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The program for our annual Boston event is about 98% complete. We have a great keynote line-up with more to come, 30 additional conference sessions, 6 pre-conference workshops, and 12 product labs. Other useful links are sponsors & exhibitors, speakers, registration, and hotel. Note that we moved from the Westin Copley to the Waterfront Westin this year to be in the new Boston Innovation District and fast-growing Seaport / Fort Point Channel neighborhoods.

LinkedIn today announced Signal, a new feature (currently in beta) that lets members see an activity stream that combines LinkedIn status updates and Twitter posts from other members who have opted-in to the feature. LinkedIn has licensed the Twitter firehose to incorporate all of its members' tweets into the site, not just tweets with the #in hashtag embedded, as is current practice.

While it is hard to imagine anyone other than corporate and independent talent recruiters will make LinkedIn their primary Twitter client, Signal does have an element that is worthy of emulation by other social networks and enterprise social software providers that incorporate an activity stream (and which of those does not these days!) That feature is role-specific filters.

I wrote previously in this post about the importance of providing filters with which individuals can narrow their activity stream. I also noted that the key is to understand which filters are needed by which roles in an organization. LinkedIn apparently gets this, judging by the screenshot pictured below.

Notice the left-hand column, labeled "Filter by". LinkedIn has most likely researched a sample of its members to determine which filters would be most useful to them. Given that recruiters are the most frequent users of LinkedIn, the set of filters displayed in the screenshot makes sense. They allow recruiters to see tweets and LinkedIn status updates pertaining to LinkedIn members in specific industries, companies, and geographic regions. Additionally, the Signal stream can be filtered by strength of connection in the LinkedIn network and by post date.

The activity stream of every enterprise social software suite (ESS) should offer such role-based filters, instead of the generic ones they currently employ. Typical ESS filtering parameters include individuals, groups or communities, and workspaces. Some vendors offer the ability to filter by status as a collaborator on an object, such as a specific document or sales opportunity. A few ESS providers allow individuals to create custom filters for their activity stream. While all of these filters are helpful, they do not go far enough in helping individuals narrow the activity stream to view updates needed in a specific work context.

The next logical step will be to create standard sets of role-based filters that can be further customized by the individuals using them. Just as LinkedIn has created a filter set that is useful to recruiters, ESS providers and deploying organizations must work together to create valuable filter sets for employees performing specific jobs and tasks. Doing so will result in increased productivity from, and effectiveness of, any organization's greatest asset – it's people.

I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.

Here's the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you'd like to learn more. What's the future of social publishing? Let's start a debate. /geoff

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.

Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.

By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.

Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.

The main conference program will be published in a week or two, but the 1/2 day pre-conference workshop descriptions for June 2nd have been posted at: http://gilbanesf.com/workshops.html.

How to Select a Web Content Management System
Instructor: Seth Gottlieb, Principal, Content Here

Making SharePoint Work in the Enterprise
Instructor: Shawn Shell, Principal, Consejo, Inc.

Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management
Instructor: Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, Welchman Pierpoint

Getting Started with Business Taxonomy Design
Instructors: Joseph A. Busch, Founder and Principal, & Ron Daniel, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies LLC

Sailing the Open Seas of New Media
Instructor: Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs, LLC

The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.

Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.

If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.

Activity for our 4th Gilbane Boston conference at the Westin Copley November 27 -29 is ramping up quickly. The conference schedule and session descriptions have been posted. The early list of exhibitors and sponsors is also available. And, online registration is open. We'll be updating the site on a regular basis from now on, usually daily, so bookmark the pages that interest you to keep up-to-date.

Looks like some really interesting stuff will be coming out of Google that will profoundly change both enterprise and consumer search experiences and markets. Lynda Moulton's post over on our Enterprise Search Blog is a good place to start on what, as of last week, has emerged - thanks to Steve Arnold - about Google's nearer-than-you-might-think plans.

I haven't been very good at blogging about this conference as it has been a busy Winter and early Spring. In any case, there is still time to join us, especially if you are in the Bay area. Registration is still open online as of this post, and is also available on site at the Palace hotel through Thursday. If you can only get away for one day, make it Wednesday for the keynote with Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The technology showcase is also open on Wednesday (with a reception) and Thursday. http://gilbanesf.com/conference_grid.html

Here is a quick update on next week's event:

New Sponsors & Exhibitors
Adobe has joined us as a Gold sponsor - their Enterprise Solutions and Developer Group in particular. See announcements on some of the new products and features to be shown from our 50+ exhibitors.

New Debates
In addition to our popular analyst session, two analysts will face-off on 7 topics they disagree on in Content Technologies: A Town Hall Debate. And of course, don't forget CMS Idol.

Keynote Survey
The early results from our survey on questions to ask the keynote panel show the topics attendees are most interested in are, in order:

• (78%) What are the top 3 technologies that must be considered in any content management strategies in the next 12-24 months?
• (60%) Are there any breakthrough classification or metadata tagging technologies on the horizon that you should be watching for?
• (57%) How will content management lite offerings from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM affect the content management market?
• (55%) How is widespread adoption of RSS/Atom going to affect content delivery? And what does this mean to enterprise content management or publishing strategies?
• (55%) What new publishing technologies should we expect to see in the next 12-18 months? Will they make it easier to incorporate better design elements to improve customer facing applications?
• (55%) Is there any real breakthrough search technology search on the horizon that you should consider for your intranet or extranet applications?
• (49%) How will Blog and Wiki tools be used in enterprise content applications? How are they being used today?
• (49%) Are there authoring tools on the horizon that are both user-friendly and capable of authoring for both electronic and print output?

UPDATE: You can see partial final results of the responses to all the questions here, and contribute to the survey here.

Content Globalization
Also, the top write-in question topic so far is on globalization and content management. This is a hot topic at the event - there are multiple sessions covering it, and many vendors showing related products and services - some of them have even put together a Content Globalization Pavilion.

We have over 100 expert speakers covering these and other topics. Conference program .

And don't forget to look into the Content Management Professionals Association Spring Summit

As we have written about in the past, the industrial sector of the economy is heavily dependent on the Internet. According to 2001 data from the U.S. Department of Commerce (the latest date complete figures are available), 18% of manufacturing shipments were e-business transactions, compared to 1% of retail sales, 2% of service sales, and approximately 10% of wholesale commerce. More startling is the volume of manufacturing shipments through eCommerce, which totaled $725 billion and accounted for 68% of all e-business. These numbers dwarf retail eCommerce for the same period, which were $34 billion and less than 3% of all e-business.

And just as major retail sites like Amazon and Ebay depend heavily on their catalog content--and thus their content management capabilities--industrial sites are also heavily dependent on content and content management. Simply put, industrial buyers go to the Web seeking specific, actionable information about the products, materials, and components they need to buy. If they don't find that content on a given supplier's Web site, they move on. And they move on quickly. Within seconds, they have made a decision about whether the Web site has the information they need, in a form they need it in, and accessible in a way that is easy, fast, transparent--and anonymous.

I am attending a seminar today on industrial buyers and how they use the Internet. The event is sponsored by the North-Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce and ThomasNet.com. I will be live blogging during the morning as the speakers walk through some background and case studies tailored to manufacturers and industrial suppliers.