Last week I participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Web Content Mavens. I really had the easy seat of the group. I had the opportunity to speak first and therefore inadvertently steal other people's points and cause them to respond to me. While it wasn't the goal, it was an unexpected and interesting situation...

After taking a few days to digest the discussion, I wanted to share some closing thoughts and open questions:

First of all, there are still *huge* misunderstandings about licensing. It was even brought up in the opening statements. GPL vs BSD... who cares? Each determines the rules, requirements, and expectations if you choose to distribute your customizations. Read that statement carefully. Neither of these licenses require you to distribute anything. It is entirely up to you.

Wow... this one has been a long time in coming...

Late last summer when David All and I pitched the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation on a site redesign, it went swimmingly. We were going to work to bring them up to date, give them a better architecture all the way around, and give us all something to be proud of. Fast forward a few months and the design had a major overhaul. Add in some unexpectedly complexities in import... and you get the idea.

Well in the last couple weeks, the whole site has been revamped. It started with a few little things like font colors and tightening up some borders, but quickly extended to balancing the layouts of some boxes, replacing the tiled background image (ack!) with a smooth gradient, and a header nav bar. It was a number of little things... but they added up quickly.

So of course, I'm going to share it here:

This is what I get for not tracking my schedule more closely...

On the 27th of February - yes, less than two weeks from now - I will be participating in a panel discussion from the Web Content Mavens group in downtown DC.

Here are the details:

I wrote about this topic six months ago - Blogging Strategy - and had an update on a few different efforts. So blogging about blogging... yes, get over it. ;)

So six months has passed... has anything changed? Do more organizations get it? Are more organizations trying it? Are more organizations engaging with their customers, supporters, employees, and competitors?

Unforuntately, I don't track the entire industry, I have things to do. But I do keep an eye on a few organizations and their trends... and occasionally happen upon other groups' efforts.

First, the obvious, there are numerous groups and individuals using it to build their brands, gain allies, and generally create a buzz around them and their services. In my own little corner of the world, the CaseySoftware blog has been online for over three years and I just passed my 500th post. Others - like Ann Bernard at WhyGoSolo - are newer to the space but have already built up a following in just a manner of months. WGS regularly generates more comments on a daily basis than CaseySoftware. Just one metric, but interesting.

Most mISV's don't need to worry about these aspects. When you're only one person, a great big file or a whiteboard or any number of other tools can probably fit your needs. But once you add a second person or a second project/product, it gets that much more complicated. Now your mnemonics and half-notes aren't as valuable... in fact, some may be a liability.

Hello, I'm Keith and I'm an information addict. I don't seek to catalog all the world's information. I don't even seek to collect it. My goal is to take what I have and make it useful.

That may sound odd but think about it... most information has a few specific properties:

• The most important/expensive information is usually the most time-sensitive;
• It isn't useful if you don't know how to find it;
• Different people will look for the information in different ways depending on the questions they need answered;

Towards this goal, I've been experimenting with different wiki structures - exclusively on MediaWiki - and how to use them to fulfill those requirements. Here are the results of a year of tweaking and refinement.

Yes, you've read that correctly, at the DailyKos' annual convention - named YearlyKos - some of the leftwing activists put the idea of unionizing bloggers out there. They didn't just put it out there, they also identified all the "Rights" that they demand. Without actually going into the definition of "Rights", let's stop and consider this one a moment...

First, from a blogger's perspective, TechCrunch knocks it out of the park with this one:

Most content creators do not work under employer/ employee relationships, most are paid without tax being deducted; in the most these are not regular style jobs. There is a reason for this, because in the vast majority of cases bloggers or content creators take these jobs as hobbies; the income earned being additional pay to existing employment.