Content Management Matters ™

At Le Web 3 conference in Paris this morning, we were tuned into Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter. The topic of his mini keynote was Persistent Communication, but he really didn't say much about that actually. And I must say I wasn't too disappointed -- I happen to think we're all twittering a bit too much these days, and I don't much care what you had for breakfast, nor if you're stuck in traffic on 101 Northbound. Sorry!

What was interesting about Evan's talk was his focus on simplicity, a concept increasingly noodled upon these days, and one close to our hearts.

In a controversial keynote speech last week at cmf2007 in Denmark, B.J. Fogg, founder of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, proclaimed that "Web 2.0 was dead", that Facebook had shifted the game and that "there might not be a more persuasive technology [than Facebook]."

Well, it was not a universally agreed upon message, nor I'm sure was it intended to be. Nevertheless, it provoked some measure of good discussion, and based on recent announcements it seems that our bustling UK-based Alfresco -- commercial open source enterprise cms vendor extraordinaire -- is in-tune with Mr. Fogg and has similarly swallowed the blue pill.

We just wrapped-up the first keynote session here at cmf2007 in Denmark. The one keynoting, and quite enthusiastically, was Bob Boiko, otherwise known as the man who wrote the book on content management. In good inverse pyramid fashion, I'll open with the closing.

According to Bob, the most important information in your organization is the stuff you're most afraid of dealing with. It's the most politically loaded. It's the scariest. Its likely to off put the most people. That's the five percent of the info which you need to focus on and lead with.

Here at the cmf2007 conference in Arhus, Demark, we're listening to Lisa Welchman discuss Web Governance and Web Operations Management (WOM).

Web Governance has little to do with information governance and records management. The exception to this is that -- as one might imagine -- the principles of good Web Operations Management can reference and/or learn from the principles found in other, more developed areas of organizational operations.

What’s it gonna take to get organizations to take their web sites seriously? By seriously I mean staff them, fund them and manage them?

If for some odd reason you're burning for an excuse to visit Denmark this fall, drop in for cmf2007, which falls on November 6-8.

This is the third annual cmf international Web conference. It will focus primarily on enterprise portals, intranets, content management and enterprise search.