Social Publishing Systems to topple the CMS

You and I have a dirty little secret. Many of the Web applications that we call content management systems (Web CMS) are not really content management systems. Huh? A lot of this confusion stems from the difficulty most of us have in answering what should be a simple question, what is a content management system? Scott Abel, The Content Wranger, has noted in previous comments that one of the problems in discussions about content management is that we really lack a common definition of CMS.

The problem we have in defining a Web application as a CMS isn't because people haven't offered good definitions for how we should define today's Web CMS. For example, I especially value Dean Barker's interpretation of a CMS at Gadgetopia, What Makes a Content Management System? On the contrary, the challenge for many of us is that what we know in theory is a CMS isn't really what is currently put into practice. The latest generation of Web applications that we are still calling Web CMS simply have moved beyond the scope of content management and into social publishing.

Something more than a CMS

What do you call a Web application capable of publishing and managing not only content, but is an application that also manages wikis, social networking, documents, forums, photos, and blogs? Some people will tell you these diverse features are best described under such terms as social software, Web 2.0, social networking, and Enterprise 2.0. While these terms may help create a lot of buzz, I have some difficulty in using these terms to describe the information system model being used by the applications. If you think the definition of a CMS can be a fuzzy or limiting term, wait until you start using the term "social software" in a business setting. Personally, I don't think my boss is in the mood to deal with such vague terms.

Jeff Whatcott, Acquia, who was originally promoting dropping the term CMS in Drupal's description, apparently realized that just saying "social software" alone wasn't the best choice either for marketing his favorite CMS. In the end, Whatcott moved the discussion to a higher level by finally helping to identify the information system Web applications such as Drupal should really fall under, a social publishing system.

What is a Social Publishing System?

Whatcott describes social publishing as a blend of three categories:

Web Content Management
Social Software (blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, forums, etc.)
Web application frameworks

Whatcott further defines the the information system for social publishing:

A social publishing system combines the above into a cohesive set of technology for assembling a web site that provides structure for people to express ideas and engage each other in proven patterns. Just a few of the patterns I see today are:

Wiki pattern: several people jointly editing a document or group of documents

Forum pattern: a structured discussion about an idea or document

Blog pattern: a person publishing personal opinions and observations on a regular basis

Article pattern: a writer and editor moving an article or story through an approval chain

Custom content pattern: a custom content type like an event, a press release, a conference session, etc that is created and published.

Social networking pattern: people publishing personal profiles, creating and maintaining their digital social graph, and interacting within their network

Things like RSS, tagging, comments, rating, voting, search, and input formats/editors permeate all of these patterns and need to be built in to the architecture. And user management, roles, and access control underly the entire system.

The genius of describing the features in a social publishing system as "patterns" is that it also allows flexibility for additional features that are found necessary for social publishing. For example, two additional patterns that I have suggested to be quickly added to the list is a document management pattern and media management (images, videos, music). Whatcott has replied and expanded his own thought to my suggestion even further.

The impact of Social Publishing on the Web CMS

Obviously the need for content management and the usage of the term, "content management system" isn't going away. There is just too much history and convenience to let the CMS slip from our vocabulary. However, if you believe Whatcott is correct in his model for the social publishing system, you have to also acknowledge that changes are about to take place in the entire Web application arena. While I can't be certain that social publishing will eventually be the most dominate information system on the Web, my gut tell me it will be so.

The following are four significant impacts I believe social publishing will have on the CMS market.

Content management systems will become a niche application. Over the past couple years, I have loosely defined forum applications (SMF, phpBB), wiki applications (mediaWiki), and blogging applications (WordPress) as niche or subsystems of the Web CMS. Under Whatcott's model, content management now becomes a pattern or subsystem of the SPS.
The best Web CMS of today will need to evolve into social publishing systems to survive. It's not just Drupal that is repositioning its focus on social publishing! Have you also taken a look at what SharePoint and Wordpress are doing lately?
The rise of SPS will hasten the consolidation of CMS products in both open source and propriety markets. See Dries Buytaert's bold statements under the header, Market predictions for 2008. Buytaert discusses the big three CMS that he sees surviving and those that will struggle under consolidation (I would shuffle the list a little).
Social publishing systems will be designed for more than just the desktop browser. What good is social software, if the system isn't also accessible on your PDA or SmartPhone? Hasn't Apple's iPhone shown us that people want to do more than just voice and text messaging on their phone?

If you really think about it, the purpose of the Internet was not to manage content. Instead the Internet's purpose was to exchange information, whether this is from computer to computers or person to people. In other words, content management systems really only meet a part of our needs for why we use the Internet. The social publishing model, with the scope and agility it is designed for, seems to be ready to do what the content management system was never designed to do. I think social publishing is here to stay and all that needs to be done is to spread the word.

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Comments

Simpler still?

I'd like to think that dealing with a lot of different environments will go away. I'd like to see an all-purpose "content manager" store, in my account, anything I create, attach or upload, give me control over access to it, and let me connect any item to any place that I have permissions, whether it's my public list of posts by date (blog), a discussion topic in which I'm participating (forum), one of my shared authoring areas, a work flow, whatever. Why should I have to care about the buzzwords, and have to manage stuff in multiple places? My stuff is my stuff, and I should be able to manage it in one place, but have it show up anywhere.

that doesn't make much sense

wordpress does just about all of that other than the forum management, so does drupal, etc. but they are by definition a cms. you can call them social management applications, but in reality what youre doing is no different than calling a secretary an administrative assistant. they still do the same job, right? and when someone says they are an administrative assistant what do you immediately thing? oh! youre a secretary! (sorry for the bad analogy)

Admin Assistants are not Secretaries

Actually, you're making my point for me. Administrative assistants are not just secretaries. There was a time when offices only needed someone to handle appointments, distribute the mail, and write dictation. As computers and other IT allowed administrators to do this work themselves...the need for secretaries diminished. A new position with a new mission was needed by managers...the administrative assistant. I don't know about your workplace, but in my organization admin assistants deal with payroll, human resources, property, and budget. A secretary as defined 20 years ago would be of no use for my organization today.

In the same sense, as useful as content management systems are...I and many others are of the opinion that we need something better. The social publishing system as defined today is the first steps in defining the applications likely to replace today's CMS.

I have to agree with Bryan

Hey Bryan! Hope this finds you well!

Just thought I might throw in my 2 cents
As a creator of a social publishing, collaboration and community building software href="http://www.mediablinkk.com/mediab_mediab...">MediaBlinkk. They really are a different breed and the next generation of software.

As my dad always said, you wouldn't use a screw driver as a hammer, and you wouldn't tape a hammer head to a screw driver to use it as a hammer. It may work for a few seconds, but later on you are still stuck with using a screw driver as a hammer.

Instead you'd probably use just a hammer and the right tool for the job. And in this case use a social publishing software. Plus social publishing software can be used in multiple other areas CMS's can't, like as a forum or other sharing style platforms. For customer feedback etc...

We like to think of Social publishing systems as the next wave of forums + content + social publishing + community building, Sort of like going from a typewriter to a computer.

Hope this helps, they are just different, you can read more about them on our site. My apologies for the links, but I just wanted to be upfront and vaildate Bryan's point.

- Colin ( href="http://www.mediablinkk.com/mediab_mediab...">www.MediaBlinkk.com).

Wonderful Post you have here.

Wonderful Post you have here. Very informative and helpful. Thanks for sharing.