The Weblogs cosmos demonstrates that only information available in little bits and pieces is useful for social knowledge interaction. Look at scientists, how they work: They quote certain paragraphs or ideas from other books in their new works – but they do not integrate whole books. This means: interactive, Web-based knowledge work can be achieved only, if applications allow for granular information management. This is exactly what happens with Weblog entries being trackbacked, pingbacked, or commented.

For future CMS, this concludes to the imperative: Atomize your Content! This means that future CMSs need to work with structured content (XML) and related technologies to identify parts of contents (XPath, XPointer). This allows for information reuse (e.g. integrating a diagram from a published work into a new text) and information contextualization (e.g. relating the metadata from the new text to the text where we took the diagram from).

Background:

Attending and speaking at OSCOM 3 [1] gave me a good opportunity to testify some theses about future Content Management, espeically compared to Weblogs and the role of Ontologies. After OSCOM 3, I stayed for two weeks in NYC and attended a CMS users group meeting [2]. There, I also presented some of my ideas for discussion and we tried to shape out some differences between Content Management Systems and Weblogs.

This post presents some of these ideas that have been presented, discussed, developed, etc. at those two events. Each thesis is posted in a single Weblog entry. This is work in progress.

Many thanks to all those you have inspired me in vital discussions!

[1] http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/
[2] http://www.egenius.com/Members/chalu/News_Item.2003-06-07.4150