Content Management Matters ™

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's big news from the space, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 -- make your startup Web 2.5
• New MySpace Drag'n'Drop Interface
• Twitter a terrorist tool?
• Gilbane Conference on Social Media Meets CMS
• Forrester Report says Social Web Went Mainstream in '08

Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 -- make your startup Web 2.5

When Digg supremo Kevin Rose isn't playing the beer-swilling buffoon on DiggNation, he's capable of putting in a shift as an extremely thoughtful business-evangelist type.

Never more so than in a recent Seesmic blog post , in which he takes a Paul Graham post on "Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy" and runs with it, concluding that once the boulder really got rolling, nearly all web 2.0 start-ups simply got lost in the noise and couldn't gain any traction.

Digg, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and most of the services which we associate with the Web 2.0 tag all launched before that tag even made any sense. If you could apply the label "Web 2.0" to a new web startup, chances are it sank without trace (some obvious exceptions like Twitter aside).

Rose also talks about the early days of Digg (it's only 4 years old??), recounting that it was a 'scappy startup', that he kept the day-job and pumped in a couple of thousand dollars here and a couple thousand there, and that he only went after Angel funding when he ran out of money. While doing things on the cheap may be anathema to the current brood of Web entrepeneurs, Rose reckons it's by no means a bad thing for your startup if you can't get money for your 'back-of-the-envelope' idea, and if you have to hold onto the day-job for a while.

CM Pros, a collaborative community of content management experts, will be discussing the lifecycle of content at the Gilbane Boston conference on December 2, 2008.

People interested in content management are invited to join the CM Pros Fall Summit to learn about the developments and projects within the content management industry and more.

Following up on its latest study on how global businesses need to actively create, manage and publish multilingual content, the Gilbane Group is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, September 24, at 2 p.m. EST.

The webinar is dedicated to helping companies develop enterprise strategies that are crucial for creating, managing and publishing multilingual business communications.

Gilbane Group, Inc., the analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies, released a study on the state of Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) adoption.

Turns out, not only the industry’s growth is tremendous, since it first saw the light as an industry about five years ago; more and more companies adopt ERM and their main motivator is fear of leaking sensitive information outside the enterprise firewalls.

The Gilbane Group has announced its Boston conference agenda, as well as the pre-conference workshops. The conference is scheduled to take place December 2-4, 2008, at The Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA. While the full conference program is not yet published, we already have some insight into what will be on Gilbane’s menu this time around.

The agenda includes two days filled with all kinds of enterprise search, WCM, content strategies and social media fun. And this is just a tip of the iceberg!

The 4th annual Gilbane Conference kicked off in San Francisco yesterday. The three day conference devoted to all things content management started things off with a special keynote session devoted to search headed up by Google's VP of Engineering, Udi Manber followed by a discussion with Dan Farber of CNET and Denis Brown of the SAG group, moderated by Frank Gilbane, CEO of the Gilbane Group.

Bridgeline Software's Chief Technology Officer, Brett Zucker, has been selected to be a guest speaker at the 2008 Gilbane Conference, held in San Francisco from June 18 to June 20. He'll be part of a panel that will discuss the latest trends and newest approaches to managing web content and will also get to lead his own session on the future of online collaboration.

Gilbane Group Inc. an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of information technologies since 1987 has announced the general release of Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends, and Best Practices, a comprehensive study of the growing market for digital editions of periodical publications.

Before we divulge the results of the study, let's take a moment to make an educated guess about what revolutionary information could have been gathered about newspapers and their online counterparts. Would it reveal, per chance, that more people than not are reading the news online? Or perhaps that more technology publishers are going online and abandoning print? What about advertising revenue? – could it be that it's more lucrative online?

West coast CMSers, it's time to get yo' summit on. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars have announced that the 2008 CM Pros U.S. Spring Summit will take place on June 17, in conjunction with the fourth Annual Gilbane San Francisco Conference which is June 18-20 at the Westin Market Hotel in San Francisco. The summit will offer attendees an in-depth forum for discussing the business and technical side of managing and delivering dynamic content.

It's a rare organization that does not track at least a minimum set of web analytics for their customer facing websites. The problem is rarely that there's no data. Rather it's what to do with that information once you have it in your hands. More often than not, it's under utilized and probably finds it's home in that virtual pile on your desktop.

It doesn't have to be that way. There's an upcoming Webinar co-hosted by Bridgeline Software and the Gilbane Group that will show you how to better use your analytics data to make decisions and improve the customer experience, and in the end improve your bottom line.

For those attending the upcoming Gilbane conference who are more on the geeky side of the spectrum, get stoked: Udi Manber, a Google Vice President of Engineering, will start off the annual San Francisco conference on June 18th at 8:30am with a discussion on Google's search quality and continued innovation.

While Google's success is generally thought of as being a result of their use of link activity and PageRank to supplement keyword search, this is in fact just one of many signals that help provide users with most relevant results. Udi Manber will share valuable info on improving search that should be relevant to everyone in the tech industry.

"Udi Manber is the engineering vice president in charge of this ongoing, and necessarily secret effort (on improving searches). What Udi is able to share about improving search will be interesting to all, but especially valuable to knowledge workers whose need for quality search is critical," said Gilbane Group CEO Frank Gilbane.

The Gilbane Conference, now in its fourth year, has gained a reputation as a forum for bringing together vendor-neutral industry pros that share and debate the latest information technology experiences, research, trends and insights. Topics to be covered in depth will include enterprise search, text analytics and content globalization and location.

Details on the Google keynote session as well as other keynotes and conference breakout sessions can be found here.

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.

Acumium LLC is stoked, and for good reason. A recent survey on Web Content Management User Experience conducted by the Gilbane Group has given Acumium the highest rating from respondents for their "ease of navigation and use of feature-functions".

Gilbane San Francisco 2008, the annual West Coast shindig for Web CMS and myriad other geekage, is currently accepting proposals for panels and presentations. Your stable of appropriate topics may include:

• Web CMS
• Enterprise wikis, collaboration, blogging (erg)
• Content globalization and localization
• "Enterprise 2.0," enterprise search, or semantic technologies
• Enterprise CMS
• Digital rights management
• Publishing technology

(Guys, please don't make this a Twitter-fest.)

Your deadline is January 15, 2008. Hurry and submit a proposal.

The conference will take place at Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, from June 17-19. Marketh thy calendars.

It's all about Gilbane this week, of course. The latest news from the Boston conference relates to Hot Banana's Web CMS, which topped the poll for Overall Ease of Use in Gilbane's "Survey on Web Content Management User Experience."