At the core of all the hype around "social networking," and "social media," is the fact that "social" websites allow members of a website to connect with each and develop relationships without needing the administrators or content editors to mediate these connections. This from the "build and they'll come," school of design and strategy. In any case, even though Drupal is a fundamentally social platform, there is no user-to-user relationship support in the core of Drupal. Read More >>>

The CMS Expo Learning and Business conference is coming up this week in Evanston, Illinois. This event is going to be interesting, in part because I will be presenting (more on that below), but also because the session track really covers a lot of bases.

The event is promoted as "Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco & Plone CMS Training," but that only does it partial justice. Looking at the home page, there is this whole CMS Support Training track going on, and there is a lot to learn from the people that are going to be there. Beyond the big names like Apache, MySQL and PHP, there are going to be some other interesting topics worth hearing about. Read More >>>

I read this article that predicted the decline of Facebook a little while ago, and I've found myself thinking about not only the future of Facebook, but the future of social networking in general. Read More >>>

So you've read that Trellon does work with a platform called Drupal, and that we build sites for various businesses and political organizations that want to make use of new "social" technologies to connect with their clients, and connect their clients with each other. But this sounds pretty abstract, and "social networking" sounds like something that bored teenagers do anyway? Read More >>>

Facebook's newsfeed feature introduced social network users to continuous updates of news about the goings-on in the lives of their friends and contacts. Activity aggregators have turned out to be a pretty useful feature for social networking sites, and can even be a little addictive when done right. Most sites that bill themselves as a social or professional network now have some kind of newsfeed, friend feed, lifestream or other feed. Read More >>>