I was in Boston last week to exhibit at the Ektron Synergy 2008 Worldwide Customer Conference. I mentioned two of several content management based projects that we would be demoing at the conference and how they related to the Printcasting.com projects. These were the Trekk.com site and the Adobe Newflash Communication Wizard case studies. It turns out that Trekk.com won an Ektron All-Star award for Best Interactive Agency site!

Our case study on the Trekk.com site explains many of the reasons for the Ektron All-Star award. One of the site’s features is an RSS aggregation tool for our internal use. It’s an innovative use of the Ektron XML management, content workflow and collaboration functionality.

The CMS400.Net product excels at managing XML content. And since RSS feeds are XML documents, using the system to aggregate external feed makes sense. But more than just aggregate, we allow team members to search through preconfigured RSS feeds or manually enter a feed item. Once an item has been selected or nominated, it can be viewed by other team members. Each team member can follow the RSS link the view the details of the item, which places a ‘read’ vote. Members can also rate the item for quality and applicability on a 1-10 scale using the Ektron content rating functionality. They can also write a review or create a discussion on the item.

This collaboration on rating and reviews creates meta-data associated with an RSS item. This activity allows other member to quickly filter RSS feed items based on topics or tags they have interest in and by the quality rating from others. Group collaborative filtering is a powerful way to shift through and make sense of the millions of new items that appear on the web each day. We think this a key feature of what Printcasting.com is trying to accomplish. It is interesting that this way of organizing and locating information is a passion of one of the keynote speakers at the Ektron conference!

David Weinberger Ph.D. spoke at Synergy on the topic of social networking tools. It was great to meet the Harvard professor. I read his book, “Everything Is Miscellaneous” last year and have used many of his examples and anecdotes since then. His basic premise is that group collaboration, tagging and reviewing is a much more powerful way to create, organize and promote knowledge compared to traditional means. He uses Wikipedia as an example, and observes that a paper encyclopedia can only be so big. But a web-based one can be virtually infinite in size. The scarcity of paper determines what can be published and what business model can be used. But with virtually free and infinite disk space, the old publishing rules and business models are in the past.

We are trying to use Trekk.com as a test bed and a working sample of some of the new business models and principles. It looks like Ektron just may agree with us!

Posted by JA Stewart at 10/29/2008 09:32:23 AM |