely in the footsteps of Movable Type 4, which likes to think of itself as less of a blog platform than a harmonious collective of plugins, New Zealand-based Silverstripe has released a blog module with a "drag n' drop widget system."

Why use one word when five will do?