wordpress
Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m going to build a new system to act as the CMS of the new newspaper sites.
Since I’m doing so, I may as well choose the technologies that I feel most confident with.
In this case the web pages will be built with PHP and Apache, and the database will be Postgresql. These will all run on FreeBSD.
Why build instead of using Drupal or Joomla? It is a tough call, but I have yet to see a CMS that isn’t story centric, or even more importantly, “site centric.”
Yes, you can achieve a great degree of “community” with a lot of CMS’s out there, especially with a blogging platform like Wordpress, which I seriously considered for many good reasons.
But the future, IMHO, is in distributed systems, and I don’t see anything that is built specifically with that in mind.
I’m basing the system on RSS 2.0 and all of the data that will be treated as atomic units, whether it was created by a staff reporter or photographer, a site visitor, or it comes from another system or site entirely.
If it sounds like an aggregator, well it is, but it’s a very smart aggregator, because I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t be displaying our original content with some prominence. But that’s just one view of the content. OPML will be the skeletal structure that suports the multiple views. We may even try to implement checkbox news. ; )
You see, it’s based upon a feed-centric view of items, so if the feed is from the editorial department and has a category of sports, we know what it is.
If the feed is from elsewhere, we know what it is.
Ultimately this is based upon a web-centric view of things, not a company-centric.
Also of note, is the idea of groups, or groupings, as Stowe Boyd might more aptly describe them. AdHocracies, is the way I’ve put it in the past. Stowe hinted at this some time back with his blog trees idea.
The concept here is that a feed, or a blog and its items are a thread of expanding contributions. I’ll be using SSE to help that along. Two-way news is something I’ve been ineterested in for a while, but have yet to hammer down.
Greg Narain told me (at Ajax World) that it was too complicated and I agree that is an issue.
The only way this can work is if it’s transparent to the people using it. It’s just got to make sense from a user interface perspective right off the bat, or it won’t fly.
I know. Good luck.
A lot of this decision was based upon the ideas that the projectvrm folks have been throwing around lately. In addition to a distributed approach to the content, we’ll be supporting OpenID and other distributed identity ideas like XRI/inames. (like =matthew)
Lastly, along the same lines as VRM, is the idea of user attention data, but It’s way too early to tell in what ways we can make that useful. But i think we will.
Who would think I’d have trouble picking a platform.
Roll my own, Drupal, Wordpress, OpenACS, Joomla, People Aggregator?
The list goes on. Granted, I’m leaning toward PHP systems. I know it best.
I like Postgresql but I’ll take MySQL. Don’t think I’m interested in a commercial DB.
It’s definitely Unix or Linux. I tend to like FreeBSD.
Aside from OpenACS, all run on Apache.
Drupal looks great, but it’s always a struggle learning new ways to do things that are simply achieved with PHP.
Cobbling together systems is also always a pain. I like clean data. Yet, who can argue that Wordpress is a great solution for the blogs that will be on the site.
There is just too much good stuff out there.
I’m leaning towards simpler rather than a monster like Plone. Master the basics and build on.
Jun 01 2007 04:20 pm |
newspapers and
wordpress and
php |
2 Comments »
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.
http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com
Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned
James Corbett asks where the integrated read/write web tool is, and claims Google Reader will morph into it.
He also claims comments are dead this year. I don’t like them either but I think that’s aggressive.
James, if you and Tom Morris want to eliminate comments, I think we could do it with SSE, like I showed at OPML camp.
We are blogging on three distinct platforms (Wordpress, Typepad, OPML community) so it would be a great start if we could get it to work between the three of us. Then we can widgetize it with Grazr ; ).
Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.
The Old Media Doomsday Clock has been moved forward from eight minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight.
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
The Human Rights Amnesty report claims the war on terror is draining attention from other issues.
Perhaps the governments of the world need to join GestureBank. They gotta be in it to win it.
Then, apply a filter based upon the anonymous pool of attention metadata and figure this all out.
There are some important discussions happening this week about open formats for attention metadata.
ET better phone home because the clock is ticking on everybuddy. The “Duh” Vinci code is unraveling.
I’m closing comments soon. My contact info is mobile:203.219.5159 email:mattatglistndotcom IM:mterenzio@gmail
I still chuckle every time I get the technorati error. I gotta say that is creative.
Then, of course, there is the comment in the Wordpress default template CSS stylesheet:
/* “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.” */
Presumably put there by Michael Heilemann.
It’s those inside jokes that makes the big old web a cozier place.
