Content Management Matters ™

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah...ahem...right.

On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute's worth of scanning.

The very last panel I attended at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was also one that I had the privilege of moderating. Our topic was the big hot topic of the conference: how to integrate social networking features into the enterprise and whether or not they can co-exist happily with a content management system. Specifically in our panel's case, we talked about Facebook's utility. The net takeaway from our panel was -- it's all about the platform; Facebook matters because of its ability to integrate outside applications.

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.

When you mention Facebook, most people immediately think “social network” (or perhaps “application overload”). Not many people will think “content management system.” Adrian Sutton, CTO at Ephox, spoke at Web Content 2008 today about the marriage of content management and Facebook. While the initial Facebook frenzy has somewhat cooled off these days (Adrian went so far as to call the unending list of invites to join groups and add 1,000 applications “a new form of spam”), there are some things that Facebook has done right, and which content management systems can learn from.

It was just a year ago that Facebook elevated their college kids only social networking site from a classier MySpace to a web portal in training with their release of Facebook Platform. Now, the buzz on the blogosphere according to TechCrunch and Facebook news blog, AllFacebook, is on how Facebook is working on an "open source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications."

The more web 2.0 progresses and the more the term web 3.0 shows up the more it seems like social networking is becoming a must for anyone involved in social media at all. Every week and nearly every day the big guns in the social world are releasing new and innovative ways to connect the web, and therefore the world. Facebook is no exception to this rule.

Seems like we can't get enough of that Facebook social network these days. Not only do we constantly hear about all the consumer-based solutions that want to emulate and even overrun it, we now have to contend with vendor after vendor offering their enterprise 2.0 version of the popular social networking platform.

Trampoline Technologies SONAR Dashboard is the latest in a string of solutions for an "enterprise Facebook". While we don't discount the need for social networking inside the enterprise, we just really wish someone would think of a better marketing pitch.

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.

Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook started an infectious desire from the public for more social-ness on the internet. The people were tired of chat rooms and IM just wasn’t cutting it. So the social network crazy started.

But MySpace and Facebook aren't the only social networks out there...

You've got an idea for the next great Facebook application, assuming Scrabulous and Vampires are not great enough, and you want the application to be available to all 55 million active (and growing) Facebook members.

What you don't have is a bucket full of money (or venture funding) to pay for a server farm?

What do you do, hot shot? What do you do?

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?

There have been concerns about privacy and safe management of user data since day one of the social networking phenomenon.

Unfortunately, these concerns have been buried underneath the fascination with the exploding popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace.

There are many projects and initiatives aimed at safe and innovative ways to allow users to take their personal data with them. But consensus was that until one of the larger players in the social networking got involved, these initiatives would be little more than wishful thinking.

It is amazing how quickly consensus can change as Google, Plaxo, and Facebook announced today that they would contribute to the Data Portability Workgroup.

While I am hesitant to say "today could be a very important day in the history of the internet" like Marshall Kirkpatrick did when he broke the story on ReadWriteWeb, I do believe there is much to be excited about.

That is, if you believe that social networking is more than just a passing fad.

Is 2008 the year of the single person? One can only hope. Besides being unattached, it turns out that we singletons are quite the demographic.

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.

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.