sioux falls

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.

A month ago, I started observing an increase in traffic from a relatively new aggregation site called Alltop.  CMS Report is now being featured in Alltop's content management page which is dedicated to "all the top content management news".  Alltop recently expanded the number of topics they cover and I surmise that content management is one of those new topics.   While there are already a number of news aggregation sites referring their readers back to CMSReport.com (and if you're one of them...we thank you), Alltop is special.     

What makes Alltop so special? First of all, the site is a project associated with Guy Kawasaki.  Guy Kawasaki has a history with Apple but he is one of those successful IT guys with so much confidence in himself that his time at Apple alone doesn't define him.  If you check out his blog on a regular basis you'll come to understand what I'm trying to write here.

Secondly, Alltop is special because it was developed by a neighbor, Electric Pulp.  Electric Pulp is based in my city, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a lot of successful tech companies with national presence to be found in Sioux Falls.  Go figure that one out.

Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal.  According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet (Mnpls) using Drupal 5.  Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.

I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection.  Yes indeed, open source does matter.

One of the biggest unknowns for those of us that live in the north central United States...how many Drupal enthusiasts are there in our area?  Not knowing the answer to this question has been bothering me.  I have also been a little disturbed seeing the map so empty of a Drupal user group for my part of the region.  So I'm hoping those of you that are Drupal users from South Dakota and bordering areas will join me and others in the new South Dakota Drupal User Group at groups.drupal.org.

This is a group for those in the state of South Dakota and and the border areas of South Dakota who are interested in Drupal! The number of Drupal users in our area may be small, but our numbers are steadily increasing. Lets get together and chat about all things Drupal whether you are a Drupal user, developer, or Web designer.

Could we have enough people for a Drupal meet-up?  Stay tuned...

It is not often that I use this site to talk about non-CMS or non-Tech, but I have to get this off my chest. Seeing four inces of snow on the ground in April does not make those that love summer happy. We had four inches of snow here, but other parts of South Dakota received more than a foot of snow. In other words, I can't complain too much, but I still hold the right to complain a little! The good news is that most of the snow has melted with only a few snow drifts still left in the yard.

Seeing this much snow during the last weeks of April isn't unheard of in the norhtern plains, but it doesn't happen too often. I think the last time I saw this much snow in April was in 2004. For the meteorologists at heart, the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls has a good explanation for show these type of winter weather storms develop in April.

I have to admit that when someone submits a story and I trust them...I sometimes don't read the whole article before I publish it.  So until I read Dean Barker's Gadgetopia, I didn't realize his company, Blend Interactive, was featured in eZ's SHARE! magazine.  The irony is that if I had read an article posted at my own site by one of eZ System's own people...Dean's post wouldn't have been new news to me.  Sigh, I have been just too busy...

You may not have heard of Blend Interactive, but they do sport a decent portfolio of sites they have developed and designed.  Probably the most likely well known work from the company is the home site for the instant messaging client, Pidgin.  The SHARE! magazine features Blend Interactive, in part, because it is one of the most enthusiastic users of the eZ Publish CMS in the United States.  eZ Publish's roots is in Norway and the software is more popular in Europe.  But, as the eZ article implies, there is a push to generate more users in the United States.

MySiouxFalls.com is a new and local online news source for the city where I currently reside, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  At first, I was not all that excited about the site and had not plan on mentioning the MySiouxFalls.com site here at CMS Report.  We've all seen these sites before, right?  In fact, I would say that many of the visitors to this blog likely have designed or participated in building sites similar to MySiouxFalls.com.  That's not to say that there are not some things from a content management perspective worth mentioning.

Open source fans likely would have interest in knowing that the site runs Joomla! for it's content management system.  Weather buffs who border on the geeky side also might find interest that much of the site's weather graphics are provide by HAMweather.  HAMweather provides weather-related products and services (some of it for free) and in my opinion produces some of the best "custom" graphics derived from the National Weather Service's NDFD.  While the site's software has caught my attention, for a change it is something else that has caught my attention.  After visiting the site a few times and a chain of events, I suddenly realized that sites such as MySiouxFalls, NowPublic, and The Register are slowly changing my habits as a news reader.