Upload, Tag, Share, Discuss:
Content Management in the Age of
User Participation
John Eckman
Sr. Director, Optaros Labs
Web Content 2008
June 18th, 2008

Spaces for Content, Interaction
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-
v3.html#11

Content Management: For Professionals Only?

Special Permissions for Authors, Editors

How are users participating?
• Blogs (comments, trackback)

How are users participating?
Blogs
Microblogging

How are users participating?
Blogs
Microblogging
Wikis

How are users participating?
Blogs
Microblogging
Wikis
User Contributed Content
(Photos, Videos, News)

How are users participating?
Blogs
Microblogging
Wikis
User Contributed Content
(Photos, Videos, News)
Social Networking

How are users participating?
Blogs
Microblogging
Wikis
User Contributed Content
(Photos, Videos, News)
Social Networking
Collaborative Filtering

How are users participating?
Blogs
Microblogging
Wikis
User Contributed Content
(Photos, Videos, News)
Social Networking
Collaborative Filtering
Tagging, Folksonomy

Contrary to what you may
have heard, there is still a
role for the content
management
professional in the age
of participation

Social Control
Social mechanisms
●
which regulate human
behavior
Internalization of
●
norms and values
External sanctions
●
Reward
–
Punishment
–

Library: Orderly, Quiet, Non-Participatory

Coffehouse: Polite, Conversational

Mardi Gras: Laissez les bon-temps roulez!

http://bokardo.com/archives/psychology-of-social-design-talk/

Loose Structures Encourage Participation

Someone's Gotta Drive the Bus

Terms of Service
Regulate Behavior
●
But over-reliance on
●
TOS is dangerous
Avoid Surprises
●
Social Norms more
●
effective than explicit
regulations
Code is Law
●

Must Cover
Privacy Appropriate
Ownership ● ●
●
Behavior
What you won't do
–
User Contributed Content
–
What they can't
–
Rights to Reuse Sanctions for bad behavior
– –
do
Guidelines/Process of
–
appeal

Identity
Anonymity can lead
●
to bad behavior
That bad behavior is
●
worse in the
aggregate
Reputation is a strong
●
curb on bad behavior
You wanna go . . . where everybody knows your name

Initial Inertia: The Empty Dancefloor
Initial Scale

It's OK to “Seed” Content

Rapid Growth
Control growth
●
Registrations, Invites
●
“Exclusivity for
●
Everyone”

Failure is Visible
“That place is so crowded
●
no one goes there
anymore” - Yogi Berra
Remember Friendster?
●
Plan for wild success,
●
spend for moderate
success

Everyone Loves Exclusivity

Moderation
Unmoderated
●
Meta-moderated
●
Community
●
moderated
Post-moderated
●
Fully moderated
●

Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and
spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam
spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam; Spam
spam spam spam ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam
baked beans spam spam spam ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce
served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate,
brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Spam
Keep out the Bots Registration wall
● ●
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Higher barrier to entry for bad and
– –
Turing Test To Tell Computers and good alike
Humans Apart)
Creates spam registrations as bots
–
CAPTCHA-like interfaces register
–
Watch for specific behaviors Constant vigilance and moderation
● ●
Akismet, Mollom With community help – flag as
– –
spam, flag as inappropriate
Spam-Protection-by-Obscurity
–
(non-obvious field names)
but remember accessibility
●

Client Case Study: Endeca
Building a partner community for innovation
The Challenge:
• Create an online knowledge-sharing and
collaboration community for employees, customers,
and partners
• Provide controlled access to thousands of technical
documents, best practices, code samples, case
studies, and other content
• Address department-specific requirements for
metadata and content approval
• Support future initiatives for interaction and
participation
• Meet a 13-week deadline
Assembly Highlights:
“The solution that
 180 users the first day, 360 the first
Optaros assembled
week, more than 1000 the first
for us lets us interact month
with our audiences
 Site integrates portal, content, and
with speed, flexibility
The Company: blog servers with a seamless user
and differentiation.” interface
• Endeca Technologies, a next-generation information access  Content is personalized to match
company user preferences
 Content approval rules can be
• Information access platform is used by many leading
adjusted for each department
companies and government agencies
- Colby Dyess  Reusable assembly for internal
• Headquarters in Cambridge, MA, USA and operations Endeca community (e.g. blogging,
Product Manager
worldwide Endeca Wiki)

Client Case Study: Endeca
Building a partner community for innovation (Cont’d)
Flexibility:
“By offering our
Key Components:
customers and
partners a seamless  Enterprise 2.0 open source assembly designed for
Client Preferred Component way to educate Endeca’s needs and preferences
 Endeca Search Engine
themselves and
interact with peers we  Content approval rules are adjustable for individual
Open Source Software are creating loyalty to departments using Alfresco's embedded JBPM workflow
Web Presentation: the site and to engine
 Liferay Portal [JSR-168] Endeca.”
 Enterprise 2.0 stack can be leveraged and reused for
 Forums: Liferay Forums
Endeca’s internal community site
- Colby Dyess
 Alfresco: Content
Differentiators:
Presentation [JSR- 170] Product Manager
 Loose assembly architecture allows easy replacement of
Endeca
pluggable modules and the ability to experiment
 Additional AJAX integration
with script.aculo.us, prototype
“Endeca customers
 DWR (Direct Web Remoting)
Differentiation:
and partners have been
toolkit for javascript
the driving force
 Blogs: Wordpress  Vibrant online community builds stronger relationships
behind our initiatives
with customers and partners
to encourage
relationship building
Web Services:
 Users can access thousands of technical documents,
and the open exchange
 Used to integrate Liferay with tools and utilities, code samples, case studies and other
of ideas and best
Alfresco content
practices. EDeN is the
culmination of these
Back-end Components:
 Metadata tags identify relevant search content to match
efforts…”
 Alfresco content repository user profile
 JBoss Application Server
 Social networking and knowledge-sharing for e-business
 Red Hat Directory Server (blogs for executives and technical staff, feedback,
- Colby Dyess
(LDAP) for user and group forums)
Product Manager
management Endeca
 New participation and collaboration features coming soon

Endeca EDeN Architecture
Presentation Services

RSS Portlet

Forums Portlet

Custom Search Portlets

Custom Alfresco Portlets

SOAP WS
Site-wide Search

Guided Navigation

LDAP SOAP WS
Content Spotlighting

JDBC
JDBC
CTO Blog
Custom Content Model 

Employee
Advanced Workflow 

User Profiles

Blogs
Custom Actions

Preferences

Minor Web Client Cust.

All File-based Content

Batch Job

“Professional” content and
●
“Amateur” content in one
place
Higher ad revenue sales for
●
mixture than for pure UGC
Conversations are two way
●
Automatic list generation
●
based on user activity is
UGC!
Most recommended
–
Most viewed
–
Most shared
–
Recent comments
–

Calls to action guide user
●
behavior
Remember “Code is law” - guide
●
behavior through enabling
technology
It may be necessary to seed
●
content

Case study: Local Online Community Site
Challenge
• Create new website that would
become a primary channel for
building community in the local
Chicago market
• Leverage content produced by
radio staff as well as content
submitted by the audience
Solution
• Assembly leveraged community,
content management, and media
integration components of Drupal
CMS
Highlights
• Web site is not just an add-on to
a radio station, but provides the
primary community experience
• Enables a collage of
commentaries, personal stories,
local satire, music and other
content originally uploaded to the
Web site.

Case Study: Syndicated Community
Community Features:
Comments
●
Rankings
●
Top Commented
●
Top Emailed
●
Top 10
●
Today’s Rankings
●
Feedback
●
Email a friend
●
Social Bookmark
●
Platform:
Symfony (PHP)
●
MySQL
●
JQuery
●

Drupal -> Facebook
Wider distribution
●
Bring content to where
●
audiences are, not
audiences to where
content is
Drupal module makes this
●
easy
Can be extended to other
●
networks

Same posts, in Drupal Format

Wordpress <-> Facebook
Comments pooled
●
between Wordpress
and Facebook
audiences
Custom theme =
●
easily adapted for
brand look & feel
Blogosphere meets
●
Social Network
Interactions in
●
context

Same content in Wordpress
(www.openparenthesis.org)

What's Next?
RingSide Networks OpenID
● ●
Open Social OAuth
● ●
Sun Project SocialSite XFN / FOAF
– ●
Apache Shindig
–
hCard
●
fbOpen
●
XRDS
●
Google
●
XMPP
●
FriendConnect
DiSO
●

Thanks!
John Eckman
jeckman@optaros.com
http://www.openparenthesis.org/
http://www.optaros.com/user/jeckman/
http://twitter.com/jeckman

Photo Credits
1. Transparent Teapot: 23.Terms of Service: http://wordpress.com/tos/
http://flickr.com/photos/59683764@N00/1258264231/ 24.Terms of Service:
2. Teapot Pottery: http://flickr.com/photos/quinn/14242449/ http://stockcharts.com/help/doku.php?id=support:terms_of_service
3. CMS Vendor Map: http://www.cmswatch.com/vendormap/ 25. Must Cover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2162663143/
4. Main Professional Building: 26. Cheers: http://www.tvrage.com/Cheers; Dog:
http://flickr.com/photos/davehogg/144100828/ http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?sitetype=2&sid=22230
5. No Access: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbennett/10859606/ 27. Dancefloor: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/529655787/
28. Seeds:http://www.flickr.com/photos/lollyknit/458912525/
Web 1.0/2.0: http://web2.wsj2.com
6.
29. Growth: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anniemole/63845419/
7. Blogs: www.openparenthesis.org, www.eosdirectory.com, technorati
30. Twitter New Friendster?:
state of the blogosphere reports
http://www.ajcronk.com/2008/02/24/twitter-is-the-new-friendster/
8. Microblogging: twitter, twittux, pownce
31. Rue La La: http://www.ruelala.com/
9. Wikis: Wikipedia, Optaros Internal Wiki
32. Moderation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozzzie/507605060/
10. Video, Photos, News: CNN iReport, Flickr, YouTube
33. Moderate Moderation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnjoh/520897789/
11. Social Networks: facebook, linkedin
34. Spam Skit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_Python)
12. Collaborative Filtering: newsvine, digg
35. Spam Truck: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulad/264285948/
13. Tagging/Folksonomy: ma.gnolia, del.icio.us
36. Case Study, Optaros
14. Grownups Obsolete: http://flickr.com/photos/nietsdoener/1091201075/
37. Case Study, Optaros
15. Beer Pitcher: http://flickr.com/photos/gerardniemira/133918277/
38. Endeca EdeN: http://eden.endeca.com/
16. Library: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chainsawpanda/170652816/
39. Endeca EdeN: http://eden.endeca.com/
17. Coffeehouse: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/188227943/
40. Endeca EdeN: http://eden.endeca.com/
18. Mardi Gras: http://www.flickr.com/photos/darinmarshall/17876483/
41. Endeca EdeN: http://eden.endeca.com/
19. Lewin's Equation: http://bokardo.com/archives/psychology-of-social-
42. REMTour: http://tour.remhq.com/
design-talk/
43. Optaros Intranet (Not public)
20. Chalkboard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike-burns/424768890/
44. Corporate Social network (not public)
21. WikiWiki Bus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HNL_Wiki_Wiki_Bus.jpg 45. Home Remedies: http://homeremedies.prevention.com/
22. Legal Notice on Beach: 46. Home Remedies: http://homeremedies.prevention.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2017134/ 47. Chicago Public Radio, Vocalo.org
48. Chicago Public Radio, Vocalo.org
49. Hearst Digital Comics Kingdom, TimesUnion.com/comics
50. http://www.TimesUnion.com/comics
This presentation licensed under a Creative 51. http://apps.facebook.com/optaros-blogs
Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 52. http://www.optaros.com
53. http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis
54. http://www.openparenthesis.org
55. <none>
56. Joy: http://www.icanhashotdog.com