Blogging and Content Management

Blogging has been the latest craze on the web. There has been an explosion of information available through all kinds of people blogging about a wide variety of subjects. Of course, businesses see opportunity as well as risk. By influencing expert bloggers, there's the ability to engage in viral or buzz marketing. There's also the risk that your customers can kill you on the web. Do a search for "Dell Hell" and you'll see what I mean.

I totally enjoy blogging as I can post something as it comes to me and improve it as I go along. There's not that pain of, "Oh, I need to make sure it's perfect before I publish."

This post will focus on some of the cool technology platforms we are looking at for implementing a blogging type of architecture for our site and client sites. In many ways, blogging is a form of content management. You don't have to worry about knowing html, style sheets, web architecture. Blogging platforms allow you to organize your articles and have a consistent yet somewhat customized format.

The term content management used to scare me way back in 1999. These were expensive enterprise systems that large publishers used to implement complex systems. Nowadays, just sign up for Blogger or Typepad and off you go.

You can implement blogging on your website. Check out how Sandeep did it. He took his site and added some code to connect Blogger to his site. He's thrown in some YouTube videos that he likes and now people can see content filtered by him. On top of that, he's thrown up some Google AdSense code and he's even making a few bucks.

What do I do for my website? Well Blogger may not be enough. There are 2 open source (meaning free) platforms that my folks have checked out. One is WordPress, an open source blogging platform. Another is Drupal, an open source blogging/content management system. Rakesh, my tech chief, has tested both. He prefers Drupal for a website because it is more flexible and has some more features. We plan on using it to do the initial build of EffinFunny because it will allow the team to quickly add content without needing a technical team. It also has some cool features like voting, discussiong, video downloads, and categorization. I understand that both make it easy to drop in Google AdSense.

This is a new era where new tools are making it far easier to set up and run a content business. Stay tuned...