CONTENT MANAGEMENT

	Contents
	Scale, by Thomas Claburn
	Content Management, by Thomas Claburn
	Security, by Charles Babcock
	Lightweight Development, by Charles Babcock
	The User Experience, by Aaron Ricadela
	Communities, by Aaron Ricadela
	Interactive Timeline: A Brief History Of Web 2.0

If you build it and they come with their photos, videos blogs, and other user-generated material, do you know how to handle it?

For sites whose main reason for being is to gather content, package it, and deliver it to millions of people, the challenge is to figure out the best way to manage all those files. Companies may need to develop their own approaches because the architecture of Web 2.0 interactivity--tagging, rating, uploading--isn't well supported in commercial content management systems. "Scaling is the big question when it comes to user-generated content," says Jesse James Garrett, director of user experience strategy and a founding partner of Web design firm Adaptive Path.

The reason existing content management infrastructures don't work for these Web 2.0 companies is "their definition of content management was completely outside what the vendors were considering when they created their software," Garrett says. Most enterprise content management systems were designed to handle documents, spreadsheets, databases, and other conventional types of files--not photos, video, or online communities.

Photo sharing site SmugMug has been adding 300,000 to 500,000 image files a day, CEO MacAskill says. The company's content management system isn't especially sophisticated, he says, just "a small bit of glue. Not many lines of code." His main concern is large amounts of bulletproof storage, which the company gets from Amazon's S3 storage service, in conjunction with a customer-friendly user interface and Amazon support. The "glue" serves to prevent data loss when file-writing operations fail.

(click image for larger view) Handling this much content and nearly half a billion visitors a month is a huge technical challenge for Metacafe

What makes content management more difficult for many Web 2.0 companies is the need to deal with user-generated material; everything those companies do revolves around data and its management. Before storing the files it receives, SmugMug does a lot of work on them, such as making sure they're the right color space, extracting information that may be used as captions and keyword tags, and making copies in various sizes that can be fetched from the disk for quick display, says Chris MacAskill. After that, Amazon replicates the files among data centers and storage.

The challenge for Metacafe is dealing with massive amounts of video as well as data gathered from users and developers. That means choosing the right content delivery network, tracking buffering times around the globe, and doing lots of development work to track page loads and the stress placed on databases. "Metacafe is really different in terms of the sheer amounts of data that we mine to bring results to our users," CEO Czerniak says.

The company uses open source software across the board for production and development. It uses a wiki to manage its development cycle and as its main knowledge management tool, chief product officer Hertzog says. "Every idea and thought are written to the wiki and reviewed and edited by people from the company," he says. "Once an idea is accepted, we continue to spec it, design it, and write the test plans on it."

Content management is difficult for Web 2.0 companies no matter how you look at it. But the good news is that people are learning. In the late 1990s, a lot of sites hit a wall because they couldn't scale, Garrett says. "We've learned a lot as an industry in the last five years," he says, "about how to build applications from the start with the flexibility that's going to be able to sustain a mass audience."

-- Thomas Claburn