Managing to keep online content together

Business & Technology: Monday, August 02, 2004

E-conomy / Paul Andrews

Managing to keep online content together

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As users like you and I continue to post more content on the Internet, two thorny questions beg answers. What's the best way to share our stuff with others? How long do we want the material to stay online? These are tricky issues because so much content on the Internet remains ephemeral. The vacation photos you post on your Internet-service provided "personal Web page" this summer probably will be gone in a few months — a victim of an Internet service provider's policy or your switching to a different provider, or any other number of causes.

The same goes for the wedding video, the baby album, the family reunion and all those other digitally documented events that are important to you and your circle on an ongoing basis.

The issue is content management. As long as your material sits on your PC, you have a pretty good handle on it. Once it moves to the Web, though, things turn dicey.

For most purposes, the Web log has been the easiest and most convenient vehicle for posting personal content — short of a full-blown server or Web site, which few consumers want to tackle or can afford.

Most blogs automate linking and offer passable search capability, as long as the content is in text form. Photos are more problematic — some blog providers are better than others at organizing and indexing images, but none really excels.

As for video, chat, comments and other services, blogs have yet to offer much.

And blogs based on a "topic of the day" philosophy don't let you manage content effectively. Unless you do the grunt work of linking to stuff you've posted previously, the material is lost behind a digital curtain for users who come to your site.

So what's the solution? A promising application called Plone is gradually building a loyal constituency by offering unique tools and an innovative approach to dealing with online content management.

Plone gives Web posters the ability to put content into nested folders, the way you do on your personal computer. Plone doesn't really care what the content is, but the standard Plone interface offers helpful categories such as "news," "events," "topics," "images" and so on.

You can add a news item, for example, through a link with a brief comment (or long rant, whatever you choose), to a folder of your choice. As the folder gets richer with additional content, you can divide it into subfolders.

Plone comes with a calendar, which you can use to post events or time-related material. Plone's standard interface is infinitely customizable as well. You can set up your own look and feel and devise your own interest categories.

In contrast to most blogs, you can password-protect information on a Plone site. But Plone also makes the information easily shared by "members" who sign up (and whom you approve).

In addition, members can set up their own Plone sites, complete with their related (or not, it doesn't matter) postings. So you can build a Plone "sphere" on the Web — a digital society where you can chat, share comments and postings and otherwise build a virtual neighborhood.

In a number of ways, Plone represents the next step in blogging. Its tools are more powerful, and it builds far more versatility into Web posting.

An open-source program built on powerful database standards, Plone still has some polishing to do in its interface and ease of use. But it offers a wide range of services and is maturing fast.

You can give it a whirl at www.objectis.org. Let me know what you think.

Paul Andrews is a freelance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com.