Content Management Matters ™

Hoping to elbow the competition out with new media, Host Color has introduced social networking components to its web hosting offerings.

When users purchase a hosting plan, they now have access to wiki tools via MediaWiki, enabling the development and management of online libraries or encyclopedia sites. Information is process and displayed with PHP from MySQL database.

The company has also begun to offer Pligg CMS, which empowers the creation of online bookmarking, knowledge-sharing platforms or reference guides. Pligg CMS and the wiki function are available via Host Color's PowerTools package.

They have also been included in four out of its five shared hosting packages.

Atlanta welcomes the leading minds in marketing and public relations for day one of the Executing Social Media Conference, which we'll be covering live.

Executing Social Media is a two day event with the ambitious goal of bringing together experts on the use of social media: blogging, RSS, podcasting, online video, virtual communities, and consumer generated content.

Day 1 started off with an session on how communications between company and customer/consumer have changed in recent years. Of primary interest were three major guidelines for starting a corporate blog.

From the annals of News You Already Know comes two reports that shouldn't surprise you.

On Monday, Reuters reported that "four out of five U.S. adults" or "79 percent -- about 178 million -- go online" and spend an average of 11 hours a week on the Internet.

An interesting article in BusinessWeek poses an intriguing question: what is driving new media (think Web 2.0 and 3.0) -- content builders or technology developers?

Because more people are blogging than are programming, BusinessWeek author Jon Fine suggests that "In the tug-of-war between the right-brain of media and the left-brain of the platform builders, the latter have the upper hand."

No longer can blogging be considered "underground journalism," subject only to the rules of the streets (like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause). As blogs incorporate into the landscape of professional media, so too will the policy of full disclosure be expected of bloggers.

Bloggers: your time has come!

Riding the hype of the Semantic Web (it isn't just around the corner; it will also make you blush), which Content Wrangler says will consist of "technologies that help people 'do stuff'," a geeky set of musicologists give us SeeqPod.

In its own way, the concept is pretty clever. You hit SeeqPod, conduct a search for a song, and in Google speed, you get real-live playable results.

It started with a few principles then progressed to online metrics, new social networks and it looks like it's going down in a firestorm over free content. All the while, publishers of traditional print media are frantically wondering where it all went wrong.

What tangled web are Web journalists weaving, and where is it all going?

Tuesday morning at ad:tech Chicago, big brands like YouTube and Yahoo debated the likelihood that the Holy Grail, sought after by everyone from Indiana Jones to Tom Hanks, is (and perhaps always has been) in the unlikely hands of advertisers.

With every new medium comes a wave of schizophrenic behavior in which old media titans express fear, reproach and occasional audacity at a "threat" that has seen no equal in history.