#futureWCM - some thoughts from China - part 1...

...Not much specific Chinese WCM input yet but I'm expecting some over the next few days. The following is just a few initial thoughts from the flight over and being wide awake when I need to be asleep :(

As another decade is coming to a close and we begin heading towards 2020, there is increasing commentary about the future of Web Content Management and what the next year, 5 years and 10 years might bring forth.

Quite often, looking back and learning lessons from history helps in the process of anticipating what the future might hold. While we can be sure there will be unpredictable developments, we can also be sure that history will repeat itself in one form or another. After-all, the ‘noughties’ has been a decade full of ‘history repeating itself’ – from the Dotcom  ( read South Seas) bubble, to long drawn out ‘religious’ wars in ancient lands to another great economic disaster. This last decade would seem to haved showed more than many that the more technologically sophisticated we get and the more electronically connected we become, the faster and more frequently we repeat our historical mistakes.

So, a good place to look back, before looking forward, is to the birth of the 'Web' part of Web Content Management and the great works of Tim Berners-Lee.

Aside from Sir Berners-Lee’s association with Dorset UK (where the very best of ‘noughties’ WCM came from of course ;) ) and his more recent time at Southampton University working on the Semantic Web (I’m trying to put my home town on the map for something other than the Titanic ;) ) I believe the simplistic essence of his original idea hits at the heart of what Web Content Management, to date, has been all about .

The essence of the WWW is ‘content plus pointers’ and you can pretty much distil the majority of our WCM efforts over the last 10-15 years down to that simple description. Content (documents, text, data, images, video) plus pointers (taxonomy, site navigation, search engines, blogs (chronological pointing), wikis (pointing simplified) )

Through his work on the semantic web, Berners-Lee has described the WWW transitioning into the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Spookily enough, when you read more about graph theory, one word stands out - the ‘Matrix’.

However, prophetic film making aside, the simple description of the GGG is ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’

Twitter, for example, distils down nicely into this description. 140 characters can provide surprisingly valuable content - it is the best content ‘pointing’ tool yet devised (because of the following 2 points) - relationships between content and pointers are visible and can be analysed - and the content, it’s context and relevancy, is often described well – by humans rather than metadata.

But, like any first mover in the technology space, Twitter is gaining critical mass but also generating considerable hype. I think that looking beyond this hype and the mechanics that Twitter is illustrating is key to the future of WCM. In part two of this post, I’ll give the reasons for this thought…