StartupSpot

CustomerVision BizWiki screencast

I've been working on a screencast that provides an overview of CustomerVision as a company and an introduction to the BizWiki software.

I've included a YouTube widget to view the product as well as a link to a higher resolution version. YouTube is a convenient way to share video but its still pretty low resolution for viewing a demo.

Click Here to go to the high resolution version

The New Model for Web Content Management

I think web content management is incredibly important and the industry settled on a profoundly flawed model for it during the first round of Internet growth. On the low end you had personal web design tools like Front Page and Dreamweaver and on the high end you had enterprise content management system like Vignette and Interwoven.

The fact that the world of web design was dominated by tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver was the biggest failure and missed opportunity of the first wave of Internet innovation. The problem on the low end is that most people spend most of their time and effort endlessly tweaking the look and feel and struggling to create a decent navigation system. This sucked up huge amounts of time and brainpower that could have been applied to understanding the intended audience and having something useful to say. Blogs and increasingly wikis are much better suited to most requirements for personal or small organization publishing needs. Default navigation and templates allow people to immediately publish a site and start being productive with content creation. In many respects the resulting site is superior. With a blog or wiki those people not trained as a designer don’t waste huge amounts of time and then end up with an ugly site like most novices produce with FrontPage. The news oriented format of a blog prompts people to keep their content fresh and up to date which is the biggest challenge for most small sites and wikis make remote collaboration an order of magnitude easier than trying to collaborate with someone else who has their own copy of FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

On the corporate side folks like Vignette and Interwoven provided a better solution than trying to coordinate the web activity of a huge corporation with a desktop tool like Dreamweaver but they were still built on a profoundly flawed centralized, command and control model. I’m not one to say that control is not needed in the corporate world but I do think the architecture was flawed. The corporate would be much better served with a mix of “best of breed,” light weight content management systems such as blogs, wikis, and special purpose CMS systems pulled together with an enterprise RSS infrastructure. This is a much more flexible architecture that allows an organization to scope the grassroots participation and corporate controls in a way that fits their needs and ensures much wider and more effective use of the system.