Content Management Matters ™

Further proof that innovation breeds more innovation, Reuters has announced that it's making news content available to the developer community through the use of a non-commercial API. The service will be offered via Reuters Lab, a test site where Reuters can showcase some of their latest product innovations and developments and where users can discover, use and comment on products and services still in progress.

Mochila, global online media marketplace innovator has launched Video Player 2.0. Poised to deliver "multiple, related videos revolving within the same player", it aims to be an asset to those looking to improve user engagement and sustainability.

With the ability to support full-screen displays, pre-roll and translucent overlay advertising, audiences are sure to revel in engaging, high-quality videos, while publishers benefit from a free ad-supported video tool for building their business.

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

In either case, it’s been a busy couple of weeks with Facebook announcing Facebook Connect, then last night Google previewed Friend Connect. Now we read all about MySpace’s “Data Availability” initiative – not to be confused with Data Portability – which allows MySpace members to share their public profile with websites of their choice.

Is this the year of the “User Identity Battle”?

Web 2.0 brought about the evolution of the social web. But there have always been challenges working socially on the web, especially with social marketing or social networking. The challenge is that it can be difficult to stay active socially, even just in your niche. Google is trying to change that.

Just a few weeks after private file sharing service drop.io was opened up to the public, another file sharing service, called YouPublish has been announced. Since we like file sharing and we like drop.io, we were interested to see what this new service had to offer and what makes it different from drop.io.

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.

Any good web publisher knows that it isn’t just content that keep readers reading and visitors returning. Interface design can be just as important as quality content. A bad website design can drive your audience away or seriously erode their confidence, just as they're coming through the door.

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?

Can print media survive the transition to the Internet?

It's an awkward question at best, whose answer has seemed quite dismal over the past year. But now, with a struggling economy and fledgling print audience, International Data Group (IDG) has sought a probable answer.

Rackspace's cloud computing provider Mosso announced they were introducing an Internet based storage solution called CloudFS as a complement to their recently launched, The Hosting Cloud. CloudFS is poised to be a competitor to Amazon S3 and Google Apps.

What's the typical audience composition for a Technology blog? We didn't know, so we vowed that we would move mountains to find out. But several months with a shovel in the Sierra Nevadas produced little in the way of usable data. And so we moved on to Plan B, and sought out the services of the Quantcast website metrics gathering service.

Coming off the heels of recently announced low cost and free hosted web application services such as Amazon's S3 and Google Apps, UK based digital asset delivery network Velocix have announced that they are releasing the world's first free content delivery network called Velocix Accelerator, currently in private Beta.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools in use today; partly because it’s free, partly because it’s fairly straightforward to use. Now Google ratcheting up the analytics game with their latest feature set in the analytics tool shed: Google Analytics for Bloggers.

Remember when WordPress fans held fast to 2.0.x after the release of 2.1.x? Was it just an reluctance to change? Well, hopefully this is not the case with the newest version of the prolific publishing platform. WordPress v2.5 offers better functionality and continues the ease of use tradition -- all in a more aesthetically pleasing packaging that works better for you…at least that’s the idea. Read on for the details.

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.