Web Content Mavens Meetup: Tony Byrne on CMS

On Wednesday, I went to the Web Content Mavens Meetup at RFD in DC: Tony Bryne of CMS Watch was the featured speaker, talking about Web Content Management and Web 2.0.

Organizer Jasmine Sante and speaker Tony Byrne.

The presentation was very informative, and provided a lot of framing around what we expect from Content Management Systems, Web Content Management, and the whole concept of "management" and Web 2.0 in general.

A few bullets that stuck out for me:

• Web 2.0 in a nutshell: It's a quest for simplicity, with an ethos of participation
  
  
• Simplicity is doing only what's necessary. At its core, Google is (or was) a single-dimensional app -- searching Web documents.
  
  
• Enterprise 2.0 (whatever that is) is about rebalancing user enablement vs. control, as well as adaptability and flexibility vs. control and standardization.
  
  
• When choosing social media applications, there's a distinction between socializing software (taking a core offering and adding social features -- blogs, wikis, etc) vs. social software (that's designed first and foremost as a social application)
  
  
• Related to that: When adding social features (such as a wiki), there's always a tradeoff between the convenience of sticking with your existing vendor's implementation vs. the capability of a standalone purpose-built app.
  
  
• Usability = Suitability to purpose ("Useability doesn't necessarily make a program more usable.")
  
  
• Only by doing scenario and task analysis (not building huge checklists of requirements), and by doing bake-offs, will you be able to determine what suits your needs.
  

It was a very accessible and down-to-earth way of looking at things, even if I don't get the intricacies of the actual architecture. Contact Tony Byrne if you want his presentation slides.

Other Events:

---

* The next Web Content Mavens meetup will be a comparison of open source Web CMSes on February 27th, again at RFD (we were in the back room -- I hadn't been there before).

* I didn't manage to make it to the DC New Media Technology - Web 2.0 & Video 2.0 Happy Hour on Thursday. I keep saying, "Next time...."

* Also on tap is Social Matchbox DC, Monday, January 28 in McLean.

As always, check out Ross's DC Tech Events listing to see what else is going on.

Tags: web content mavens, tony byrne, cms watch, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, dc tech events, social matchbox dc