Content Management Matters ™

After a summer spent relaxing and keeping a low profile (as if!), why not plan to re-energize your career with a trip to the IDEA Conference? Scheduled for October 7-8, 2008 in Chicago, designers, media artists and information architects alike are sure to learn new ways to reinvigorate and approach the way complex information is designed.

If you can't get enough of social networking -- and clearly we can't -- make sure and pencil in the 4th annual Social Networking Conference taking place July 10-11 in San Francisco. The San Francisco chapter will focus on my favorite topic, enterprise social networking and on mobile social networking. The keynote speaker will be Britt Selvitelle of Twitter, who's talk, cleverly entitled "What's Love Got To Do With It?" will touch on why it's not enough to make passionate users, but also "passionate creators" (a reference to Twitter's wildly popular API, no doubt).

Early bird registration is going on from now until July 1st for the 4th international jboye08 conference, a meeting of global gurus in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference brings together IT practitioners from all over the world in order to share and learn in an open environment. It is described as intense, with discussions, demos and interaction from the attendees.

Working in a creative industry, like design, is no guarantee that your work environment is a creative one. Ruts and lulls affect us all and it's often a challenge to take the extra steps necessary to revive our creative juices and reinvigorate our passion for innovation. At this year's HOW Design Conference, Making Creativity Work provided participants with solutions and insights into how companies and individuals can inspire and collaborate to develop exciting products.

It can be a real pain trying to keep up with all the upcoming conferences that happen every year. With web 2.0 being the subject of late, there are a lot of conferences and events designed specifically around it. What follows is a list of some of the top web 2.0 conferences happening this summer. Have a browse and see if anything tickles your fancy. Then think about how you can convince your boss to send you.

For all the grief that we give those in the print industry, I appreciate it when special efforts are made to spread awareness to help them (and others) to learn new techniques that make their work on the Web more effective. Such efforts are in abundance at the HOW Design Conference.

Common Mistakes Print Designers Make on the Web was not only an advantageous session for print designers who have had the Web thrust upon them, but also helpful for Web designers, who had the opportunity to listen in and see things from a different perspective.

The session, presented by Stephanie Sullivan, founder of the web standards redesign company, W3Conversions, reviewed the top ten mistakes and provided insight about how to remedy these situations.

It's often necessary to validate most business decisions, but never has proof been as demanding as it is with design. Design is still construed as a very arbitrary, hippy-dippy discipline and nothing gets the goat of a designer more than having to explain time and again that there are indeed standards for design.

Enter the Designer's Guide to Research, courtesy of the HOW Design Conference presented by power couple, Jenn and Ken Visocky O'Grady, founders of Enspace, a creative think tank that works to enhance collaboration and communication among designers, writers and marketers, alike.

Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Finns, it's time to flex your open source muscle. The Open Nordic Conference is happening in Norway on June 19-20. Brought to you by a formidable team consisting of eZ Systems, ICT Norwary, National Center for Open Source, and ICT Grenland, the Open Nordic will actually be three different, but related conferences running in parallel. They're all related to open source and promoting the use of free software -- something we can definitely vouch for.

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.

Think you know what's coming next in the constantly evolving world of Web search?

No? Well, what better reason to attend Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto 2008. Key strategies for maximizing the search visibility of your web site are within your reach, as well as opportunities to attend 21 sessions and workshops in three concurrent tracks.

Not happy to just let people come to their new developer portal, Day Software is heading over to ApacheCon Europe 08 in Amsterdam to do a little social networking.

On Friday, April 11, Day's chief scientist, Roy Fielding will deliver a keynote address entitled "Apache 3.0 (a Tall Tale). Prior to his keynote Friday, look for Fielding's presentation today on "A Little REST and Relaxation". In this presentation, Fielding will discuss the REST protocol he developed giving conference attendees an solid introduction and in-depth overview.

Other presentations by Day on Friday, include:

• Senior developer for JEE and portal applications Carsten Ziegeler's presentation titled JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Apache Jackrabbit. This might be a good presentation for anyone interested in winning that JCR Cup 2008. There will be a content management application demo during the presentation.
• Another senior developer for Day, Jukka Zitting will give a presentation called File System on Steroids - an Introduction to JCR. This presentation is all about the JCR standard providing an introduction to the JCR API and Apache Jackrabbit.

A great way to spend your Friday if you are a Java developer or architect. Especially if you want to win the first Day JCR cup, gleam all you can from the experts themselves.

Details on the conference are found here.

Web 2.0 Strategies is the UK’s leading forum for exploring real-world implementations of web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques. This year, the conference, hosted on June 12 in London, is set to focus on customers, communication and collaboration: implementing the enterprise 2.0 revolution.

Here's a quick heads up for you Bay Area CMSers: The 4th annual Gilbane San Francisco conference is coming to the Westin Hotel, June 18-20.

If you are a big believer in the benefits of social search, then there's a conference you need to attend -- The Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, March 17-20, 2008.

Here's another must attend event if you live on the west coast -- or just feel like visiting Vancouver, British Columbia -- home of XFiles series.

For content management professionals who need to look more strategically at their content, the Content Convergence and Integration 2008 conference could be the trick.

The 3 day event March 12-14, 2008 is brought to you by the Strategy A Consulting Group.