From Publish comes an article called Content management ready to explode (picked up as well, naturally, by Evhead). The article rings true to me, and what’s more, no one currently in the field has a lock on things. When you need a techie priesthood to run a CMS on a day-to-day basis, the CMS is pretty much beside the point – you haven’t addressed the key issue. To me, the most important issue is to overcome the workflow and work volume issues by placing publishing responsibility as close as possible to the person who is writing the original text. That person mustn’t have to be shadowed by a CMS tech at each step, either.
Is it just me
, or is what Thom Calandra (editor in chief of CBS MarketWatch) says in this interview completely off target in the current context? Maybe it’s just me, but I strongly believe that doing anything for a mass market on the web in 2001 is doomed to failure. His comments read, to me, like unadulterated thoughts from 1997.
A principle of the web that has emerged: if the barriers to access are low enough, users will tend to be drawn to more specialized, niche-oriented material. Weblogs are not the be-all and end-all, by any stretch of the imagination – but it’s not a coincidence that the form has thrived and that tools have been built to maintain them easily. Personal publishing is just the opposite side of the same coin in terms of the development of content online. As niche web publications built out since 1999, so did niche-focused publishing tools begin to thrive.
In other publishing
news, Margaret Atwood has won the Booker Prize.
Ian Kallen from Salon
has posted an interesting slide show he presented in July called Industrial Strength Publishing. It contains a lot of info about Salon’s content management system, which they have announced they will sell through a spin-off company called Creation Engines.
I’m absolutely convinced
that publications that place their editorial material online stand a much greater chance of increasing their subscription and newsstand revenue. I don’t have a lot of firm data to support my point of view, but I have lots of experience – I’ve been involved in publishing original material online for over 6 years now. And the only conclusion I can reach is that if the media are different, alternative channels support each other, they don’t undercut one another.
In Wired News today there’s an article that looks at magazines who don’t have much of an online presence: Publishing Without a Net. It’s interesting to read alternative views to my own.
