After re-posting this story — Content Management Systems Just Don’t Work — forwarded to me by the ever-capable robotics ninja/programmer/genius/good guy Gabe Hollombe. Destry Wion RT’ed and mentioned on Twitter to “see comments” in said story. The story, written by Clay at Sunlight Labs, argues that it’s more cost-and-feature effective to hire a programmer to make a custom CMS, than it is to work within the constraints of an off-the-shelf solution.
*Having wrestled with many CMS solutions, from Vignette to WordPress, I concur, “Do you concur?”
But if you keep scrolling—past the last period—the story continues and evolves. Different CMS aficianados shot back in the comments and a meta conversation began to bubble and brew. This, and that 100 dances in 100 days in 100 locations video, are the reasons I love the web. First, I get a well-written/researched article about CMS solutions vs. custom development and then (bonus), I get content threads splintering off into: new solutions, the question of what a CMS is actually supposed to do, security issues, costs and “power pie.”
Personally, I don’t put too much weight into how many ✮’s an article has, how the author is ranked or the number of Diggs a story receives—if there are a lot of comments, my interest is piqued. When the story touches a nerve it is passed around and as it is passed around the POV changes and as the POV changes we get a sneak peek into what others see, feel and know/don’t know.
Today, we are in such a rush to present the latest nizzer info we have found, or broadcast triumphantly from our cardboard podiums that we forget the benefit of this web thing is the iterative, additive nature of the conversation. I too am guilty of the simple “cool article dude”, comment. But when an article educates or inspires and the ensuing comments build atop what the article started—that just lights my fire.
So go on, create/find an interesting story, Tinyurl it, tweet it through Tweetdeck, push it through Friendfeed and into the Facebook-Twitter app. Perhaps the story will get blogged about, and then pushed to Digg and/or mentioned in other blog posts, which will get pushed into Facebook again and LinkedIn. Don’t stop that process; just don’t forget, as Destry Wion reminded me—a lot happens past that last period.
–Ian
February 25th, 2009 at 11:24 am
There is, indeed, a great comment thread on that blog post. There weren’t many comments when I read the post, and it’s nice to get a ‘heads up’ about good comments that are worth reading.
Is there a tool out there to let me easily subscribe to a blog post’s comment thread? Sure, I can just add it as a feed in my RSS reader, but that somehow feels like the wrong place for it.
February 26th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
@Gabe, try this http://www.backtype.com/
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:19 am
@JRameau, thanks. I’ll check it out.
Over the weekend I wrote myself a very simple little tool to help solve this issue in an overly simplistic way that just-might-work.
This week I’m sending it to psyc evaluations with some friends and putting some clothes on it so it doesn’t look so naked. Stay tuned, Ian and friends. =-)