Sometimes I get too nostalgic over computers or software that I once used in my daily life. I remember my first computer (the Commodore Vic-20), I remember my first programming language (BASIC), and I remember my first spam filtering software for user generated content (Akismet). But nine years ago, a new spam filtering service originally intended for Drupal called Mollom emerged and I quickly forgot about the other spam blocking software.
When Livefyre announced their new Livefyre Engagement Cloud on Wednesday, Jordan Kretchmer claimed that "Today, we’re going to make some history". With history yet to be written, this could come across as typical grandstanding made by a company's CEO and founder. Yet the deeper you dig into this story, the more you realize if not history being made then at the very least Livefyre has charted a better course for user engagement and the use of user generated content.
Earlier this week, I questioned whether social media could replace my need to blog. In my article, I mentioned that Google+ and LinkedIn as social network platforms are able to provide near blog-like functions. Since that article posted, I've already heard comments from my Facebook and Twitter friends that no one uses Google+. I respectfully disagree with my friends. While people like to call Google+ a ghost town the numbers would indicate otherwise.
Ever since social media and social networks have gone mainstream, our digital lives have become complicated. There are a number of social media management tools already out on the market that aim to give users the tools they need to better mange, filter, and prioritize the content they read from their favorite blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Almost all these tools fall short of their intended goals and why I'm always on the lookout for something better to come along.
Yesterday, Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that Acquia has released the next generation of Mollom, the Mollom Content Moderation Platform. The new Mollom platform is being billed by Acquia as the "first cloud content moderation platform built for the enterprise". Mollom is capable of reducing the time that’s required to moderate large volumes of user-generated content. Personally having used Mollom to assist me in moderating user content for small to medium sites, I would think the need for something like Mollom is even greater for enterprises with an even larger web presence.
As a former meteorologist, I think it goes without saying that by default I will talk about any content management system with "cumulus" in the name. In this case, I'm talking about CumulusClips, a video sharing CMS officially out of Beta and released a stable version (v.1.1).
If you are in need of sharing videos but a little uneasy with allowing someone else manage those videos then perhaps CumulusClips is your answer. Requirements for hosting CumulusClips aren't too difficult to meet although you'll want plenty of memory for all that video encoding you'll need to do for new videos uploads.
Over the years, I have gone on record stating the importance in allowing users the ability to leave comments at this site anonymously. I have always recognized that there is a segment of the online community that likes to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave an online trail that can be traced back to personal online accounts. Despite all the trouble I've had with the spammers and bots, the benefits of anonymous comments was always worth it to me in hopes of reading that one life changing comment provided by someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.
"Help 2.0 is about letting go of old-school, preconceived notions about our role as content providers. Help 2.0 forces us to realize that by leveraging the knowledge of the crowd we can help users find the right information quickly and easily, whether we created the content ourselves or not. And perhaps most importantly, Help 2.0 is about creating support experiences in which users can help us learn what they want and need, while also allowing them to assist one another, in ways that are meaningful to them."
-Scott Abel, The Future of Technical Communication Is Socially Enabled: Understanding the Help 2.0 Revolution, Intercom.STC.org, April 2011.
