Web Idol News & Articles

Here at J Boye 2009 the Web Idol competition is about to start. In the line-up we have 23 Video, e-Spirit, Kapow Technologies, Microsoft, Sitecore and TERMINAL Four.

J Boye '09 -- Web Idol Contestants Exhibiting Pre-Contest Commencement Consternation

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Web Idol is a semi-serious but mostly humorous event loosely based on the extremely popular (with people we don’t know) American Idol TV show.

The event is a fast-paced set of competitive demos. Select vendors present short demonstrations of their products, showing-off their fanciest features -- often the stuff most recently developed. For those that prefer succinct, comparative presentations to long-winded demonstrations, this is a session for you.

The judging is done by an expert panel of judges who primarily offer pithy commentary, but it's the audience who holds voting power over the final outcome.

[UPDATE: The votes have been tallied. It was TERMINAL Four in 3rd place, 23 Video in 2nd place and Sitecore who has taken home the massively awkward 1st prize trophy. Congrats to all for an entertaining reprieve from serious thinking.]

See more J Boye 2009 coverage:

• Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges
• Design for Behavior Change: Why Facebook and Twitter Are Winning
• Persuasion: How to Make Your Media More Persuasive
• Selecting a CMS - Pitfalls and Best Practices

The J. Boye Conference's 2009 Web Idol competition was fiercely fought, with eZ Systems, Ektron and SilverStripe presenting Web Content Management Systems and Isys demonstrating an enterprise intranet search.

While Isys, SilverStripe and Ektron presented compelling demos, Bård Farstad's eZ Publish Web CMS proved the winner, with an elegant drag-and-drop interface and on-the-fly photo integration.

After snapping a few shots of the judges, Bård uploaded them into a gallery he created with a few clicks.

For light- to medium-weight sites and rich blogs -- eZ Publish supports video, naturally -- this Web CMS makes creation, well, eZ.

SilverStripe (news, site) is using this year's J. Boye Conference to boost awareness of its open source CMS product by taking part in the Web Idol competition that adds some speed and humor to the event.

In the very Danish early evening here at the jboye08 conference your sometimes faithful correspondent was present to witness the ever faithfully entertaining Web Idol competition.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Web Idol is a semi-serious but mostly humorous event loosely based on the extremely popular (with people we don’t know) American Idol TV show.

The Web Idol version is a bit of a hoot but at the same time provides a line-up of Web CMS vendors with a chance to strut their latest stuff in front of a crowd of leading web practitioners.

Alfresco, a provider of an open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, announces support for Open Document Format (ODF). Their ODF Virtual File System will support drag and drop conversion to ODF documents from any Office application source.