Topic Pages & Future of CMS & Content Publishing

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Richard MacManus, founder and Editor-in-Chief of ReadWriteWeb has posted couple of interesting posts on the launch of new CMS called Medium, Topic pages and open network, why they haven’t worked for news sites yet, why they are the next big thing.

He gives example of Quora on how it’s so successful in capturing factual and interesting insights around topics. Coincidentally, I was also tracking Olympics on Quora, and had the similar experience in discovering great content and previously at time of Steve Job’ death and Merissa Mayer’s appointment as CEO at Yahoo!.

Let’s figure out what is topic & it’s relationship with CMS & Publishing

Continue reading Topic Pages & Future of CMS & Content Publishing

My wish-list of features from wordpress, bufferapp, getpocket, flipboard & zite

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WordPress –  Blog Author Twitter Handle API

How cool it will be if a post captures the blogger’s twitter name and short url and provides an API for Re-tweet applications. Say, if I come across an article and after reading it, I want to post that article via Buffer App, it automatically recognizes the twitter ID of the blog author and drafts the post with @blog_author_name.

Many a times, I read articles off twitter and post it on my twitter timelines, sometimes it would be good to know the author or add my comment to RT and ping the author.

WordPress –  Follow Author and Re-Tweet Author Plugin.

On the similar lines, besides the main publisher it would be a great feature to follow the author from blog post  from author bio section and re-tweet the author. This might not be desirable for a publishers who want to maintain their own brand identities for content but a good feature for communities who would rather author take the credit and build followership.

The ‘Follow Button’ is already available form twitter it’s only that it needs to be integrated within author bio or on the page somewhere. I am sure someone might be already using this through a personal hack or any other CMS.

Buffer App – Integration with Flipboard, Zite, GetPocket

I love buffering, it’s a great tool but I wish I could buffer through Flip-board and Zite. Most of my content consumption these days happens there, right now I mark them to my getpocket for reading later and then publish them selectively on twitter. Buffering directly within the app would be a life saver for me.

Search & Archive – The future of reading, buffering & publishing

I like the zen-like approach of buffering which is buffering and get pocket which is reading it later but I wish they could all converge and offer me a dashboard to-do-anything. A one common app which lets me read, re-tweet, bookmark for reading later, schedule my social media posting or just archive for my own personal use.

Right now, most of these apps are task oriented and they do not have a memory or a library of actions for me to go back to. Finding your own content on twitter or facebook is almost next to be impossible. I can bookmark my content on zite and flipboard but cannot search what I had read previously or tag my favourite authors and publishers to directly jump to the content that they published today.

It’s a big and messy finding and losing content consumption cycle. Some people call it filter bubble and the bubble bursts too fast.

No.1 reason why almost every professional or a small business web site must use WordPress CMS

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WordPress is the de-facto CMS powering the web today. It’s such an established fact that there’s no reason to debate it. Technically, we can debate this headline and kill each other but logically yes, most of the sites can live on this planet through wordpress – statically or dynamically. I am explaining this further just to avoid any criminal wastage of time and resources and not satisfying anyone at the end – primarily the professsional / business, user and the content itself

Responsive web sites which support both web & mobile – Most of the business or web sites for professionals have 10-20 pages and serving a very basic need of offering about us, services, products and contact sections. Such sites today, do not offer a consistent experience on web and mobile. WordPress is the easiest option to offer such solution to this problem through responsive templates.

There are numerous template providers who cater to specific requirements and offer wordpress template for photographers, writers, corporates, doctors, educators, events, fashion, hotels, app makers, and what not. Even if there isn’t an option for your business, and a profession yet, a local wordpress designer and developer near you, or on the web, can do a very good job at making such template, which would feel that it was just designed for you. Most of this templates may not be responsive in true native nature, but many templates are starting to become. Some templates can be made responsive in basic sense through various wordpress plugins.

Maintaining a web and mobile version for a website is a headache for everyone. There are many complex scenarios and instances where wordpress cannot easily be proposed as a solution. But, a majority of the websites which exists as a brochure or basic business site can be fixed just through wordpress.

Your business discovery is changing on a day to day basic through what’s happening on web, search and social. Web, search and social on the other hand is not similar on desktop, tablet, phone and many other permutations and combinations which can occur within this eco-system.

If you wanted to become discoverable at all these places and without figuring out how many dots to connect together, the easiest solution is WordPress.

WordPress is not new, is pretty much reliable, stable, scalable, modular, customizable, self-hosted, 3rd party hosted, multi-language and powered with world-wide community of talent developers and designers. I have spent more than 15 years in Internet industry, if there is one CMS that I can think of which probably my other colleagues or some random web designer or developer is aware of – is wordpress.

If you want to own a business web-site which is responsive, discoverable and easily scalable, please do consider to be owned by WordPress. I am not writing this in praise of wordpress, but as a frustrated user who #1 problem is to see your contact web page on my mobile device. I wanted to reach you but sorry you made it too difficult to have my monies for your business.

Link : Download | Host

WordPress themes marketplace: My theme is from studiopress & this a good list of 15 wordpress theme marketplaces

Why I want to mourn the death of un-dead RSS feeds?

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Though RSS has given birth to many not-really-so-simple-syndication-feeds it cannot still be forgotten. Some people say Twitter is a new place for RSS feeds with a faces, but the old babe I knew, was never so talkative & didn’t care about follow-me-to-get-followed-back. She was precious and exclusive.

I had many good encounters with RSS feeds and even knew her father – Dave Winer. Dave also talked fondly about RDF, OPML and what not. Reading his blog on a regular basis and long before MySpace was born, I actually fell for a dream of ‘united world of blogs’ connected with FOAF. That dream never came true, or might have intercepted like movie Inception, and realized as the Facebook or Tumblr.

Facebook is to me now is the world biggest private FOAF network. At that time in 2000s, I thought it would be either Blogspot or later I wanted or still want WordPress (.com+.org) to be that open-sourced non-brokered and independent FOAF of (just any) blogs. I am not a communist, but a decentralized network has much more power. We will handle that subject some time later.

I don’t want to say RSS is over yet, because I still haven’t stopped using it. Many well known publishers still use it and though it might not be consumer facing or discussed, it still runs as a important thread on the Interwebs. You will only know it missing, if RSS is really dead tomorrow. Pull just the RSS and the entire web will come tumbling after.

Then what do I miss about RSS feeds…

Actually I feel bad that I ditched RSS feeds for Twitter. I started having extra-RSSReader affair with Twitter, Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Seesmic, Twitter Mobile and then super sexy stuff like Zite and Flipboard. But I am coming back to my original love RSS feeds for these reasons:

  • There was a foreplay-like fun in hunting for someone’s RSS Feed. Hmm.. this blog looks sexy, I want to be in touch with you. Where’s your RSS baby !. All that fun is gone now, I see dull blue sparrow and just click ‘follow’.
  • The blog subscription was never like a marriage contract, it was not like attaching to a nagging spouse. There was no commitment that ‘thou shall see me everyday’ and ‘I tweet therefore I am’ or ‘I subscribe you to be subscribed’. Because, the poor blogger never knew who is the secret admirer, always had to be good at content mating dance.
  • The RSS subscribers also knew that Twitter-App-Viagra was not available those days and always kept few relationships at a time. They also spent good time with their subscriptions (quality not quantity), the default action was ‘expand reader windows to read’ or ‘click the blog link to read’ and not ‘RT’ or ‘Like’. The rumour of engagement only spread via trackbacks, comments and blog links. These days everyone is having affair with everyone even without following each other or actually spending time on the page.
  • People also used to get more content-orgasm those days, because they actually used to spend some time together and invest in each other or dedicate some time to a topic. These days we know more, while doing a very little , why ? Because more than consuming and using information for actual purposes we are reading more about inflated dolls
  • Even a casual encounter used to enriching those days. Just imagine you could meet a sexy blog playmate who is an expert on classical music and you could explore her archive by archive, tag by tag without coming across what she ate for breakfast and her gastric troubles.
  • We knew the most prettiest  blogs like Slashdot, Metfilter, Kottke, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and so on. We knew them by faces, we knew them by their addresses, we visited their home (pages). These days people don’t even know with which URLs their browsers are hanging out with.
  • These pretty sites used to talk mostly about their experiences and how they felt about it or what they thought about it. It was not (always) – “Look ! With Hot Babe on the side, On AplusK’s side I mean “
  • Hmm… am  talking about the blog babes here or the match maker RSS. Ok, I miss you both actually. Sob. Sob. Can someone please ReTweet this !

Internet Defense League.

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Slashdot informs

Following the successful defense of the Internet against SOPA, website owners are being invited to sign up to a project that will enable them to participate in future protest campaign, the Internet Defense League. The banner logo for the ‘bat-signal’ site is a cat, a reference to Ethan Zuckerman’s cute cat theory of digital activism. The idea is that sites would respond to the call to “defend the Internet” by joining a group blackout or getting users to sign petitions. From the article: ‘Website owners can sign up on the IDL website to add a bit of code to their sites (or receive code by email at the time of a campaign) that can be triggered in the case of a crisis like SOPA. This would add an “activist call-to-action” to all participating sites – such as a banner asking users to sign petitions, or in extreme cases blackout the site, as proved effective in the SOPA/PIPA protest of January 2012.

What’s the plan ?
From the website “When the internet’s in danger and we need millions of people to act, the League will ask its members to broadcast an action.  (Say, a prominent message asking everyone to call their elected leaders.)  With the combined reach of our websites and social networks, we can be massively more effective than any one organization”

Joystick Tragedy: Are Porn & Video Games Ruining A Generation

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Life is really tough for male species on this planet. Porn & Gaming – the most favourite sticky activities with this generation of males seems to be ruining them.

Got this very sad news via slashdot about a piece on CNN ‘The Demise of Guys’: How video games and porn are ruining a generation’. (The ebook can found on Amazon)

This new kind of human addictive arousal traps users into an expanded present hedonistic time zone. Past and future are distant and remote as the present moment expands to dominate everything. That present scene is totally dynamic, with images changing constantly.

A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that “regular porn users are more likely to report depression and poor physical health than nonusers are. … The reason is that porn may start a cycle of isolation. … Porn may become a substitute for healthy face-to-face interactions, social or sexual.”

Similarly, video games also go wrong when the person playing them is desensitized to reality and real-life interactions with others.

Violence in video games is often synonymous with success. Children with more of a propensity for aggression are more attracted to violent video media, but violent media, in turn, can also make them more aggressive. This could be related to the fact that most video games reward players for violent acts, often permitting them to move to the next level in a game.

Of course not everyone is happy with this study

It is, of course, a horrible vision of a future in which grossly over-worked women are forced to run the entire world of human affairs, while men busy themselves between the twin joys of Brazzers and Battlenet.

When these pale haggard creatures are forced to venture out into the real world, perhaps to purchase some tissues, they find a place that is much less interesting than ‘MILF Lesbo Honeys’ and Call of Duty had led them to believe, and so they shrink back into their sordid little dens for more epic self-gratification frenzies

I am not expert on these matters but everything is good in moderation – even playing with your joystick.

George Dyson on Digital Universe

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“You can’t predict how software will behave by inspecting it. The only way to tell is to actually run it.And this fundamental unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives – not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things. This is why the digital universe will never be a national park; it will always be an undomesticated, unpredictable wilderness. And this should be reassuring to us. “

George Dyson (science historian). Wired. March 2012