For 40 years, scientists have searched for a way to bring nuclear fusion to the masses. If successful in bringing fusion online, we all could have an inexhaustible form of power to meet our world’s energy needs. The promise of fusion is a dream that many have hoped to see become a reality in their lifetime.

Perhaps not for as noble of cause, Drupal users have sought better themes for their Drupal sites. Four years ago, it seemed to me that creating a good theme for Drupal was almost done as an afterthought. There simply were not too many places for a user to go for a quality Drupal theme. I recall spending a lot of wasted time maintaining my own (boring) themes for Drupal sites. The Drupal days of version 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and even 4.7 for themes were dark days indeed. Luckily, Drupal 5 introduced us to a new theme called Garland. Garland may not have been a perfect theme but in my opinion the theme marked the beginning of an era for a new style of Drupal themes.

In the past few years, the number of Drupal themes provided under open source or via private companies have exploded. Along with that explosion, various starter and base themes have been introduced too. On the top of my head I can think of Zen, Genesis, Basic, and AdaptiveTheme. These starter/base themes offer theme developers opportunities for everyone to build or use professional sub-themes. In fact, this site used Zen in the theme’s early years and today we’re currently using a Genesis based theme called Extreme Updates (slightly modified). With each passing year, the theme offerings for Drupal has steadily improved in quality and quantity. This year is no exception and brings us a new official base theme to carry us over into the next generation of themes made for Drupal.

The year 2010 brings us Drupal’s newest base theme, Fusion.  Currently, there probably isn’t a Drupal theme that offers site owners more control over layout and style than a Fusion based theme. Fusion has the support and backing of well-known Drupal theme shop, TopNotchThemes. TopNotchThemes appear to be serious enough about Fusion revolutionizing the way themes are done in Drupal. This week they publicly announced their new line of themes and a website called Fusion Drupal Themes. Most of the themes offered at the site are for a price, but there are a couple free themes also being offered that should give you a chance to see what Fusion is all about.

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While Flash CMS is probably the best way to create a fancy, multi-functional website, there is always a chance to improve the user experience in website management. With exactly this purpose in mind FlashMint has released Mint Editor – a new offline content management software to edit and customize FlashMint XML templates at ease.

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It is already happening, and I couldn’t be happier.  There are CMIS-base custom clients being developed and released that are taking some of the pain out of using ECM systems.  I’m not talking about open source clients, but commercial clients with dedicated teams and one goal, to make money.

I know that there is pain in the use of ECM systems, and not just because I use them.  I know this because of one simple metric; In my list my most successful ECM projects, the top of the list is dominated by systems that do not use the default user interface.  I’m not talking about customized clients.  I’m talking CUSTOM clients.

A Market is Born

Well, there are some companies that are addressing the problem.  As I said in my Fierce Content Management guest piece on The Future of CMIS, two companies are leading the way by taking existing custom ECM client applications having them use CMIS to create a broader market for their software.

Generis updated their existing common interface, CARA, to leverage CMIS to work against multiple repositories.  WeWebU has announced plans to follow suit with their OpenWorkdesk interface in the second quarter of this year.

This is great!  Companies are looking to address the largest pains out there with ECM systems.  We may actually be entering the time of true Application Separation!  I’ll address some impacts shortly, but first, let’s look at what I saw over the past couple of weeks.

There is a Market, Now

So, three things triggered this post.  The first was watching Generis’s CARA application being shown to a continuous flow of prospective clients at last week’s DIA EDM conference.  Many were Documentum users, but there was a healthy collection of SharePoint users as well.  The response was consistently positive across the board.  Even those that said they were happy with their existing interfaces were impressed.

The second was talking to a company that was starting over fresh.  They had written a set of architectural principles that they wanted every component in their new Knowledge Architecture to meet.  Documentum’s interface didn’t cut-it.  The platform may have cut it, but having spent years being ignored by EMC, they were moving on to another platform.  They did feel that CARA, using CMIS and being browser neutral, met the bill.  They still had tests to run, but they were enthusiastic about the prospects.

Those two events showed me that there is not only a market for applications, but potentially a strong market.

The final triggering event is this Implementation Spotlight on CARA3 on the Ext JS website.  They used the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build CARA, using Ext GWT to round out the functionality.  This allowed them to build CARA very quickly, allowing them to hit the market quickly and to throw in all sorts of cool features with very little effort.  The result is quick, light-weight, and browser independent.

The important part about the article, while it has a healthy amount of marketing, it gives you more background into what led them to develop a CMIS-base interface and about the underlying technology.  The first is important from a market perspective.  The second is pretty cool from a development perspective.

Enough on that, on to what this means…

The Landscape is Shifting

This is actually part of a perfect storm.  Look at this:

• ECM Platforms have gotten stronger to keep up with the increasing volume and more diverse nature of content.
• ECM interfaces have been steadily falling behind the innovation curve.
• CMIS allows a common way to communicate with a repository.  Chemistry is providing a common implementation for those that already support the JCR standard.
• Documentum and FileNet were bought by EMC and IBM.  Oracle bought Stellent, but they aren’t the user-friendly people.  Open Text bought everyone, leading to a shifting product lineup that leave people wondering if they are coming or going.
• Open Source ECM has matured, providing multiple options for an ECM platform.
• Microsoft has been Microsoft.  They are fixing every problem with SharePoint, but they haven’t caught-up to the curve yet.  Meanwhile, their biggest flaw remains, Works best with Microsoft products. (IE and with SP2010, Silverlight).

Fun fact: Did you know that many ECM vendors charge a separate license for their user client?  I wonder if they could take that money and buy a better client for less?  That is what we are about to find out.

We are now looking at vendors creating custom user interfaces.  Generis may have been first to release, but they are going to be far from the last.  WebWeU has been aggressively marketing their interface and I am looking forward to seeing it when it is released.

History says that the first couple of vendors typically don’t win the war in software (Wordstar, Novell, AOL).  When you take that into consideration, you can see why it is way to early to make any judgments regarding either of these offerings.  What we can say is that unless things change, this may become a permanent market niche.

Until Open Text buys them all.

Disclaimer

This time, there really is something to disclaim.  Generis is a partner of my company, Washington Consulting, Inc.  While my company, as policy, does not accept any revenue from any technology vendor if their software is used/purchased by a client, there are still some co-marketing efforts and lead-sharing that takes place.

That being said, this post was entirely MY idea, not my company’s or Generis’s.  I heard about the spotlight and thought it would be a good time to highlight the first commercial CMIS client already in the market.  In six months, there will be more competitors and it is entirely possible that one will be better.

None of this changes the fact that the release of this client shows that CMIS is already changing the Content Management landscape for what I hope is the better.

Yesterday, Fierce Content Management published an article that I wrote entitled The Future of CMIS.  I discussed what I see as a very busy, and important, year for CMIS.  It is a good article, at least on the Scale of Pie, and I am not going to be regurgitating it here for you.

Instead, I feel the need to clarify an inconsistency.  In the article I stated [bold added]:

The past year was a good year for the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The specification was released for public review and efforts began to build an Open Source implementation of CMIS,  Apache Chemistry. The next year promises to be even bigger…

I even proclaim that The future is now.  That is all well and good, but there is one thing hanging over that statement.  I predicted in my mandatory 2010 predictions post that:

2010 Will Not be the Year of CMIS

These statements appear to contradict each other.  Now I could just say that my thinking has evolved and excuse myself that way, but I’m not.  I’m sticking with both statements.

Tap Dancing to Two Tunes?

How do I resolve such a conflict?  Simple.  I’m going to play with grammar.  2009 was a big year for CMIS.  Nobody can really deny that.  2010 will be a bigger year.  CMIS will either show that it has what it takes to become an established standard or it will become a flash in the pan.

Either way, it will be a big year.  But will it be the year of CMIS?

That is where the fun kicks into play.  I see 2010 as a stepping stone to 2011, which I feel will be THE year.  Only one year can be the biggest year, and I see that as 2011.  That will be the year that more solutions will hit the market and CMIS will move past the early adopter stage.

It is kinda like how an actor can play a James Bond role, but there is only one who is the James Bond.

If all goes well, CMIS will cross the proverbial chasm and become mainstream by the end of 2010.  That said, client interfaces, deployments, and case studies take time to develop.  This will really hit its stride in 2011 when even the last repository holdouts will have to realize what is happening in the market and jump on board.

That will make 2011 the year of CMIS.  2010 is critical because it will lay the foundation for that success.

Or…CMIS could fail, making 2009 the year of CMIS, but I don’t see that happening.  It is in our hands to educate the broader community and make sure that version 2.0 gets started in order to make sure that CMIS realizes its potential.

EMC Documentum is announcing a new reseller relationship with Fatwire that will fundamentally change the way it competes in the web content management market. For those that are familiar with Documentum’s history in the web content management space this announcement will cause mixed reactions. Many forget that Documentum was actually one of the very first [...]

Interview with Joe Gollner by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

The Content Wrangler: Joe, thanks for agreeing to chat with us today. Tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry.

Joe Gollner, Content Philospher

Joe Gollner: I began tinkering with content, using open markup technologies, in 1987 while still a grad student at University of Oxford. The tinkering has never stopped. Tapping on another side of my background, the military side, I was deeply embroiled in the CALS initiative – where we applied open markup technologies to the most complex documentation scenarios imaginable -– within the NATO defense community. I was even given the delightful, as well as official, title of “CALS Philosopher”.

Over the years, I have been entangled in a bizarrely large number of projects and in sectors as far afield as aerospace and education, health care and telecommunications, academic publishing and oil engineering. I formed an XML solution integration company in 1998; sold that company to Stilo International in 2004; and chaired, for many years, the XML World series of conferences. So you could say I have been immersed in the content business for a long time –- so long that perhaps it is time to change my title again, this time to the “Content Philosopher”.

The Content Wrangler: Tell us a little about your firm, the markets you serve, and the products and services you offer.

Joe Gollner: Currently, I am assuming new responsibilities for Stilo International as the Chief Solutions Architect (Intelligent Content Technologies) and my specific role is to initiate and lead solutions projects for customers who need to elevate the IQ of their content and the associated content processes and information products. These efforts dovetail naturally with the technology products side of Stilo, with the venerable OmniMark content processing platform being the foundational offering. Go to almost any large scale content environment that you would be tempted to identify as an example of intelligent content at work and there is a better than even chance you will find OmniMark at work as well. Specifically, OmniMark is used to build conversion, enrichment, validation and publishing processes that bring intelligence to the vast stores of content. OmniMark is used to put in place publishing processes that make something of that new found intelligence.

At Stilo, we use this technology to build highly sophisticated content management and publishing environments. It turns out that we can also build new services that organizations will be increasingly able to access “in the cloud” (or in their environments, if they so choose) – with these being cases where these customers can leverage the power of OmniMark without necessarily jumping in with both feet and mastering what is admittedly a highly specialized field.

For the last couple of years, we have been working on an on-demand conversion portal, known as Migrate, and after collaborating with a number of organizations a new release is fast approaching.

New for 2010, I am also dedicating a larger portion of my time to research and publishing, with a book in the works that focuses, resolutely, on the subject of “intelligent content”. Under my research and publishing agenda, I am approaching the question of “intelligent content” from a number of angles and identifying design patterns that have, over the many projects in my history, seemed to produce the best results. These efforts will lead to a book, as mentioned, but I also expect it will produce some new methodological tools, learning resources, and even, looking further downstream, technology components. These activities are being organized under Gnostyx Research. Most recently on the publishing front, I contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book on Information Management Best Practices which I see is getting some good press at KMWorld.

The Content Wrangler: Intelligent Content is a hot topic today, but many people don’t understand what it is or why it matters. From your perspective, what is intelligent content? What makes it so smart? And, why do organizations need it?

Joe Gollner: I might be the last person you want to ask that question. Not because I don’t have an answer – but because I have too many answers. In fact I have been circling the question of “what is intelligent content” on my blog including a recent post that resurrected some of the memories from Intelligent Content 2009 (very positive memories) and that looks forward to this year’s event.

In essence, the definition I put forward last year in my whitepaper, The Emergence of Intelligent Content, still holds water, I believe:

“Intelligence refers to the ability to acquire and apply knowledge (normally a quality attributed to people but not exclusively), or to a collection of information of value in a particular context (OED). Content can be considered intelligent when it expresses, in an open way, the full meaning underlying a communication such that the data, information and knowledge being expressed can be easily accessed and effectively leveraged by both people and the software applications that support them.”

There is quite a bit packed into this definition. In practical terms, intelligent content is about upping our game in the content business – identifying the content that is the most important to a given business, ensuring that this content is created, managed and leveraged in the smartest way possible, and putting in place the mechanisms whereby these high-value assets and services can evolve in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Chef Gordon Ramsay sees that the right dish is delivered to each customer — prepared, just they way they asked for it.

OK, I should be able to make this more tangible than that. Picture intelligent content is an array of ingredients that can be used to satisfy every customer request as they make their way to your counter. One says, “I want a beautiful reproducible PDF that I can send to my print media supplier.” The next one says, “I want ePub output that is tuned to each of the main eBook viewing platforms.” Then one shows up and says, “I need dynamic help, that is filtered on-the-fly for an almost unlimited number of configuration scenarios.” Finally one says, “I need to glean the best morsels of this content for marketing material which will be arrayed across a number of media channels and delivered individually to each of our customers and prospects.” The purveyor of intelligent content is like Chef Ramsay, who with a few well-timed barks, sees that the right dish is delivered to each customer — prepared, just they way they asked for it.

At Intelligent Content 2010, I will be speaking about Intelligent Content Management. I explain how this content kitchen needs to be organized and how it needs to work. In an effort to make the subject both accessible and entertaining, I am leveraging the motif of a famous spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, to address the three sides to intelligent content and the management demands that arise around each and, more importantly, around their integration. I am now thinking that there maybe a little Chef Ramsay involved as well.

The Content Wrangler: Creating intelligent content certainly seems like a good idea. Can you share with us a few examples of how intelligent content can help an organization to be faster, leaner, make more money, reduce expenses, reduce risk, or serve its clients better?

Joe Gollner: On the subject of examples, I could go on forever. I will touch on a couple. Before I do, I want to stress that creating intelligent content and integrating it into business processes and offerings of an organization can be very hard work. I am bald for a reason. I mention this not to put anyone off but only to remind people to start small and evolve their “intelligent content capabilities” incrementally. For reasons that I will go into in Palm Springs, where intelligent content is involved the “big leap forward” might well be your last.

In the chapter I contributed to “Information Management Best Practices: Volume 1″, I recount a case study where we dug deeply and greedily into the various benefits that intelligent content can deliver. And this was done on a relatively large scale so what benefits were realized translated to some very big numbers. Perhaps the most important benefit, at least in terms of returning concrete financial savings and fundamentally improving the quality of the information services being provided, was the dramatic reduction of content redundancy.

Content in most organizations exists in a state of unbridled redundancy. If there is one version of a warning statement being managed and translated there will likely be a hundred. In this case, there were often thousands of identical components being managed and translated in parallel. Eliminating this redundancy, making it leaner, saved over a $100 million dollars a year in this one example. And the dollars saved were not the only story. By eliminating the content redundancy the number of documentation errors was dramatically reduced. By eliminating the content redundancy and raising the intelligence of the managed content components, a fundamental change could be introduced that would see content processes fully integrated with the system engineering processes that were continually modifying the equipment platforms the documentation needed to describe.

My favorite anecdote from this case study pertains to the publication of a large parts manual which historically took 18 months to republish. This manual, in being managed the old not-so-intelligent way, was, as you can imagine, almost completely useless because it was always a couple of years out-of-date. When questions arose, the mechanics would typically phone headquarters to ask the equipment lifecycle management office about what parts they should use or order. Once the content was rendered “intelligent”, the republishing of this manual went from taking 18 months to 18 minutes. And the people responsible for providing up-to-date parts information to the field units joked that the 18 minutes coincided with the amount of time they spent on coffee break, because their process produced an online reference tool that was “continually up-to-date” automatically. That’s intelligent content in action.

The Content Wrangler: Are there any examples you can point to of intelligent content on the web?

Joe Gollner: As another example of intelligent content in action, and this one being accessible online, I would point to HP printer products division and the support resources they supply to customers. My good friend, Rahel Bailie, president of Intentional Design, gave a great talk last year where she explicitly used HP support environment as an interactive illustration of several things being done well. As usual, I acted up in the presentation – this time blushing, fanning myself and getting all misty because she was showcasing one of my customers.

A couple of years ago my team had done a substantial amount of work for HP renovating the intelligent content infrastructure that underlies these online support services. Now our work was made infinitely easier by two factors – one was that HP really did have their proverbial act together and the other was that the previous integrator who had designed the initial system (many years before) had done a spectacularly good job. How often does that happen? And, how often does one integrator say that of another’s work?

The Content Wrangler: Do you know of any useful online resources you think our readers might find useful in understanding intelligent content?

Joe Gollner: In terms of where to look for more information, I would first point readers to the Intelligent Content 2010 conference. Somewhat unabashedly I would point people to my blog posts on this topic and specifically those falling under the xContent category. I also contend that my whitepaper on this topic remains a pretty good place to start.

The Content Wrangler: Thanks for taking time out of your hectic schedule to chat with us about intelligent content. We really appreciate it.

Joe Gollner: I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Palm Springs at Intelligent Content 2010. I am especially looking forward to any debates that might break out –- as they did last year.

Seth Gottlieb at Content Here is on a roll lately with some great thinking.

His post on The Myth of the Occasional CMS User was timely based on some conversations we’ve been having around the office. There is a lot to unpack in it, and of course anything with Myth in the title catches our attention.

Seth summarizes a frequent pain point with CMS rollouts:

“Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way”

He goes onto explain all the reasons why this can wreak havoc and have people assigning blame to the wrong areas. He correctly points out that CMS failure often comes down to expectation setting, a topic we’ve covered here on the Myth as well.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen organizations buy a CMS, take their same content structure, and simply distribute authoring ownership to every far flung corner of the organization. And let’s not entirely blame the organizations. It’s how CMS is sold. And it’s a myth, straight up.

Here’s a familiar scene.

You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.

And the CMS technology itself only magnifies this problem. Content management systems do a lot of things well, but they are not built for the occasional user. Far from it.

They typically expose all the functionality you need to build pages and sites, but they are not organized around supporting task-based content entry. And occasional users have very specific tasks.

I know vendors will disagree, highlighting things like inline editing, roles based security and workflow. But in almost all cases, it still doesn’t work for the occasional user. The pain far outweighs the gain.

So, I’ll take it one step further than Seth. Stop letting people use your CMS unless they are an integrated part of your web and editorial team and need to be in it on a regular basis. Even then, they may not need to be in the tool.

Seriously, don’t let them in. Even if they beg.

Build other processes for allowing them to request updates and get content into the system. Lie if you have to (sorry, all out of seats!).

Your content publishing process should be oriented to serving your site visitors (content consumers) not the internal structure of your company.

Build an editorial process and team that supports getting this content published in the most effective way possible and stop forcing administrative assistants to sit through tools training.

Everyone will be better off.

Related posts:

1. How Many People Does it Take to Screw in a Content Management System?
2. A False Choice for Web Content Management
3. Why metadata matters

The Economist:  Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better, says Martin Giles

Complete Story

 The Webtrends Engage 2010 opened with an NOLA Ignite session on Monday evening. The
Ignite Series was started by Brady Forrest and Bree Pettis in 2006. The
objective is for innovators to share their ideas with one another. The tag
line: “Enlighten Us, But Make It Quick” can sum up the event for new comers.
This was not an official part of Webtrends but an opening act. To the left is one of many street bands that are part of what makes New Orleans great. 

Speakers in the community come to talk about what
they're most passionate about. The topic area can be about anything, but each
speaker has only five minutes with only 20 slides that auto advance every 15
seconds. This gives the speaker a tight window for their presentation but it
also gives the audience a way to digest all the great information that will
come their way. This session also featured some great food and an open bar.  

The later can be a benefit in NOLA. The local
paper had a letter to the city of Miami on the front page   today about getting
ready for the Super Bowl. It said that they needed to prepare for the Saints
fans. This first thing that Miami needs to do is to get more beer. The paper
acknowledged that they probably had extra ordered but that was not enough. The fans found that beer tasted better with victories. The paper also pointed out that there is no need to be concerned about safety issues as the
Saints fans just like a good time. There was no damage after the Saints won the
right to go to the Super Bowl. It’s the Big Easy and it has seen too much destruction. Fans just want to have fun now.

Ignite is very fast paced to take notes but here
are some personal highlights. First the audience was lively and loud. This is a
good thing, sets the right tone, and is like the Saints fans. There were even some Who Dats. And the
open bar had been in swing for over an hour before the speakers started. The
room was packed.

The first speaker went over her mistakes as an
entrepreneur. She did her list of failures and is now doing GetFitNola. She is
an ex-Marine and started in DC but now is does health and fitness in NOLA. I
guess there might be a need here with all the celebrations. She is a natural comedian and maybe should go
there.  The applause meter went
wild.

The next guy did video games. He continued the
comic routine going over interface issues. I was not sure of his product but he
was amusing.

Gumbo Labs was the next topic. It is defined as
hacker space for tinkerers, not criminals. He said that hacker spaces are
taking off. There is hackerspaces.org. Many are in Germany. They now have a
physical space to geek out in here in NOLA. His team did work with DeeCours, an
art exhibit in New Orleans, to do a tech-based art happening. They meet every
Tuesday night and he wants you to come so Google them if you are in town.

The next guy was a really wired conspiracy
theorist. Walmart and RFID and DOD are the largest investors in RFID.  He was the best comedian so far and got
a standing ovation.

Smart Gird was the next topic. The current gird
was designed in the 1870s and has 45 % efficiency. Only 3% of electricity comes
form renewable resources.   We now need a two-way system.  The Feds have provided 4.5 billion in
matching funds to help with research to make this happen.  The speaker is working on smart energy
devices for the home.

The next guy was a funny Brit who evoked Led Zeppelin.
He got into cultural differences in vocabulary such as fags, pissed, randy,
jocks, bums, and bangers, Having lived in London for a year, I knew the punch
lines and have seen this routine before. You can image where this went.  He forgot “on the job’ which relates to randy. This one was
pure comedy. He topped off the applause meter before we broke for half time.

After half time, an artist led off talking about
meetings and the Web. She was too serious and read her notes from cards. Being
a painter I was more hopeful for something here.  

The next guy talked about people who get arrested
doing stupid stuff.  Hope and fun
is in sight. He clarified that this is party related stuff, not serious
crime.  His premise was you should
not feel guilty over these arrests, If you were a good person when you did this
act, you are still good. He is the person to take care of your trash with a
guilt free approach. However, if you do this all the time it is a problem.  The audience picked up.  He represents NOLA criminal law. The
audience was re-engaged.  Who dat.

The next person started with some good
disclaimers. She asks people for money and she is single. Then she when through
the best practices in fund raising like finding out what the property values
your targets have. There was a lot of detective stuff. What they do, where they
work, what they love so you can figure out how to get their money. By
@verarcoks.  This is way I prefer
to give directly to charities and not to fund raisers.

The next speaker talked about how to stop doing
things that do not matter.  He
asked Twitter about the most random things he has done.  Backtype said he has left over 2000
comments on the Web. He also drove cross-country to meet real people and he
wrote about it on the Web.  People
applauded but they were likely his friends.

They next guy discussed Carebacks.  They will allow anyone to get anything
to anyone at anytime.  You give to
Carebacks and they make sure it does not go to crack dealers. Sounds like a
scam to me like the credit card companies that charged processing fees for
donations. He started funny and went down hill.

The session had some funny highlights. It was the
first Ignite in New Orleans so I guess it will take a while to sort out the
genre but I see its potential. Stand-up comics will do best. It helped to have
a sense of humor and not take yourself too seriously. The NOLA criminal law presentation wins my prize as he was funny and also clearly conveyed the need for his
business service. I look forward to the main act: Webstrends. 

Meanwhile some school kids in my old neighborhood showed some wonderful creativity as the city gets ready for the Super Bowl. 

Here are three authentic concerns from real world adoption of enterprise micro-blogging that my colleague Henrik Gustafsson has captured and which he also helped me answer. Some of these concerns might sound strange to long-time and frequent Twitter users, but you need to deal with these kinds of concerns when trying to facilitate broad adoption within an enterprise.

1. Platform hijack

“A few very active people have hijacked our internal micro-blogging platform”

Can a free and open platform such as a micro-blogging platform be hijacked by a few individuals?

My answer to this is no. And yes.

I answer no because the platform as such does not exclude people who want to participate. Anyone can grab the mike and join the conversation, or start a new one.

I answer yes because even though the platform does not impose any restrictions to participate, we might impose these kinds of restrictions by our attitudes and behaviors as individuals and/or collective. Though, the subjective feeling of not being included that some individuals might have does not necessarily mean that other people deliberately exclude them or don’t want them to participate.

The fact that some people are more active than others is no surprise and nothing strange. This is illustrated by the 90-9-1 principle, which claims that in social groups, some people participate more actively than others. Social participation tends to follow a 90-9-1 rule ((cc) Jake McKee & 90-9-1.com):

Everyone is free to participate if they want to, and choose how they want to participate. If someone just wants to listen, then fine. If someone wants to create, then just do it.

2. Emergent spam

”Some posts are beginning to look like spam.”

Does spam exist on a platform where it is each individual who chooses whom to follow and listen to, and where you can use tags to filter out the stuff that is relevant to you?

Yes, it does. Temporarily, until you adjust and fine-tune your filters. That is something you must learn to do, and to continuously. If someone you follow is mostly babbling about stuff you don’t really interested in, then unfollow that person. No damage done. Someone might start following you, and then choose to unfollow you. You need to do the same if you want to avoid a feeling of information overload (or spam if you like). That is the name of the game, and what you are doing is just calibrating your filters.

Anyone is free to opt in and opt out from any conversation that takes place in public. You need to choose which ones are important and valuable to you. No-one forces anyone to follow someone else. And you can’t (at least you shouldn’t) force anyone to follow you.

3. The risk of being misunderstood

“What if I will be misunderstood?”

All communication brings a risk of being misunderstood. That is because the purpose of the communication is to be understood. If the communication fails, it means per definition that you have been misunderstood.

The graphic “10 levels of intimacy” below by Ji Lee can be used to illustrate a communication continuum from the most intimate way to communicate to the least intimate.