Open Source CMS Edges Toward the Mainstream

There's a very interesting article on EContent Magazine on Open Source CMS moving towards Enterprise Content Managment.

Led by the growing popularity of the Linux, Open Source Movement has gained momentum, with an increasing number of open source content management products on the market . What separates companies such as Zope, Lenya , eZ publish, and Nuke from better-known counterparts at Documentum, Vignette, and Hummingbird is that the open source products (with a few exceptions) tend to focus solely on Web content management, rather than enterprise content management—but that doesn't mean at least some of them aren't making their way into the ECM space as well.

If you visit opensourcecms.com or cmsreview.com, you'll find hundreds of open source content management packages. Goodwin admits that quality can vary dramatically among the numerous packages, but he points out that many have caught on and are widely supported.

"Some of these open source CM systems are fantastic, while others are—how should I say this—less than stellar," says Goodwin. "Since there is generally no financial motivation for the initial creation of any open source CMS, the quality can be questionable. However," he says, "if the system becomes popular and more people and programmers become involved, the system generally gets better and better with each iteration. With any popular open source software, you'll continually capture better and more qualified eyeballs going over the code, making it stronger, leaner, and more secure."

The real strength of open source content management is that it reduces the overall cost of implementation, according to John Blossom, president and senior analyst at Shore Communications, Inc. "The big picture is that it means that virtually any company can have a sophisticated Web publishing infrastructure that takes content out of the realm of unstructured content for a fraction of what systems cost only a few years ago. The real money is in solving business problems far more sophisticated than these tools, but in the meantime these tools are revolutionizing the ability of sophisticated content to appear virtually anywhere online or in the enterprise," Blossom says.

Social bookmarking on the web

Furl is a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages. It's your Personal Web.

Furl offers the best ways to share the content you find on the Web, and recommends new Web pages that may interest you. You can also search Furl to find the best sites that other people are saving.

Furl claim that it's been used by people for many purposes namely travel planning. Recipe sharing. House-hunting. Medical research.

New Method of Searching on the Web

I Recently came across this website(FindArticles), providing a new facility to find focused information. FindArticles is focused on delivering the best and most essential search results. There are different kinds of searches. They claim to have assembled all the essential publications covering a wide range of subjects namely Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Business & Finance, Computers & Technology, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, News & Society, Reference & Education, and Sports. Just give a try. Seems interesting.............

Software's Top 10 2005 Trends

Bill is spot on when he writes, XML is at the heart of almost every significant trend in the software industry from Service Oriented Architectures, to Message Aware Networking, to Composite Applications, to Data Abstraction. Bill writes, for all its importance though, XML has always played second fiddle to HTML. However 2005 may well be remembered as the year in which XML eclipses HTML in terms of overall importance to the web. That’s because XML is now the de facto language of machines-to-machine interaction on the web and such interaction is exploding thanks to adoption of web services and the proliferation of web-capable devices. Now XML is evolving to the point where many new XML-based standards seek to embed within XML aspects previously only associated with complied code, such as business logic and state. In this way XML messages are now becoming free standing bits of code and integral parts of applications. In essence, XML messages are becoming software. I also concur with Bill in his reading Sofware as a service where he writes, 2005 may very well turn out to be the year that software as a service goes from being an alternative means of delivering software to being the preferred means. I can already see a groundswell of favorable opinion about this with small enteprises.

Bill's 2005 Top 10 Software Trends:
#1 XML
#2 Open Source
#3 Software As A Service
#4 Service Oriented Architectures
#5 Message Aware Networking
#6 Inter-Enterprise Applications
#7 BPEL
#8 Composite Applications.

Simpler designs needed for handsets

According to the inventoer of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee "A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets".(The mobile Internet) will be a huge enabler for the industry .. and for big profits," .

"Web designers have learned to design for the visually impaired and for other people. They will learn in a few years how to make Web sites available for people with mobile devices too," he said.

Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1990 while working at European particle-physics lab CERN in Geneva, trying to make it easier for fellow scientists to share information and collaborate over the Internet.

While his invention has revolutionized the way people across the globe work and communicate, repeated attempts by mobile device makers and operators to lure users with mobile Internet access have failed.

"Everyone was supposed to be browsing the Web with their mobile phone, but the problem is that it has not happened," Berners-Lee said, adding later this was not a question of weak demand.

"It is a chicken or egg thing, just like originally when the Web became the Web. Nobody asked for Web clients or Web servers ... you have to get enough people to understand the potential returns," he told Reuters on the sidelines of the seminar.

Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web was as a resource for collaboration. He said that so far it had been "a big disappointment" in this respect, although exceptions such as "wikis" -- essentially interactive online note pads -- showed its potential.

"Wikis in general are great examples of how people want to be creative and not just suck in information," he told the seminar, pointing to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as the most advanced development in this area.

Source : MSNBC