It seems like I've been on a quest to find easy ways to publish content to the Web since the middle part of the '90s. The toolsets I've used and the battles I've fought would make a hell of a scrapblog.

So, you might think with all the fancy ways to connect to data these days, the era of push-button publishing would have arrived already, right? Well, sort of.

It really arrived a few years back when blogging pioneers like Six Apart launched Movable Type and Google bought Blogger.com. It was those services that really spoiled us with that feeling of instant gratification as we published.

And as good as some of the Web content systems are these days, they're still just that -- systems. We have to integrate, translate, transform, secure, index, migrate, and all sorts of other things before we can actually publish.

And it's interesting that I hardly ever use the term "system" when I speak of the tools I use to publish my own content. I think of things like WordPress, Movable Type, Tumblr, and Windows Live Writer as utilities. I think of them as services that help me create work product.

But there are some encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction.

One of them is the adoption of on-demand software, especially in the content management sector. From Salesforce.com to CrownPeak and Ektron, there are plenty of options. And customers are figuring out how to blend these services into traditional IT environments to make their business users happy.

The other is the vigorous efforts by vendors to scale down offerings for easier integration, deployment, and maintenance. CrownPeak's recent online version of its software is a good example, as is Telligent's Graffiti platform.

I'll be speaking with Telligent and Salesforce.com over the next few days. We'll see how far we've come.