One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

Most people in the content management world will acknowledge that seeing these five guys together in the same room is a rare event. What you may not know is that for many of these open source leaders this event was the first time they have ever met one another.

We tend to focus so much of our time on our own projects that we lose sight of what is taking place outside of our own bubble. The benefits of open source projects getting to know one another better has me thinking a lot lately about the "The Strength of Weak Ties" and the importance of getting to know your competition.

CMS Expo 2011: Founders' Panel from SilverStripe on Vimeo.

The sound quality in the above video could be improved but I think we're just lucky enough to have the video. I'm not aware of any "official video" being taken by the conference organizers so we're fortunate the SilverStripe folks who shot this video were thinking ahead.

Just started reading Drupal's Dries Buytaert's blog posting titled, Joomla vs Drupal: business models and commercial ecosystem. The article comes just a week after he attended CMS Expo and are some of his thoughts on the Drupal/Joomla! comparisons many of us do with open source CMS.

But what does the future hold? The Drupal community seems to be expanding into the enterprise, whereas the Joomla community is expanding into, well ... Drupal. All the Joomla companies that I talked to at CMSExpo were in the process of taking their products and services to the Drupal market and rebranding their organizations to be cross-CMS compatible.

When time allows, I may add my own thoughts about Dries' article in this post as well as a comment over at Buytaert.net. In the meantime, please be sure to read the comments in the article (no flame war so far, yea!) as there is a lot of substance in the comment section too.

Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most part, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.

I was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.

In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.

Every year, there are some key information technology people that make mostly sound and trustworthy predictions for the coming year.  I'll be updating this page through the week with links to these visions of what we may expect in 2009.  My own thoughts and vision for 2009 and CMS Report will come later in another post (I am not worthy to place my own comments here).

Content Management and Social Publishing Predictions

Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead) - Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom

Ryan Thrash (MODx) - Evolution and Revolution

Open Source

Dave Rosenberg (Co-founder of MuleSource) - Open source as paid software

Assorted Tech Gurus - The Future of Open Source

Technology and Information Technology

Joe Zuccaro - Twitter, Blogging, Open Source CMS (Drupal), Government

Assorted Analysts - Cloud Computing, Windows 7, Collaboration, Patents

If you come across a posting regarding 2009 by an IT leader, please feel free to leave a link in the comment section below. 

I'm doing a little morning reading at some of my favorite Internet spots.  A couple of this morning's IT related posts that caught my attention:

• Rich Hoeg (eContent) has created a very nice tutorial/screencast on Google's SearchWiki.  Personally, I can't decide if this is a good move for Google or not.  It seems to me the biggest benefit of Google is that you go there, do a search, find the link you want, and get out.  Internet junkies like me already are too distracted with places like Digg.com that I like Google's single purpose pages.  When I'm on a search mission, I don't need the collateral damage.
• Dries Buytaert explains the weaknesses of serving your own CAPTCHA to fight spam and the benefits of Mollom hosting CAPTCHAs for you.  He also discusses the dirty business of comment spam where services will leave comment spam at sites like yours and mine for a fee.  As I commented on Dries blog, comment spam makes this world a scary place for website owners. I'm glad we have Mollom!

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites.

Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup -

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

CMSReport.com is one in a number of Drupal sites that have been "secretly" testing Mollom over the past several months. Since installing Mollom, I've been able to sleep at night knowing that Mollom is watching over my site. The amount of time I spend on moderating anonymous comments for potential spam has been significantly reduced thanks to Mollom. This is good stuff from Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen!

I just completed one of the most exhausting days at work I've had since switching over from operations to IT. Everyone wanted a "minute of my time" which translates in the real world to 20 minutes (if I was lucky). The last thing I really wanted to do after work was touch a computer. Yet, I find myself too excited to not type about some great news.

What is the good news? Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal, is starting his first Drupal startup. The working name for the company is Acquia.

Thus, I'm starting a Drupal company whose current working name is 'Acquia'. Acquia's software products will include a number of Drupal distributions -- for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal's founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community.

Already, some of the other CMS news related sites are wondering how the Drupal community will react to Dries' announcement. Comparisons are already being made to other open source CMS projects that have been torn between commercial and community interests. Take this CMS Watch post for instance:

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.

Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert tells all about the Drupal project: its history, where it is today and where it is going.

Perhaps if this is a "tell all" interview...Dries is finally hitting celebrity status and we'll soon be finding articles about him at TMZ.com instead of ComputerWorld?  :-)

Actually, the interview is quite good and I like the fact that beyond Drupal 6, Dries is pretty conservative about predicting Drupal's future.  It's best to keep us all guessing.

"Right now, Drupal's hardest challenge is to manage its explosive growth. We have raw and untampered ambition but we're left wondering how we can scale our infrastructure with the available resources, how we can attract more top-talent to help get all the work done, how to maintain -- and raise -- the high quality of our work, and how to make Drupal easier to work with. We're also learning how to deal with legal issues, we're figuring out how to better market ourselves, and how to efficiently organize large conferences."
 
Complete Story

Hopefully everyone will see the humor and irony of this post. I was visiting Dries Buytaert's blog this afternoon and then visited CNET's News page. What I observed this afternoon from those sites is either coincidence or ruthless strategic planning from the open-source community.

Buytaert posted on his blog about a recent interview he did as project leader of the Drupal CMS for a Belgian business magazine. Evidently the article paints a picture that Buytaert is the "anti-Bill Gates". Buytaert, through his post, indicates that he isn't too comfortable with the magazine's perception of him being anti-Microsoft.

The irony is that CNET reports that Bill Gates is stepping down from his full-time role at Microsoft, the company Gates founded. The article indicates that Gates is leaving Microsoft to use the time to pursue charity work: