Content Management Matters ™

In an effort to entice consumers to visit its customers' sites and make Flash software more attractive to Web site developers, Adobe has taken steps to make pages with Flash-created images more recognizable to search engines like Google.

Although they are still growing in use and popularity, widgets are not new to the web. Something that is new is the ability to easily create your own flash based widgets without needing to know a lot of action script or other code base. This is where Sprout Builder comes in…

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger's job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren't for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

But it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation.

This trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.

Adobe has joined the ranks of the social media product suppliers with the announcement of it's Flash Media Server 3 product line.

CEO Sridhar Vembu of Zoho wrote an interesting article about why the Zoho suite is AJAX-rich as opposed to Flash-heavy. For those of you who still think AJAX killed the info-architect, it makes for nice reading.

Vembu prefaces the post by stating Flash is a great tool for other stuff (like ToonDoo, par exemple). But for the Zoho suite, the flexible nature of Javascript simply serves users better.

Open source firm Editopia has just announced the release of NCode.

This is a server-side video encoding offering. Web developers can add video, in any format, to Flash. Under the General Public License, it costs zip zero.

NCode is cross-platform friendly and supports multiple codecs, including H.264, and PHP and Java programming environments.

Editopia may soon release an enterprise edition with support, as well as indemnification and rights for fee-based codecs.

For all the Chocolate Rain lovers out there (YouTube knows who you are), wishing for a higher-quality video experience, the latest beta release of the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player is your proverbial genie let loose from the bottle.

Adobe Flash has enjoyed a place in the spotlight for awhile now, and Microsoft hopes to shake that up. Yesterday at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference they unleashed Microsoft Silverlight, a new plug-in that promises to deliver "the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

And with Brightcove Inc., Major League Baseball and Netflix already in their corner, we say game on.