@ Gilbane2008

Finally, some free time to write something about my trip to Boston where I visited the Gilbane Conference. Lots of interesting speakers there, on content management and globalization, the free commons, Yahoo rich content and proof that Twitter really is everywhere…

So yes, there was this incident with Fatwire which was quite tragic but in its own a really good example of how we can and will have to learn to communicate differently. Even if it was just a marketing scam to get attention, I really believe that this type of publicity does more harm than good in our Web2.0 world. And just go out and look on Twitter to see how fast bad news travels.

Another nice example of Web2.0 or actually Enterprise2.0 showing up was the presentation of Michael Edson on how the Smithsonian Institute should become a free commons, since they were founded to freely distribute knowledge after all… There was a beautiful video in his presentation, but unfortunately that cannot be found on YouTube, something to do with digital rights…

I participated in a panel on globalization together with Sophie Hurst who gave an overview of the SDL’s research into market demands for translation services and machine translations. Our second speaker was Fred Holloway from Symantec who gave an overview of machine translations in their business process. And I closed the line with a presentation on the possibilities for marketing and support to work together in the content management area.

From a European perspective it is hard to understand why you would have a separate track on working for audiences with multiple languages. It is integrated into everything we do. I worked for the European Community a couple of years back, with the startup of the European Urban Knowledge Network. Multicultural issues are more than different languages, really! This was discussed in the GCM-3 track with Ulrich Henes from the Localization Institute.

I do hope that we can grow into discussions on how to organize the right content for your (multiple) publication channels and how to guarantee long-lasting content quality. Really see it as organizing front (web management) and backend (content management). Content management will never be as sexy as the parallel fancy website track, but hey, somebody has to do the hard work. And sexy just isn’t good enough anymore.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 12:33 and is filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, collaboration, content management, information quality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.