Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.

Some of the options I am considering for this site include:

• Partnering with others to build a bigger and better CMSReport.com. I wouldn't mind seeing this site become more of a community driven site.
• Selling CMSReport.com, both domain and site, to a company or someone whom can take this site to the next level.
• Returning CMSReport.com back to its roots as a personal blog.

Five years ago, I started CMS Report by wanting to build a website focused on reporting today's news in the world of content management systems (CMS). At the time, I was obsessed with information systems and realized that a CMS is one of the best vehicles to putting the ideals of information systems into practice. My goal was to either blog here at the site about content management or to refer others to CMS stories posted elsewhere. My strategy was to make this site my personal bookmark for stories that would interest me and perhaps a few others that might share my interest in this emerging market of Web content management.

There has been a lot of articles written lately on Rupert Murdoch's latest comments regarding the need to charge online readers for the content they access to the business model The Wall Street Journal utilizes. Murdoch recently announced that additional News Corp's newspapers would be charging users access to their online content.

Speaking on a conference call as News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, Murdoch said the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.

"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."

That pay for content business model that Murdoch wishes to spread to the the rest of the News Corp holdings has worked pretty well for the WSJ. Yearly subscription to WSJ.com is around $100 and the business news site recently introduced a cheaper micro-payment system. Deane Barker recently pointed out this story on his Gadgetopia blog. Barker points out that this business model could possibly work for additional online news sources, but Murdoch needs "another big player on the bandwagon, and he might kick the snowball off the hill. Gannet? New York Times Company?". Barker's point is that for News Corp's subscription model to work, access to news content needs to be limited at other places online too. In my opinion, a fight against free online content is a war that has already been lost.

As a subscriber to the WSJ in both print and online content, I do see paid online subscriptions working for niche news sites. I however have serious doubts that the model can work for general news. People are willing to pay and only pay for content they can get nowhere else online. The news articles found in the WSJ is unique content and since its also content of value, I'm willing to pay for it. However, reporting general news is a much different game. Even if the majority of newspapers started charging access to their content it only takes one newspaper willing to offer that same story for free to break the pay for access model.

Yesterday, I talked about CMS Report's five most read articles that were published in 2007. Today, let's talk about seven of our articles that remained at the bottom of the dog pile. Listed below are Seven Great CMS Report Articles that you few people read.

1. A review of ReviewBasics
2. Introducing Facebook to the Boss
3. United States students continue to fall behind in IT education
4. Saying Goodbye to Old Media
5. Thunderbird 2.0
6. Virtually impressed with Microsoft
7. Getting more work done through less innovation

Most of the articles listed above were read less than 1000 times. Yet, in my opinion, the articles are some of the better articles I wrote in 2007. Hey, some of the stories even have pictures (something I rarely do on my site). Perhaps you could make it one of your 2008 New Years resolutions to read the articles?

What a great year we had at CMS Report! In 2007, we posted over 800 articles. Below are the five most read articles that I posted in 2007. Interestingly, three of the top five stories have little to do with content management systems.

1. The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization
2. I have lost my Wow
3. IE7 update available for Vista while Windows XP users wait
4. Drupal on a Budget
5. Comparing Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal

For those that are curious, the most read article of all time at CMS Report is a comparison I did between Drupal and Joomla. I posted that article in late 2006 and it has been read 35,920 times (thank you Google).

My 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 I would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.

This post you are reading has been saved unpublished for a few days as I have feared it reads too much as a rant.  In this post, I'd like to discuss the difference between good and bad competition when it comes to similar "news sites" such as my own CMS Report.   I also want to touch on about how a CMS such as Drupal and Joomla brings both the good and the ugly online.  Unfortunately as with all technology, the modern CMS not only has been a blessing to sites dishing news for their writers and their users...but also a curse.