There are some people blessed with the rare skill of saying something of value under 140 characters or less. One of those people is Addison Berry. Addi is an active contributor to the Drupal open source project, Lullabot team member, and former civil servant . Two tweets from Twitter by Addison Berry that made me smile when I first read them can be found below.
"I find the kinder and gentler I am to myself, the kinder and gentler I am to others."
Last month I began my annual break from technology. Using previous technology breaks as my guide, I had expected to spend a lot less time at the computer and cell phone. My plan was simple, straight forward, and summarized in a simple slogan, Blog Less, Relax more. A month later, I write this blog post with the realization that my Technology Break of 2009 was a complete utter failure.
During the past year, I've posted various articles on social publishing systems. Open source content management systems such as Drupal, Movable Type, and WordPress have done a lot in the past year to better incorporate social media features into their web applications. I think the topic of social publishing will continue to be an interesting topic as the CMS continues to evolve in order to stay current with the current social tech trends.
The following is a WordPress.TV video of Andy Peatling, Automattic, talking about the WordPress social networking system BuddyPress at WordCamp Montreal. In the video Peatling gives practical advice for people considering WordPress/BuddyPress as a platform.
We made it! We made Jon Marks' updated Follow Forty Twitter CMS Gurus list.
So, you want to follow the CMS world on Twitter. How about the ability to follow the creme de la creme of the CMS Twitterati in a couple of clicks. Well, my friend, you’ve struck gold. [UPDATE: Even more gold than promised. The list is growing. More than 40]
Better yet, if you read the comments, we were added after some controversy. By the way, Jon has correctly included himself in the list.
BuddyPress 1.0.1 was released yesterday. This point release fixes a number of security issues in the 1.0 version so it is a critical upgrade for everyone currently running BuddyPress. There is also a number of other bug fixes so please review the release history for more information.
There has been a huge transformation this year at WhiteHouse.gov. Blogs, RSS feeds, and connections to social networking sites are being fully utilized at the President's website. Those of us that have worked in information technology positions for the federal government have experienced first hand just how slow bureaucracies can be in taking advantage of newer technologies. From my perspective, it is almost surreal to see references to Web 2.0 from a website for an office that once didn't allow the President of the United States to send emails or even use a smart phone.
One of the more interesting concepts, I think, is the many ideas for how to incorporate microblogging (think Twitter) into your content management system. Drupal Voices via Lullabot interviews Rob Loach and briefly talks to him about his Distributed Micro-Blogging proposal which received a grant from the Knight Foundation. The audio recording is only two mintues long but there is enough there to get you started thinking how microblogging may eventually play a role in the larger world of content management.
Jon Marks, a technical analyst from the United Kingdom, posted an interesting article last week on his blog. In the post, The CMS Word on the Tweet, he discusses the difficulty of finding "his world" on Twitter when seeking conversations centered around content management system. Jon even uses CMSReport.com's CMS Focus as an example for showing what he observes as a large divide between open source Web content management systems and propriety enterprise software. A divide that many of us may already recognize but haven't quite put into words like Jon has.
To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.
I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.
Jon asked me via Twitter to let him know what I thought of his article. I think Jon has done an excellent job of identifying the dichotomy found within CMS. It does seem that the enterprise often takes an approach to content management that differs greatly from open source projects. The approaches differ so much that the parties involved often end up defining what is a CMS in two different ways. The only thing I would like to comment on is that I unfortunately live on a third, yet unidentified, world that the other two worlds don't fully understand.
Long time readers should already know that I'm a big fan of Andrew McAfee. Andrew McAfee is the Associate Professor at Harvard Business School that is widely credited for coining the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”. With all the traveling I did in January and February, I haven't had much chance to visit some of my favorite blog sites. To my surprise, Andrew McAfee recently moved his blog from the business school's CMS over to his own domain and his new site looks great!
My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about "Twitter fever" finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The start of the article is interesting to read.
Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.
"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."
Isn't that ironic? When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough. The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere. Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement. The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).
Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient. Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less. What would we call this new service, Twit?
After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things. My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper. At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.