Content Management Matters ™

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.

Who doesn't love AJAX? It alters a site's content without users having to reload. It's rendered the pageview virtually worthless, inspiring Nielsen/BuzzMetrics to pursue a time-based site tracking model for calculating the popularity of sites. And in many ways, its availability is one manner of gauging the hip-with-it-ness of a site.

As with any snazzy and hype-ridden new technology, there is reason to take caution.

Google is working on a new AJAX API that will enable the good user -- that's you -- to post feeds to your web properties with just a wee bit of simple JavaScript.

Those who've tried weathering the storm of server-side feed grabbing and caching issues and the labyrinthine depths of parsing XML know what a welcome pairing this is.