User Generated Content

Newton: How Web 2.0 will change the face of business

John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I not only liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.

Mollom: Drupal's new weapon for fighting spam

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites.

Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup -

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

CMSReport.com is one in a number of Drupal sites that have been "secretly" testing Mollom over the past several months. Since installing Mollom, I've been able to sleep at night knowing that Mollom is watching over my site. The amount of time I spend on moderating anonymous comments for potential spam has been significantly reduced thanks to Mollom. This is good stuff from Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen!

John Newton: A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise

John Newton has written a fantastic summary regarding social computing (or is it social networking or social content management) and its role in the enterprise. The post is titled, A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise.

I plan to talk about Newton's post and social networking at a later date. Howerver, there isn't any reason why you shouldn't be able to read Newton's post now. Consider it homework for a later visit here at CMSReport.com.

Choosing Drupal forum over vBulletin

Steven Peck, associated with the Drupal project, wrote about an article he came across regarding a comparison of the vBulletin forum and Drupal's forum. The article is titled, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. The author of the article writes:

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Mr. Peck's reaction to the article (and my emphasis in bold):

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

In other words, Peck and many of us that pay attention to how the forum applications stack up against CMS native forums don't see too many articles like this. It is rare to see someone using a standard forum application such as vBulletin, SMF, or phpBB switch over to Drupal primarily for its forum functionality.

phpBB3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) released

The official release of phpBB3 is almost near with the first release candidate now available. The following is a partial list of features that are new in this version phpBB that did not exist in 2.0.x.

  • Attachments - Attachments in posts and Personal Mail, Automatic image thumbnails,Display attachments inline
  • Unlimited Subforums - Create unlimited subforums, Display active topics of all subforums
  • Custom BBCodes - Create your own BBCodes, Add buttons to posting screen
  • Custom Profile Fields - Add new fields on user profiles, Display them at registration, Display them on the profile view

Wikipedia on ABC Nightline

As I was heading for bed, I just saw ABC's Nightline story on Wikipedia. Wikipedia uses the wiki application MediaWiki for its content management system. The Nightline story was as close to a fair and balance story on an IT subject you can find on a non-technical program. The story focused not so much on technology as it did the people of Wikipedia, mainly the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the community of wiki users.

Akismet Anti-Spam Modules for Drupal and phpBB

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We've been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet's filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:

Family 2.0 Sites?

Taking the term of Web 2.0 further, CNET has an article about Family 2.0 sites:

Cook is one of a growing number of parent-entrepreneurs who are putting their time and money behind their familial interests and starting a new generation of Web sites for parents and older people--sites that borrow many of the social networking concepts, such as photo-sharing and the wiki, that are found on well-known destinations like MySpace.com and the aforementioned Wikipedia.