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CMS — What it should be? (Or, should it be?)
- 6 November 2007
In a site the scale of any major college/university, the real difficulty for new media is helping people connect the dots to different kinds of information that already exists on the site. Often, the left hand in one area of the institution doesn’t have the time to keep up with and know that there might be valuable information for them in another’s site (the right hand), and they end up duplicating the work, if it’s that important to have it available.
And, while we in new media can help connect some of those dots, and often do, it would be far faster and more robust if there were a more automated method of doing this. So, Noah and I were just talking about this and some other issues — thinking out loud about ways to see the website (and management of it) work better — and I was particularly enamored with the following idea.
What if the future CMS allowed people to tag (in exactly that Web 2.0 methodology) certain types of content (images, audio, video, text blocks, RSS feeds, etc.) or whole pages with tags, perhaps from a defined set. Further, they could set a scope of availability that might include academic-only, or select portion of the site only, or, available anywhere on lclark.edu.
Website editors could then sign up to follow certain tags with email notification or by RSS feed to be alerted when new content appears that is relevant to their site’s mission. (They would also be able to search on the tags at any time.) Other types of information would be automatically built into this system, such as alerts regarding news stream by tag and events by tag.
If the tagged element is a bit of content, as in a audio file, the site editor could then choose to absorb the material into their site (not by duplicating the original content, but merely distributing it to an additional location). In this manner, if that content changes in the future, like the tuition numbers which change annually, any page absorbing that content would automatically be using the most updated and accurate version.
While talking about this, Noah did remind me that Trillium does actually use a good base for this methodology. In Trillium, blocks of content are assembled to make pages, and within an account/site, you can re-use a block as many times as you like. What I’ve outlined above would require an extension of that methodology, so that accounts/sites could share their blocks (and a notification system to help manage that process).
Thoughts?
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Comments
Tags of any form could be an excellent help to manage the “connect the dots” problem (like we were discussing in the posts about RSS). I wonder however how much training will be required to make an implemented system really be useful. Perhaps there could be a Google-type automatic grabbing-and-tagging of content once people enter it…
I agree completely — what makes del.icio.us really work for me is the auto-suggestion of tags, as I assume like other people, I’m too lazy to think up my own tags except in select cases.
I’ve already found a PHP tag generator, and would look to have a script like this review the text that you’ve entered or edited, and compare the results to the existing tag space and providing suggestions. (Having a del.icio.us-like interface also helps, in that you just click on the tag to include it.)
As for the tags, it occurs to me that we might want have an “official” tag space, particularly as we start out, to provide some standard terminology for offices/departments, etc., but that we’ll definitely want to provide users with the ability to create their own — I know I can’t conceive of every last possibility, but I figure our user’s collective can.
Of course, this is all only possible in a specific system that could handle this sort of information management, or in one in which we can customize it to add this type of function. 