January 2013

Thanks to Blend Interactive's Corey Vilhauer, I was reminded via an email blast that this is the last day to register for the Now What? Conference at the "early bird" price. This one-day conference is designed to help anyone who works with a website post-launch answer the question, “How do we keep our website useful and relevant?” The conference was created to help bring together web and marketing professionals from across the region to hear from some of today’s leaders in web project management, web governance, and content strategy while talking shop with colleagues and speakers.

Recently, the fine folks at CMS-Connected gave me the opportunity to become a periodic guest for the CMS in the Spotlight segment of their show. CMS-Connected is an hour-long monthly news webcast that focuses on the content management industry. For the January show we had Joomla! in the spotlight, but once we went live I soon found myself challenged to adequately cover the CMS given short period of time and format.

In the recent times when we developed web properties, it has become standard for us to adhere to "Privacy and Accessibility" guidelines. In some cases, the customers have their own set of privacy and accessibility guidelines, and in other cases the customers expect the implementation agencies to follow the latest standard. In either case the core of these guidelines are laid out of by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Let us explore the accessibility guidelines a little more, and ask, why and how it is relevant?

Why Accessibility?

It is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse abilities

Update: A recording of January's show can now be found on the CMS-Connected site. Also, a continued video discussion on Joomla! can be found here at CMS Report.

The world of intranets was a simple one before. Nobody ever thought about having the right CMS or ECM or even WCMS to support their intranets. But was it really that simple?! I believe everyone who ever worked on an intranet or used an intranet at work had the same old problem, once a page was created where to find it? Who is allowed to create pages? How to edit them? Who approves them?

Online video becomes the star format for branded content

London, 15th January 2013: 2012 was characterized by a marked increase of online video in brands’ communication strategies. The top videos of 2012 ranked by Ebuzzing Social, the global experts in social video advertising, show the importance of this emerging format and its potential as a medium for original content and creative advertising.

In 2012 the sectors which had the most success in online video were Entertainment, Technology, Luxury and Drinks

•  Samsung, Google, Red Bull and Dior all have 2 videos each in the global top 20 videos

Sports stars are the key to success

"A well-executed CMS selection process takes into account the needs and desires of both marketing and IT, creating a content management environment that has been optimized for those who are responsible for publishing content as well as those who are responsible for providing technical support."

 -John Fairley, Walker Sands Communications, "Don’t Let IT Hijack the CMS", CIO Update, October 3, 2012.

Brett Profitt recently posted on the Elgg Blog that Elgg 1.8.12 has been released. Elgg is an open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments. Elgg can be found in a number of settings from campus wide social network to internal collaborative platform for small and large organizations alike.

Elgg 1.8.12 has been released with numerous bugfixes and improvements. Enhancements in this release of Elgg include: