Shimon Rura and Josh Ain provide a new approach to content management by bringing together the features of main stream content management with those of blogs. I was fortunate to get a preview at the Berkman blog meeting last night. They are now taking it on the road, speaking at OSCOM 4 in Zurich which runs September. 29 to October 1.
The authors express the significance of this move quite well so I will defer to their words.
“Content management systems have found two compelling applications. The organizational CMS focuses many contributors around common business goals. The personal CMS, typically a blog, eliminates barriers to individual publishing. While organizational CMS recreates its social structures based on existing business relationships, personal CMS leaves its users to develop relationships from the ground up.
Bloggers express these relationships using simple mechanisms like linking and republishing. Because blogs provide a lasting, personal identity, they make it possible for social phenomena like reputation and trust to develop online. These in turn support informal communities of interest, offering their members ad hoc ways to collaborate without establishing a typical business relationship.”
I was excited to see in their demo that they are taking this mixture in both directions as they fuse features of heavy duty content management (e.g., creating content for multiple distribution channels) with the features of blogs, along with some social networking characteristics. For the latter you see the interrelationships between your posts and links and those of others. They also bring a rich and flexible multiple level categorization capability to blogs. You can even display content from multiple categories at the same time with major and minor themes, creating, in essence multiple blogs on the same page.
I look forward to see where they are going to take their ground breaking efforts.
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