Web2.0 CMS - what makes a good one ?

Attributes of a Web 2.0 Content Management System (CMS)

Contextual Content

What made Amazon such a success ?  It was one of the first to deliver contextual content.  When you order a book on Amazon, it recommends other choices which are based on your current orders and buying history.

What makes Adsense so huge ?  It was one of the first advertising services to deliver contextual ads.  When you visit a blog about cars, you'll find ads about buying car and car accessories.  It is powerful because it makes assumptions about the sort of products and services that you are looking for.

Contextual content has huge benefits in the ability for websites to cross-sell and reducing information overload, by adapting the experience of the website to the user.

So how does a CMS do this ?  Behind the scenes, there is a complex system which tracks your interaction with the site and makes lots of assumptions about you.  It can tell this about you if you visit the site from the same computer or if you login to the site, and it will typically log it in a database.  This database rarely gets accessed by a content manager, but the most important feature is that the CMS supports real-time publishing of content.  This information can then be used to deliver information of interest to each unique user.

Embedded Content

You and website users should be able to embed a YouTube video, Flickr photos, Google Maps or other forms of media which describe content in non-textual ways and that are stored and shared content easily.

A Web 2.0 CMS should support what is called the "mashup". 

Fortunately most of these tools provide an easy way for content managers to put this stuff into the site, however not all content management systems support this sort of content.

User Contribution

Supporting user contribution is by far the biggest asset for any Web 2.0 content management system.  For this, they need to interact not through some backend login admin system, but through your website.  Better still, with Web 2.0 they could be doing it from an external website.

• User Annotation
• User Ratings and Reporting
• User Content Classification
• Community Building
• Wiki support

The CMS Should Enable Users to Annotate Content

On the web, any document can be a draft, a work in progress.  User contributions or comments are an important part of blogging, but it is also an important tool for Intranet documents which are constantly evolving.

A Web2.0 CMS with the ability for content annotation should ultimately treat user annotations and content contributions similarly to anything else "put up" on the site.  That is, the CMS should support the ability for users to search for this content and highlight it as being added by a member of the website's community rather than the original content owner. 

Any user contributed content needs to be carefully controlled, so a good Web 2.0 CMS should have methods for reducing the likeliness of abuse.

The CMS Should Enable Users to Rate and Report 

One of the biggest reasons for the success of eBay was its system of enabling user feedback to other users which becomes public.  By flagging and rating content - in this case users, it adds value to the buying experience.

YouTube also allows users to rate content, as well as to report abuse.  This helps control the quality of the information which comes up in searches.

The latest forums also enable different levels of users the ability to report and even ban other users.

A Web 2.0 CMS that supports user ratings and reporting on content and users can not only reduce the workload for site administrators but greatly add value to the content on a site. 

The CMS Should Enable Users to Classify Content

I don't have to tell you how important keywords are to online marketing.  In fact it is likely that you found this article via a keyword.

So much flexibility is offered by applications like Del.icio.us and sites like the ABC website are really showing what is possible by allowing users to "tag" articles with the keywords that they feel are appropriate for them and display them for all of the world to see.  Other users can then navigate sites by selecting the popular tags to show all of the related content. 

Traditionally a webmaster would add keywords and metadata to a page, which was very much a hit and miss science and something almost entirely ignored by Google.  Now this cataloguing task is done by you and I.  For example an academic might tag this blog article as "web 2.0" or ", a business person might look at it totally differently and use a term such as "profit" or "marketing".  It is all about how you see the content, its meaning and benefits to you as a customer. 

As the number of tags grow, the CMS needs to support different ways of representing them.  Large lists of tags are sometimes represented by tag clouds, so that you can visually see which keywords the most people use. 

Popular new words are often known in business as buzzwords.  Now imagine what effect it has to your sales if your customers with the click of a button can access all of the products, services and hot topics that customers associate with the latest buzzword !

A CMS that supports user defined tagging systems is a potentially very powerful one.  Obviously you need to be wary of innapropriate keywords, so a CMS that enables keywords to be moderated via a range of methods is even more powerful.

Now let's look at some of the technical considerations to make all of this happen.

The CMS Should Enable Community Building

A Web 2.0 CMS should not only enable content security for login areas, but allow users to create their own private groups and Virtual Communities for interaction.  An intranet, like Central for example is like a "Facebook" behind your firewall, enabling secure workgroups in a business environments.  A Web 2.0 Internet site can enable community building public and private groups for discussion and collaboration, and the ability to invite other users and the CMS can be the perfect platform for achieving this.

The CMS Should enable easy Wiki style user contribution

A Web 2.0 CMS should make contribution of content as simply as possible.  This is the only way you are going to get people sharing their knowledge.  Wikis are by far the easiest and most powerful way to do this, as they enable people to edit without right then and there without having to go through a login style management system.  Look at Wikipedia as an example of the power of collaboration and knowledge.

Technical Considerations

Any non-techs can feel free to skip this section, but these things are important nonetheless.

Open Architecture

Basically, experts should be able to add useful components to it.

To be a successful Web 2.0 CMS, it needs to have an open architecture, and ideally be open source.  An Application Programming Interface (API) can enable third party developers to contribute templates and modules.  Ideally, such as 2.0 CMS is dynamic, extensible, object oriented.  But at the same time the CMS must have tight security to protect and privacy and sensitive data.

Use of newly released technologies, such as Google's OpenSocial APIs can enable a Web 2.0 CMS to interact with other Web 2.0 applications.

Broadcasting and Sharing Content

There are many methods for broadcasting and sharing content, but the most important one from a Web 2.0 context is RSS.  As discussed in my earlier blog, the benefits of RSS are that it enables pull marketing and communication methods as podcasting.

Flexible Content Structure

The line between CMS and Digital asset management has never been so blurred.  Without a flexible structure, you simply can't catalogue the massive amount of user and administrator contributed content that will end up on your website.

Many content management systems only support content in rigid heirarchies.  Many of the open source systems like Drupal and Joomla have very rigid taxonomies that not only enforce heirarchy of content, but also restrict it to a few well defined levels.   This is a real nightmare for web designers and developers.   What this means is that if your site is more than a few hundred pages, then it becomes almost impossible for a user to navigate unless your developer resorts to awkward workarounds and cludges.

Believe me, I tried to build a site using Joomla, before moving to Drupal before giving up altogether due to these limitations. 

A system like Datalink's Freestyler on the other hand supports an unlimited content heirarchy.  But relying on heirarchy alone as a content structure and navigation method poses problems with content being buried deep within a site, taking too many clicks to get to.  The consistency of the navigation models, while highly usable, can become tedious for users and sometimes users want to use new navigation methods besides the search, sitemap and directories.  For example contextual navigation, tagging and tag clouds aren't heirarchical by nature and they are driving many of the most successful of today's websites.

So a Web 2.0 CMS needs to have a flexible content structuring system to allow for both effective navigation and content management in the new web.

Conclusions

Finding a Web 2.0 Content Management System with all these features can be tricky, as the field is new, and there are still people trying to define it.

Freestyler has a dynamic publishing system which places it in the ideal for a Web 2.0 CMS.  Concord plugs directly into Freestyler to extend Freestyler with sophisticated digital asset, user management and data management capabilities and an API enables template, module contribution and external application support.

We have a roadmap which includes all of these features and 90% of them are there already in the various packaged distributions.

Best of all, unlike many in the industry, we actually know what we are talking about when it comes to Web 2.0 CMS.

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