Content Management Matters ™

Fresh, original content is a website's most valuable asset. It keeps users coming back, and most importantly, gives a website a higher search ranking and more ad sales. So when a service promises to add tons of fresh, user-generated content with only a few lines of code -- for free -- you can see why a lot of heads have been turning -- many of which have money to invest.

Wetpaint, a Seattle-based wiki provider whose technology is used in almost a million social communities, has announced $25 million in venture capital funding for its new embeddable social publishing platform, Injected. The deal, which includes major investors like DAG Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Accel Partners, brings total funding to around US $40 million.

No matter how you say it, MindTouch has announced the release of MindTouch Deki Wiki "Jay Cooke" v8.05.

Driven in part by the requirements of Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community, the open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform known for its innovations in internationalization/localization, search and user experience, has aimed its sights on revolutionizing multilingual content management.

As we previously covered, wiki provider Socialtext, is expanding their offerings with two additions to their service, "Socialtext Dashboard" and Socialtext People".

CMSWire had the opportunity to discuss these two recent additions with Chairman and President of Socialtext, Ross Mayfield.

Spend a little bit of time listening to what your customers actually need and you might get some really good, saleable ideas for new features and services offerings for your product. At least that's what Socialtext did, announcing the newest version of their business social software along with four new service solutions.

A few weeks ago we covered that Cisco/WebEx and California-based enterprise wiki provider eTouch Systems were integrating SamePage, an enterprise wiki, into the WebEx Connect collaboration environment. Since that time, I had the opportunity to ask a few questions of Aniruddha Gadre, CEO of eTouch.

eTouch is very focused on usability and their Same Page wiki allows customers and employees to "access a secure wiki that enables them to communicate, collaborate and organize energetic ventures."

By closely integrating the collaborative content editing capabilities of SamePage with the application mashup capabilities of WebEx Connect, the new platform is expected to be available to more than 2 million Cisco customers in an effort to allow users to create content and collaborate on the go.

The mandate has come down from on high that your organization needs some Web 2.0 tools. However, since you are tasked with implementing Web 2.0 technologies internally, what we are really talking about is Enterprise 2.0.

So you figure you will just throw up a wiki or setup a forum and call it a day, right? Wrong. There’s some thinking that needs to go into this implementation if you really want it to be successful, and these six lessons will help you understand how to approach Enterprise 2.0.

Web 2.0 firm Zedomax gives us ... drumrolls, please!

The ONE BUCK WIKI!

On the One Buck Wiki, users can purchase whole categories of words.

A page on the One Buck Wiki currently costs US$ 10, but every 1,000 pages results in a price jump by another US$ 10.

The company aspires to push 4,000 pages by year's end.

Nice to know there are some aspirations blowing in the wind.

Today Traction Software released TeamPage 3.8, an enterprise blog and wiki solution.

To give you a sense of what you can expect from the offering, founder Greg Lloyd illuminated its muse.

"[Our customers] challenged us to further improve ease of use, scalability, management and the real need for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration 'at the edge' -- with customers, supply chain partners, sales partners, legal and other professionals -- as well within the core of the enterprise. We're extremely proud to have met this challenge.”

PaperThin has announced the release of CommonSpot Version 5.0, the latest upgrade to the company’s flagship Web CMS.

The release introduces a new authoring interface that includes RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, XML publishing and rendering capabilities.

As if the Web 2.0 bandwagon wasn't full enough with media outlets expressing interest in blogs, wikis and other sources of user-generated content, Time, Inc. has announced they will add social networking to some of its weekly magazine sites by the end of this year, or early 2008.

Don't get me wrong - it's not that the bandwagon is bad; it's great that so many companies are finally understanding the impact of Web 2.0 and are engaging their users. But many of these decisions, however long overdue, seem to lack coherent strategies.

Despite a broad track record across the digital space, the notion of wikis in the workplace still makes enterprises twitch with fear. Whether because they don't fully understand what a wiki is, or because the word itself conjures up visions of Lord of the Flies (employees running amok, unmanageable access to all kinds of information), many fail to realize the benefits of this helpful collaboration tool.

Wikis can help employees share information, track workflow and allow users to edit and author information with ease, often saving time and money.

The sports-oriented content providers at XOS Technologies are tapping into "white-label community platforms." The product, XOS Community, is positioned to give businesses the ability to create and manage broadband communities of their own design.

Analysts estimate that over 80,000 podcasts and 60 million blogs proliferate the Internet. As these figures grow and collaborative media-supporting business applications expand, we figured it was only a matter of time before a publisher recognized the growing need for a unifying industry voice.

Enter Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, just that voice for what parent company Larstan labels the "new media titans."

Xerox, better known for copying and collating than wiki'ing and blogging, expands its profile in the enterprise content management space by announcing a new version of their content management platform.

Conversation is making a comeback in a big way. While this doesn't mean more people are getting cozy over coffee, it does mean the tech-savvy are demanding faster and faster ways to get their thoughts out to both relevant audiences and those less so.

With Blog Flux's new Commentful, one-liners and whole discourses left on comments pages can be brought to an owner's attention in real-time, increasing rates of response so it's almost like having a real discussion -- almost.