Blog post June 2009

The promise of strong coffee and bacon rolls prompted nearly 100 publishers to set their alarms a little earlier last Thursday morning and gather at the Law Society Hall in Chancery Lane for a Publishers Breakfast Seminar.

Is it the holy grail? Drupal does have a bit of a reputation for grabbing all the resources it can and keeping hold of them until the bitter end. The trick being, of course, making sure that "the bitter end" isn't the point at which the site stops working and your community start complaining.

There's a two-pronged approach here, and you won't be surprised to hear that it's not all about the technology in our view.

She may have helped thousands of parents raise contented babies, but the jury is out as to whether Gina Ford is contented with her five-figure libel settlement from mumsnet.com particularly given that it's estimated that the payout doesn't even cover her legal bill. But what was the argument about?

Over at CMS Watch, Tony Byrne asks whether Drupal is overhyped and entering the "peak of inflated expectations". Despite the buzz, he says, it's not the knight in shining armour that everyone is expecting and he is right, but it's not the technology that's at fault.

After picking up on HP Labs research on the value of paying attention to top contributors I thought it would be interesting to check previous research from the same guys at Palo Alto, looking at predicting the popularity of online content (pdf) or read it on scribd). The abstract nicely sums it up. Could be useful for planning a community growth strategy for example:

After reading a blog about burnout the other week I'd been thinking about how to help community managers avoid the same problem, faced by pressures from managing difficult issues online to getting buying from across their organisation. The issue came back to me today after reading FreshNetwork's Holly Seddon ask how to best deal with burnout in the LinkedIn Community Manager group:

This recent study from HP Labs demonstrates the feedback loop between attention and contributions to online communities. The abstract provides a nice introduction:

It's a tough climate for publishers right now, with titles closing down and increased scrutiny of ROI from investments in technology. But holding back on investing in social media is a risky approach, as the techniques and expectations are moving forward at a furious pace. The surge in popularity of social platform Twitter shows how publishers need to be embracing today something that didn't exist a few months ago.