Yuval Ararat

Continues lerner eager to explore

Requiem to comments

We all like reading posts on blogs, news sites and media. we like to see videos and pictures. some of us like to comment on them too. but those comments are not social, they are local and isolated. who saw this in his twitter feed?

i commented on _____ blog post http://bit.ly____

This is a hack with a hint to the future.

Comments are a social thing, an interaction of the reader with the blogger. Why should it not be a part of the social fabric?
There are a few first trials to weave the social tools to website, like the cmswire.com  reactions driven by disqus, but comments are still available. No one was bald enough to take the plunge yet and remove comments all together.

The Facbook social plugin gives another platform to replace the comments while adding the facebook aspect to it.

The risk as with all cloud services is the locking of the data to a third party and with the last Amazon EC3 shutdown, as with all risks the mitigation and the value it offers should be assessed, my view is that an integration of a twitter/facebook feed to your articles is much more engaging then the current comments structure. The value and exposure in the social networks will beat the search value, yes i think that search will crumble against the mighty social network information structure, information is ranked better in a social network to my oppinion but that is a huge article i have no time to deal with at the moment.

So what do you think about the comments death? is it inevitable?

Why #CMS Modules are not Enterprise worthy

I just encountered elcom CMS proposition, flipping through the pages of the products i realized the truth of the proposition.
The product is bought as a base infrastructure with Base modules and then you can add new modules on top.
This is a very small business oriented approach to my taste and understanding.
When we approach an enterprise with a “Social Package” or with Blogs/Wiki/Comments modules that you can add to the base offer we will get a bitter response to the latter, the people in the organization don’t like to play Lego. they just don’t care if the tags is different module to the wiki’s or not, TCO is what they care about and the CAPEX encuring the purchase to be justified with the ROI.
So packing modules into integrations, seamlessly integrate able product lines will generate much better traction then modulizing offerings with a base install.
The thought line behind modulization is clear, installing a new module will be simple. but the simplicity is good for mediume and small businesses and not a large scale IT infrastructure where the stability and scalability play a bigger part of the decision making.
So my take on the offering from elcom is that its aimed to the medium size clients making them feel big enterprises as they are installing ECM and not some Joomla/Drupal open source thingy.
Looking into the offered modules and i noticed that the bread and butter of an enterprise are in the additional modules sections, SSO and Staging of content are the air you breath in an organization with more then one layer of content creator and multiple business units handling content in the environment.
This leads me to believe that the product is not aimed at enterprise after all is it.
So these days businesses use the Enterprise keyword as a marketing spin to make the purchaser look good in-front of the board of directors and to explain high costs, noice.
Coming back to the Modules vs Product theory, in the field of large organizations a module can be used only by a small segment of the business and be neglected in the purchase as to the additional cost, thus may be preventing a better business process. or it could be a hidden feature on the platform that gets used most often and add the best value.
Business in the sizes we are speaking of will shell the extra dollars for a full package so the offering of modularization does not appeal to it.
As oppose to the medium business who has a small IT team that is very well familiar with all the organization and has the ability to chase every requirement and be aware of it, in this case modularization is a great optimization solution to save on the IT cost of a CMS.

The iPad web influence.

WePadNo no no, i did not get an iPad on ebay, its still missing some basic specs i need like a camera, though the WePad seems more like what i want.
The iPad is starting to symbolize the death of the Searched web, where website page was king, this is done with the help of mobile OS’s perception of usability standards.
iPad is pointing on the change we are making to the internet, from the even spread internet to Silos of information instead with vertical content, the Apps!
There are some people in the industry that compare the iPad with the CD-ROM publishing phenomena, where CDs were sellotaped to the front of a magazine, and their inability to bring extra profit. they were only done to glorify the news paper brand.
Apps are wonderful things they are focused on a single realm of usage and the put the rest of the world aside, but they are changing the way we build our internet and structuring our content.
We used to have silos of thought and very productized information consumption long ago when the internet was nothing more then a dream in some university, they called it news paper.
But the internet broke these silos to pieces and enabled a generation of people to produce news and information sharing in the forms of Blogs, Micro blogging and Collaboration Sites.
These enabled us to publish everything and surpass governments to display real footage from places like Iran.

But the iPad is becoming the icon of the reversal of that, its iconic because of the broken promise of creating the ultimate publishers tool.

What we get is a big App driven solution resembling the iPhone and Android phones supplying segregated content streams that are awesome on the go but lack when you hit a certain size and commitment.
The phenomena we are getting now is that many companies invest efforts in becoming iPad capable with applications, especially publishing houses, which in this age of the web should not happen. The web standards should have sufficed with a browser.
Some will claim that the Appcelerator IDE and alike just create a web interface over the same content i supply, i disagree as to the point that web standards should have driven the product to be able to display and let a person interact with content without the need to re mask it under an app.

The issues i see with this from the content management side are huge, since we are now using a different interface to display content you will not be getting the same content as it is probably not looking “Good” on the App you just built, this will mandate an “iPad” version of the same content and thus will create content duplication and degradation to fix display issues that could have been avoided.
We are talking about multiple content formats to maintain partially duplicated content with same metadata and probably the same tags and classification, all in the sake of the App.
This will create the duplication of resources in the team to manage the Website and the App’s, iPhone/iPad/Android etc, content.
I wonder how quick will somebody build a publishing plugins/system only for iPhone/iPad and the likes?

But i think that the product is incomplete as with the iPhone that was released in the first version without the GPS who its competitors had.
So i am not claiming i will never buy an iPad, just not this one.

As for some other perspective i got thinking about when i was reading Jeff Jarvis article, the inability to open the packaging, with the ability to close it back, makes these items throwaway like and very unfriendly to people who can repair electronics or inquisitive child.
This is something i can understand in a phone a bit more, may be as a construction stability, but not at a personal computing unit.

Choosing a Content Management System

Books

Nearly all websites these days use some sort of Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a tool (usually web-based) that helps facilitate the process of creating, posting, organizing, and managing the content of a site.
Types of content you may find managed in a CMS include news stories, blog posts, photos, videos, events, and more