MySiouxFalls.com is a new and local online news source for the city where I currently reside, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  At first, I was not all that excited about the site and had not plan on mentioning the MySiouxFalls.com site in my writing. We've all seen these sites before, right?  In fact, I would say that many of the visitors to this blog likely have designed or participated in building sites similar to MySiouxFalls.com.  That's not to say that there are not some things from a content management perspective worth mentioning.
 

Michael Silverman has a great article on The Content Wrangler regarding content management. The full title of the article is "Making The Business Case for Web Content Management: First, Admit You Have A Problem".  The article is a one-stop place for explaining content management, why a business or organization should implement a content management system (CMS), and tips for choosing and implementing a CMS.

I have been struggling to decide what I think about the Wikipedia/WikiScanner episode that played out last week.  Collaboration Loop had some thoughts of their own in the article, The Death of Wikipedia?

But with the release of Wikiscanner we now find that organizations are actively trolling Wikipedia to help themselves, or to hurt others.   We find that our level of trust in Wikipedia has been significantly impugned.  We find that the social computing model is suspect to abuse from those who aren’t playing by the rules.  In effect, our naïve view of the world of wikis is destroyed.

It is my non-bias opinion that Jared Ritchey may be one of this century's finest writers.  Oh let's just choose a random post as an example and see what he has to say regarding content management systems.

I love well rounded and informative information. Bryan Ruby, the author, publisher, webmaster for CMSReport.com has a SPANK of good information and resources regarding many of todays top CMS solutions on the web.

My thanks to Jared for the nice compliment.  Most of Ritchey's other posts at his Wordpress site focus on Web design.  The content of those posts make a visit to his site well worth the time.

Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons.  Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.

Joomla!'s announcement from June 15, 2007 that began Joomla! is moving to ensure the future of the project by committing to compliance with the GNU/GPL license was a bit shocking to many accustomed to the Mambo proprietary extension licensing exception.

This post you are reading has been saved unpublished for a few days as I have feared it reads too much as a rant.  In this post, I'd like to discuss the difference between good and bad competition when it comes to similar "news sites" such as my own CMS Report.   I also want to touch on about how a CMS such as Drupal and Joomla brings both the good and the ugly online.  Unfortunately as with all technology, the modern CMS not only has been a blessing to sites dishing news for their writers and their users...but also a curse.

Now that Summer 2007 is finally here, it is time to step back for a couple weeks and spend less time in front of the computer.  As I mentioned earlier,  I'm going to use some of this time to publish online a professional report I did on IT user support.  This report was submitted a couple years ago as a requirement for a Master of Science in Administrative Studies with an Information Systems track.  You'll get bits and pieces of it in the following weeks and once I'm done, I'll regroup them similar to the research paper I posted earlier this year.

Packt Publishing recently asked me to be a judge for their Open Source Content Management System Award. You can find a brief bio and mug shot of me on their judges page.

For my non-IT friends, content management systems are basically software applications you place on the Internet server that are quickly replacing the old "flat file" format. For example, I use a CMS to blog about CMS as well as this site. Yea, my website needs some work done to it...perhaps when cold weather returns to South Dakota. Despite what you might think from the bio, I'm still with the National Weather Service and currently don't have the time or resources to make my "side business" in information technology anything more than a hobby. If IT positions were ever "downsized" in the NWS, though I know exactly what I would be doing for work.