tag:www.anuff.com,2008-08-08://1 2008-08-25T16:39:55Z a rapidly evolving situation Movable Type Pro 4.2-en tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.9 2008-08-25T01:53:03Z 2008-08-25T16:39:55Z

Ed Anuff I used the Action Streams plug-in to put a list of Twitter and Facebook activities in the right hand column.  I did this out of habit, treating the list of tweets as a black-box in the form of a widget rather than something actually integrated into the content of my blog.  Over the last couple of week, I realized that while this made sense from a technical perspective, it didn't really reflect the true relationship between the content generated through lifestreaming and long-form blog posts that expounded on a particular idea, never mind that fact that the former are going to outnumber the latter due to my lackadaisical efforts to compose interesting posts.  But, more importantly, it demonstrated some of the limitations of using widgets as the fundamental building blocks of web publishing.
]]> This isn't particularly an epiphany for me, although I've spent many years advocating the idea that web publishing should be component-oriented.  In 1998, Oliver Muoto and I started a company called Epicentric, that we built up to a $40 million a year business and sold to Vignette that was based on the idea that corporate intranets and extranets could be replaced by "My Yahoo"-style corporate portals.  It made sense at the time, because it represented a much more efficient alternative to the cumbersome content management systems or hand-edited web sites that many businesses were trying to use as the basis of their web publishing efforts.  Corporate America was trying to use the tools that had been developed for Internet sites whose primary business was the web to internal communications where these activities were supposed to be used in support of some other primary business and the end-result was at best overkill, and at worse a sinkhole of time and money.  So, corporate portals where you simply assembled your page out of a collection of "portlets" (what we now call "widgets"), was a welcome alternative.  Even then, we knew that there were some limitations to this, though.  Each portlet was an isolated silo of content, we knew that eventually these things would need to talk to each other, and ideas like standards for "inter-portlet communications" were discussed at enterprise software conferences.

Seven years later, in the fall of 2005, I saw that Web 2.0 was recapitulating many of the developments of the enterprise software world.  Content management systems, service-oriented architectures, and some of the work I'd done related to portals and portlets were now being redescovered in the form of blogging, mashups, and widgets.  Teaming up with some of my former Epicentric colleagues, I started a company called Widgetbox that tried to implement some of the things we'd learned in the portal space to make widgets easier to build, find, and use.  That company has since gone on to become the largest destination site for widgets on the web, with over 70,000 widgets available, and platform technologies like OpenSocial and Facebook's Application API are built on many of the concepts that Widgetbox pioneered.

However, we still come back to the fundamental challenge of using widgets, which as that their strength is also their limitation.  Widgets are componentized content, and components, by definition, compartmentalize.  So, when I started this blog, and used Action Streams as a widget to segregate my microblogging activities from the rest of the content, I was falling into the trap of letting expediency drive information flow and the end result was a much less effective web site.  Luckily, Action Streams is implemented as a plug-in and even though it can be used as a widget for quick integration, it can also be used within Movable Type's powerful templating mechanism to let me easily create a single blog stream that merges my lifestreaming with posts like this.  You can see the end results if you visit the main page of the site and see the blog posts intermixed with tweets on it.  I really think that even a simple type of mash-up like this is a lot more interesting, especially when it can be accomplished without any coding just by editing a template.

Today, we're seeing more and more services being delivered in the form of widgets.  Services like Disqus and Pluck and Google Friend Connect provide entire commenting systems and social media features in the form of a simple line of Javascript.  These services are very convenient, but it's important to ensure that any such service has a robust API that can be used to think outside the box, or at least the widget, and to full leverage these within the overall experience of your site rather than just jamming together a set of boxes on a web page and calling it a day.
]]> tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.7 2008-08-15T15:45:22Z 2008-08-25T02:50:11Z

Om Malik did a good job today of summing up the conversation about the convergence of blogging and social networks that was started by Six Apart's launch of Movable Type Pro on Wednesday, with a full set of features aimed...

Ed Anuff Om Malik did a good job today of summing up the conversation about the convergence of blogging and social networks that was started by Six Apart's launch of Movable Type Pro on Wednesday, with a full set of features aimed at allowing bloggers to create social network-like communities around their blogs.  A couple of things worth adding, though.  First, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, the "social" aspect of blogging platforms is one of the main things that differentiated them from the previous generation of content management systems.  Second, is that there seems to be a perception that the social network around a blog is meant to replace or compete with the mainstream social networks such as MySpace or Facebook.  Fostering community discussion and interaction wherever a focus of interest occurs is a good thing, and the blogosphere is a perpetual source of these focus points.  This is the inevitable evolution of blog commenting, which is what makes sites like GigaOm so interesting.  The social network capabilities will allow these blogs to take that to the next level.  However, these communities will be linked to each other and to the large social networks like Facebook through a variety of mechanisms, such as all the emerging standards like OpenID, aggregation tools such as FriendFeed and Movable Type's Action Streams capabilities, and other forms of data portability.  The nice thing is it's not going to be an either or choice, sometimes more is more. ]]> tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.5 2008-08-14T01:34:32Z 2008-08-25T05:59:46Z

Ed Anuff ]]> What was occurring on the Internet in the form of blogging and in the intranets in the form of corporate portals and intranet collaboration tools was the result of a sea change that had occurred in terms of how people thought about web content creation.  The original content management systems, whether for internal or external content, were designed to address what was perceived as the overriding need to impose control over the process of how content was published.  This was because web technology was still relatively new in the overall scheme of things, and the fear of the wrong content going live was the number one concern of anyone involved in professional web publishing.  Fast forward five or so years, and the web is taken for granted, there isn't the same fear of disaster every time someone hits the "publish" button, spelling errors can be corrected later, broken links fixed, etc.  The  concern now isn't about enforcing process, it's about making it faster and easier to get your ideas out there.  And most importantly, it's about getting a conversation going.  This is the social factor that essentially took a market that was previous bifurcated by internal versus external usage and split it again along process-driven and social-oriented applications.  Needless to say, the products that have focused on the social side of the equation have seen rapid growth.

This is a cleaned-up version of what I drew on the whiteboard to illustrate this concept in a recent meeting:
The goal here isn't to catalog and categorize every vendor in the space, there are literally hundreds of vendors providing content management solutions, and even the products listed here have functionality that straddles these categories.  It is, however, a good way to understand how and why a new category has emerged which is led by smaller vendors as well as open source projects, in reaction to the needs of users who are more interested in ad-hoc collaboration rather than formal processes as they create and interact around the content and ideas they want to communicate.  Movable Type Pro, which Six Apart made available today, and which I'm excited to have been part of the launch of, is very much part of that trend, designed from the ground up to serve large scale Internet communities with content at the core.  I think it's going to be an interesting and exciting time as the lessons that have been learned in the blogging world start to permeate and transform the rest of the content management market.
]]> tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.4 2008-08-12T04:34:32Z 2008-08-25T05:53:30Z

Ed Anuff Six Apart as the EVP of Movable Type and Six Apart Services, and I'm sorry to say I'm just getting around to blogging about it.  It's always a tug of ware between the clichés of "eating your own dog food" and "the cobbler's kids going barefoot".  I'm not going to get too much into what the company is up to just yet, other than to say we've got a lot of good stuff that will be coming out very soon now.  As for as the job itself, I'm enjoying it quite a bit.  The company has a great culture and great people, and it's refreshing to be at an Internet company that's revenue focused.  I really like the markets the company serves, and there are a lot of things I see that make me confident that the space is going to enter a new phase of growth as the changes brought about by blogging start to permeate and reshape the rest of the media industry.  I'll share more thoughts about that here over time.
]]> tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.3 2008-08-11T22:16:16Z 2008-08-25T02:47:24Z

Ed Anuff Slicehost, which means this is the third hosting provider I've used for this site in less than a week.  All of the hosting providers I've worked with have provided great service at good prices, but I've been unhappy with either the performance or the server configurations.  Slicehost is great if you're willing to forgo a control panel, I've used them in the past for various server projects, but I've become spoiled by having a nice control panel like Plesk for personal sites or RightScale for Amazon EC2 servers.  However, I just can't find a provider who offers fast VPS hosting of an Ubuntu server and provides a control panel at a price point which is competitive with Slicehost, and since I'm using Movable Type to publish anyway, I don't really need anything else to manage the site. ]]> tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.2 2008-08-08T07:21:35Z 2008-08-25T02:46:31Z

Ed Anuff Action Streams plug-in.  Very cool! ]]> tag:www.anuff.com,2008://1.1 2008-08-08T03:43:31Z 2008-08-25T02:46:06Z

Latest release candidate installed, so far so good......

Ed Anuff ]]>