"There are people who can call a blog as their business. In this case, their revenue is mainly from ad sales on their blog. But, that is not a very sustainable or long term business approach you should have. Your online business must solve a person’s problem."
- Marieke Hensel, Why Blogging is Not a Viable Business Mode", Branding Personality, January 30, 2012
As I have done each and every year in the summer, I will be taking my annual break from technology. Through the month of August, I'll be decreasing my postings and management of this site in hopes of using the time to broaden my perspective. I need to spend some time recharging my batteries and my enthusiasm for content management systems as well as information technology in general.
I won't be abandoning CMS Report, but I'm really hoping you will be seeing me a little less here during the next few weeks. As always, I appreciate help in any articles submitted to CMSReport.com. If you want to really help out, create an account today and start contributing your own CMS stories. I'll be checking email, moderation queue, and social networks now and then for submitted posts to make sure you're not waiting too long to see your story published.
It is now time for me to unplug and officially begin Technology Break 2011. Have a good rest of the summer and see you on the other side!
From WordCamp Portland 2010, Melissa Lion & Julie Yamamoto session how how to evolve your career from blogger to professional marketer. I'm always fascinated when I hear people's professional career evolved over time, especially when it is a career that is immersed in information technology, the social web, and Enterprise 2.0.
Unique, Image-Based CAPTCHA Decreases Website and Transaction Abandonment, Increases Security and Conversion Rates
Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead, will give his bi-annual State of Drupal talk in the beginning of DrupalCon SF, where he’ll discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss Drupal 7, usability, the Drupal.org redesign, and other developments to Drupal.
CMS Report is here live at Drupal Con and we'll be blogging about the presentation as we hear it.
Edited: Video from the keynote speech has also been embedded at the end of this post. This video can also be found at archive.org.
2:30 PM: Dries finishing his speech with a pep rally cry. Drupal is growing up and Drupal 7 will bring in more users. As Drupal grow, Dries sees we need to stick to the culture...sharing and contributing, show passion, and innovating. Lastly it needs to stay a culture of fun. All together "awesome happens".
2:25 PM: Drupal as it follows the market to stay relevant but the desire is to also still needs to serve the low end of the market. This is why distributions will need to be utilized to serve both high end and low end of the market.
To succeed Drupal needs to focus on missing features. To succeed in the low end, Drupal needs to focus on creating better experiences. Both missions do overlap.
215 PM: Consolidation = One Big Winner. Lots of CMS runner ups...and very few winners. Drupal needs to be a winner. Winners have richness and reach to be successful.
Trend: Cloud computing and SaaS is hot. "Computing is transforming from an innovation to a service." How does Drupal stay relevant? Dries is talking about Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. The dilemma is the innovation makes room for a lower-end product often causing the original product to fail.
205 PM: Dries bring up some Drupal related statistics. According to Dries, Drupal now powers 1 percent of the Web.
The new version of J Admin Mobile! and J Admin Mobile Lite! have been submitted to the Apple App Store with the ability to upload images into Joomla articles, add new users, change user levels, along with other enhancements and bug-fixes.
Wall Street Journal: "Before heading to a store or retail Web site, many shoppers love to check out the growing flurry of product reviews posted online. But figuring out whom to trust in the blogosphere has gotten trickier as more and more bloggers get paid to promote products on their sites."
Lorelle on Wordpress: "The Real Estate world has changed dramatically since I was directly involved. Then, social media meant being an active member in your community, going to social events, meeting people how and when you could, signing deals on the hoods of cars, chasing down every lead you could with phone calls, brochures, newsletters, signs, social meetings…I guess little has changed.
What is different is that while some of the old marketing techniques work, the web changes things..."
My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about Twitter fever finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The start of the article is interesting to read.
Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.
"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."
Isn't that ironic? When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough. The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere. Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement. The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).
Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient. Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less. What would we call this new service, Twit?
After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things. My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper. At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.
The year 2008 was another great year for CMS Report. In 2008, we posted
close to 500 articles to the front page. Below are the ten most read articles that were posted
for the year.
Similar to last year, three of the top stories have little to do
with content management systems. It seems that there is more interest in gadgets than content management systems! Hopefully CMS Report can help change that.
As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site. May everyone have a great 2009!
CMS Wire recent took a look at Technorati's Top 100 blog sites and determined which CMS the sites were using most. They concluded, not surprisingly, that Wordpress was the most popular CMS with 34% of the top sites using the blogging application.
Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second [16%], and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.
Probably more interesting, is that full-fledged CMS barely made a dent in the top 100 list.
Wider scope Web CMS technologies are not used much by the top blogs. Drupal scores 5 sites, with Plone used by 1. Other popular Web CMS platforms are conspicuous only by their absence.
CMS Wire isn't saying that CMS are not good for blogging. I think what CMS Wire is observing is that when users want to only blog...they prefer to keep it simple. Why use a CMS with more features than they possibly can use when something like Wordpress or Movable Type can do the job? At least that is what I get from the article.
This Labor Day marks the end of my Summer Technology Break, a self-imposed exile from spending too much time at the computer when instead I could be enjoying family, the great outdoors, and the real world. How did I do? Well, the family spent some time in Michigan visiting family, friends, and the fish. My 4 1/2 year-old son caught his first trout on his first fishing trip (thanks to the patience of Jason and Jean Stephens from Head Hunter Guides). We also spent a week camping and hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota which included a family hike up Harney Peak. For the most part, I would say my break from technology during my hours away from my "day job" was a success.
While I did manage to maintain CMS Report during the summer with a number of posts, I would say my Google PageRank and decrease in advertisement revenue shows that I was indeed on a technology break. With the break over, I will now be tending to the posts in numbers and consistency with more tender loving care. I also have some ideas for helping to take CMSReport.com up to the next level. For better or for worse, you can expect some changes at this site in the months to follow.
I'm sure by now, new visitors to CMSReport.com have wondered...why so few posts? Last May, I explained that I was taking a break from technology during the off hours of my "day job".
So, as I have done in past years, I'm taking a break from technology. By posting less during the summer months, I hope to recharge my blogging batteries for the cold weather that is sure to follow. I will make an effort for the quality high for those articles I do post this summer, but the quantity of posts will be somewhat lower. My slogan for this summer's tech break is Blog less, breathe more. I hope some of the other blog junkies out there join me and take a similar technology breaks. Life is too short to live and die by the computer.
So, now you know. I haven't lost interest in content management systems and information technology but I do have a greater interest. I have an interest of staying sane in this busy profession of IT which many of us have chosen. If you don't take such a break yourself, how do you keep your sanity?
Blogger: Beyond the Basics is a new book from Packt, which will take users beyond the basics of Blogger. Written by Lee Jordan, this book will help users to take full advantage of the rich and powerful features of Blogger to transform their blog into a fresh and state-of-the-art blog as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Blogger is a blog publishing system from Google with a friendly interface specifically designed to create and maintain weblogs. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features including RSS feeds, link-backs, photo slideshows, and integration with popular Google applications like Picasa. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.
This book will focus on transforming a typical blog into something fresh and professional that stands out from the crowd. It starts with an introduction to an example blog, discussing what it is lacking, and then adding all the features of Blogger to make it successful. This book will show users how to transform a slow-paced typical business blog into an attractive and interactive profit-making blog with measurable results. It has a very user-friendly approach and shares tips, tricks, and resources to continue to grow their blog.
This book deals with using the current Blogger and third-party tools to optimize and create widgets for a blog. Users can transform their blog using existing tools then take it further with more challenging approaches to customizing their blog. All the steps involved in each example are listed under the section called "Time for action". Similarly, the results of that action are listed under the section called "What just happened". This structure adds to the clear, simple, and focused approach of the book.
Seth Gottlieb, Content Here, recently turned me on to Sacha Chua and her blog. Sacha is an Enterprise 2.0 consultant and application developer for IBM and she also happens to be a very good blogger. What makes her blog interesting, besides being well written, is her posts on corporate use of social technologies given from the perspective of her generation, the Millennials (latest hip word for Generation Y).
While some organizations are still debating about introducing Web 2.0 technologies to their employees, this newest generation now entering the workforce is likely to expect that such technologies are already available to them for use in their daily work tasks. While the use of information technology is often viewed by companies in terms of staying competitive and a requirement for implementing strategic plans, the technologies are also increasingly becoming an essential tool for the human resources department. If you're expecting to attract and keep bright educated Millennials such as Sacha within your organization, you then need to better understand how people in her work cohort are likely to process the work given.
