Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Month: February 2010 (Page 1 of 3)

Social Publishing with Drupal — New GG Whitepaper

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.

Paper on Open Government Data Initiatives Available

Updated March 3, 2010

Government agencies produce a lot of information. Making it accessible to the public, which essentially paid for it, can be quite challenging. The volume is high. The formats are varied. Much of it remains locked in information silos.

Support is growing to take steps to make as much government information available to the public as possible. President Obama issued a directive describing the official policy for Transparency and Open Government that mandates an unprecedented level of accessibility to government information. At the same time, technical advances have improved the feasibility of increasing access to the data.

I recently completed a Gilbane paper on this topic and how some agencies are improving access to public data. It is now available for free on our Web site at https://gilbane.com/beacons.html. The paper’s sponsor, Mark Logic, has provided interesting case studies that illustrate the challenges and approaches to overcoming them. I also explore some of the major hurdles that need to be crossed to achieve this goal, including:

  1. Extremely high volumes of content and data
  2. Highly diverse, heterogeneous data formats and data models
  3. Complex content integration and delivery requirements
  4. Time-sensitivity of content
  5. Changing information environments

The approaches described have enabled that users of this technology to implement high-volume, disparate-data applications that not only overcome old technical barriers but also deliver new value to their organizations. This is, after all, the essence of open data – be it for open government, open publishing, or open enterprise.

I encourage you to read this paper to get a better understanding of what works to make government data more open.

Update: the Beacon is also available from Mark Logic.

FlashMoto Introduces Multilingual Flash CMS

FlashMoto.com, a start up that specializes in Flash website creation and provides a Flash CMS, launched an updated version of their Flash content management system with multiple language support. FlashMoto’s control panel has been translated into 12 languages, among which are: Spanish, Bulgarian, Japanese, Romanian, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Serbian, and Czech. The interface language can be changed once a user logs into the admin panel. Users may edit their Flash CMS website content, add new pages, edit and delete the existing pages, manage the website menu, galleries, contact forms, upload videos and music, etc. Other features include SEO support, ability to upload your own fonts and integrate external modules and widgets. All the data is stored in XML files instead of a database. FlashMoto flash content management system features a basic navigation interface and WYSIWYG editor. In its next version, expected to be launched towards the end of March, FlashMoto will add 4 more languages: German, French, Turkish and Polish.  http://www.flashmoto.com/

Content Globalization: Hot Topics at Gilbane San Francisco

We’re featuring multlingual content strategies, practices, and technologies in four sessions on the San Franciso program:

  • Reaching Global Audiences: Case Studies in Multilingual Multisite Web Content Management
  • Breaking Out of the Silo: Improving Global Content Value Chains by Collaborating Across Departments
  • Content Metrics: Tools for Measuring ROI in Global Content Infrastructures
  • Eliminating the Multilingual Multiplier: Addressing the Cost of Producing Formatted Content in Multiple Languages

These topics are among the hot spots on Gilbane’s 2010 Content Globalization Heat Map, which identifies a set of key investments that companies can make today to advance their content globalization practices and overcome language afterthought syndrome. (See this presentation for more information on these concepts.)

We’re in the process of populating the sessions with top-notch speakers. Check the Gilbane San Francisco conference site for updates. Twitter is #gilbanesf.

Content Globalization: Hot Topics at Gilbane San Francisco

We’re featuring multlingual content strategies, practices, and technologies in four sessions on the San Franciso program:

  • Reaching Global Audiences: Case Studies in Multilingual Multisite Web Content Management
  • Breaking Out of the Silo: Improving Global Content Value Chains by Collaborating Across Departments
  • Content Metrics: Tools for Measuring ROI in Global Content Infrastructures
  • Eliminating the Multilingual Multiplier: Addressing the Cost of Producing Formatted Content in Multiple Languages

These topics are among the hot spots on Gilbane’s 2010 Content Globalization Heat Map, which identifies a set of key investments that companies can make today to advance their content globalization practices and overcome language afterthought syndrome. (See this presentation for more information on these concepts.)

We’re in the process of populating the sessions with top-notch speakers. Check the Gilbane San Francisco conference site for updates. Twitter is #gilbanesf.

A New, Very Interesting Platform in the Digital Publishing Space: PubFactory

I’ve followed iFactory, which recently released PubFactory, since its inception as a multimedia service agency, going back to my days wearing the editor’s hat at eMedia Professional.  Here’s a company that has spent its youth wisely.

PubFactory is a digital publishing platform that emerges from iFactory’s many years of solving their clients’ pressing Web publishing demands, alongside iFactory’s habit of throwing in a few extra-demanding capabilities of their own.  They’ve taken what they’ve figured out and rationalized the process into a platform, and the platform is impressive.

PubFactory is content online publishing platform “built from the ground up to support books, reference works, and journals in a variety of XML formats, with full support for PDF, images, and other rich media.”  Sounds, good, but not unique, right?  Here’s what I really like hearing about: “…management tools for librarians and administrators, and a full suite of back-end controls for publishers to control their content and manage relationships with their customers.”

The range of options that are oriented to a publisher’s customers is impressive, and includes such things as flexible ecommerce, access models, social media, analytical metrics, to name the big ones, and the flexibility in publishing control is also smart, with strong search and browsing, DOI and various library-specific support, customization, and, basically, push-button PDF and ePUB creation.

This last feature is showing up more and more, as in SharedBook, a multi-source/community/blog-content ebook/pbook generator, to name only one.  The biggest surprise about PubFactory, however, is its sheer scalability.  Using PubFactory, and slated for release in late spring 2010, Oxford Dictionaries Online (part of Oxford University Press) will present modern English dictionaries, thesauruses, and usage guides.  Not exactly a chapbook.

Of course, real-world use is the real test, but iFactory’s decade-plus efforts suggest a good passing grade out of the gate.  I’m looking forward to seeing iFactory’s Director of Publishing Tom Beyer’s PubFactory demonstration at Tools of Change, next week.

Need me to look up a word for you?  If so, or if you want to know more about our upcoming study, A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Systems to Re-Invent Publishing, drop me a line.

Response to iPad Release: Publishers, Take a Deep Breath

Not surprisingly, there’s been a lot of ink spilt on the iPad, from the numerous name-related jokes, to serious considerations, both positive and negative.  I’ve been letting the iPAD news kick about for a while, before adding my two cents.

On the thoughtful side of iPAD-related commentary, as good an example as, any comes from Samir Kakar, CTO, Aptara Corporation, a fellow that knows a thing or two, or million, about ebooks, digital publishing processes, and content formats.

Samir points to some interesting strengths of the iPAD, including its use of the ePub format, even while rightly arguing that “the ePub standard will likely need to be updated to allow publishers to create more detailed layouts and attach various types of multimedia supported by the iPad.” Other important characteristics include the color screen, Apple’s DRM, and distribution and ecommerce platform initiatives like Apple’s iBookstore.

A lot of people are enthusiastic, and especially among the ebook crowd, since Apple comes in as a major play, and, hey, as usual, another of Steve Jobs’ good-looking babies.

But of course, the immediate impact the iPAD will have for book publishers will be modest, at least in comparison to these same publishers’ need to get their publishing processes in order. From the perspective of making money from digital content, publishers need to keep their focus on enriching content with meta-data and striving for one-source/many format publishing. This alone should cause book publishers to take a deep breath or two.

As to iPAD, while I may be wrong in my complaint, at least I’m consistent: As I’ve earlier argued about Kindle being a needlessly restricted device , I’m more annoyed when it comes to iPAD.  Why there’s no voice telephone option—despite the presence of the 3G cell phone signal I/O—simply flummoxes me. Why the iPAD isn’t multi-tasking—such as a MP3/iTunes player, while, say, perusing the Web or epublication—leaves me scratching my head.

But then again, I haven’t seen a compelling enough argument for dedicated ereaders that erase my reservations about too-high prices for artificially constrained communication devices.  Yes, people say that the Kindle is too big to be used conveniently as a telephone, and, obviously, the size/portability questions grow more as the size does, as with the iPAD.

But then, just what am I going to do with all those iPAD shoulder holsters I’ve been making in my basement over the long winter?

I guess I better concentrate on more useful projects, like the upcoming report from the Gilbane Publishing Practice, A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Systems to Re-Invent Publishing.  For more information about this, contact me or Ralph Marto.

EMC and Fatwire Announce Joint Offerings

EMC Corporation and FatWire Software announced that they will jointly offer solutions for Web experience and brand management to help manage online experiences and brand consistency. The strategic partnership between EMC and FatWire includes reciprocal reseller agreements, joint innovation, sales, marketing and services activities as well as a minority equity investment by EMC in FatWire. Under the reseller agreements, EMC will resell FatWire’s WEM product set as its WEM solution and FatWire will resell EMC’s digital asset management software including EMC Documentum Media WorkSpace and EMC Documentum Content Transformation Services as its digital asset management offering. The two companies have also committed to joint product development to extend Documentum-FatWire integrations. http://www.emc.com http://www.fatwire.com/

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