Web Publishing News & Articles

iBook. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Apple’s evolution is astounding. It’s like you can actually see the ape man begin to walk upright.

Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) hopped up on his soap box today to announce the launch of Drupal Gardens into private beta.

Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of the content management system with aim to please. As Buytaert put it, “Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites."

Voila:

Needless to say it's a pretty big move for the platform, and it will certainly be interesting to watch how it does next to popular alternatives.

Sick of losing sleep over installations or upgrades? The team plans to release more registration codes during the next few months, so make sure to request on here.

Most of us apply various forms of metadata when we create or manage content. This metadata helps make our brilliant creations findable. But text-based content has life easy -- search engines can also accurately index it. So findability is not so big of a challenge for text assets and parsable documents.

But the content we manage is not all text-based or parsable. We use a lot of opaque assets like video, audio and images. Indexing technologies cannot (yet) effectively crawl these items directly -- they must rely on the explicit application of metadata in order to derive the semantics and context which make the assets findable.

Choosing a great DAM solution is fine, but it's not going to solve all your findability and reuse problems. Thoughtful taxonomy development and the practical application of metadata is critical for such success. Towards this end, Earley & Associates are holding a free webinar -- part of their Digital Asset Management Jumpstart Series -- this Thursday.

Running on January 28 at 2pm ET the Practical Asset Reuse – The Role of Taxonomy and Metadata webinar will walk you through the ins and outs of taxonomies and metadata for digital assets. Stephanie Lemieux, Taxonomy Practice Lead at Earley and Associates and Diane Burley, Industry Specialist working with Nstein Technologies are two of the speakers in this session.

If making DAM work better is a priority in your organization, then head on over and register now.

As we await the official announcement of the Apple tablet, the silence and unanswered questions has given us time to ponder the ways that the Apple tablet may impact the future of ePublishing.

With ever shrinking budgets, many organizations are finding digital asset reuse a growing organization imperative. Effective use of metadata and taxonomies in the context of a DAM solution can facilitate great reuse patterns. Here's a start down that path.

WordPress (news, site) just launched their own Superman. Labeled the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit org is designed to “democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.”

In other words, and straight from the horse’s mouth:

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks.

The goals of the software projects they plan to promote are:

• The software should be licensed under the GNU Public License.
• The software should be freely available to anyone to use for any purpose, and without permission.
• The software should be open to modifications.
• Any modifications should be freely distributable at no cost and without permission from its creators.
• The software should provide a framework for translation to make it globally accessible to speakers of all languages.
• The software should provide a framework for extensions so modifications and enhancements can be made without modifying core code.

Examples of projects that embrace the philosophy include WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, BuddyPress, and of course, the Web CMS itself. 

Feeling charitable? Donate. 

Sick of TweetDeck, Twhirl or Twitterific? Of alliterative Twitter clients? Then maybe Seesmic (news, site) has what you’re looking for. The new Seesmic Look is for the Twitter user in need of a simple, sleek solution (sorry).  

What’s up with Flash content management in 2010? According to Flypaper Studios (news, site), it’s all about doing right by the e-Learning customer base.

The third version of the company’s Flash CMS platform was released this week, and includes features like an overhauled data base (for speed!), learning management system (LMS) bookmarking, and a new scoring display component.

There’s never a dull moment for web publishing, especially in 2010.

In a recent survey conducted by Sitecore (news, site), the .NET Web Content Management software company discovered that the number of organizations implementing Web analytics has risen to nearly 90 percent. For a market that’s expected to hit US$ 953 mil by 2014, we can’t say we’re surprised.  

Tom Foremski of the Silicon Valley Watcher has continually called for the need of the media engineer -- an individual who is part journalist and part software engineer -- in today’s web publishing industry. Lately, his vision is becoming reality.

The Guardian News & Media (via Guardian.co.uk) are broadcasting their recent good fortune. It turns out that it has sold 68,979 copies of its premium iPhone app, which launched in December. Does the future of web publishing belong to iPhone apps?

Each quarter, Akamai (news, site) publishes a “State of the Internet” report. The rundown includes data gathered across Akamai’s global server network about attack traffic and broadband adoption, as well as where each country ranks in speed.

Q3’s verdict: United States, we’re not even in the top 10 (insert sad emoticon here).

Traditional marketers and communicators are obsessed with achieving their objectives. Web marketers and communicators are obsessed with helping customers achieve their objectives.

Why waste all that time creating an account on a website when you can login with one click of your mouse? Such is the beauty of Facebook Connect. And, if we’re lucky, soon the same will go for Twitter (news, site) as well.

Word on the street is that the microblogging champs are planning to release a set of tools that will enable third party websites to integrate Twitter features directly into their websites and services.

Not to be mistaken for Twitter’s Simply Buttons with a new look (the buttons let users on third party sites sign into Twitter), the new features will reportedly allow websites to authenticate users, pull data and publish it back to Twitter. Though it’s true that all these functionalities currently exist, they’re not wrapped in the neat little package that Facebook Connect offers.

Facebook Connect has gained massive popularity since its release in 2008, currently extending to 80,000 websites with a monthly 60 million users. And let’s not forget a recent and fairly significant move from Myspace. Once thought to be the king of social networks, the site bowed pretty low when it integrated Facebook Connect into its Fan Video service last week.

Will Twitter’s upcoming tools catch on? Towards the end of 2009 our fine feathered friend saw an unexpected leveling out in their growth rate, causing many to wonder the site would do next. Perhaps these connectivity tools are one their tricks for an explosive 2010.