Maybe I'm biased (check that—I am biased) and perhaps my news diet is biased, but the topic of content management seems to have dissipated these last few years. I recall a panel I sat on at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies conference in 2003. The moderator wanted to know if blogs would impact content management companies. Of course (everyone said) but the context requires some preamble that no one could agree on (at least not in 2003). I've recently written about content management, specifically with regard to business requirements like personalizing your weblog and RSS content to meet your objectives (see Dozens of Markets of One). But I don't describe conversations like this as necessarily in the realm of content management; indeed no one would recognize my writings as having much to do with CM. But many of my writings are about content management, and Brad Feld's mention of it today poked a memory location concerning its importance—everything about the loosely-coupled, web services, blog-based, RSS syndicating, folks-tagging movement have roots in content management. Two things seem to be responsible for driving me away from the CM term—open standards (which we ironically have many to choose from) and new requirements such as discrete addressability (permalinks, etc). Perhaps the evolving nature of content toward more atomized structures made me (and others) uncomfortable using such an ambiguous term (e.g., isn't everything content?). When we designed the MyST platform, we created a unified embrace of content (allowing us to escape the question of ambiguity) by following one very simple principle—everything is a resource and resources are related to one another through typed associations (yes, a direct influence of XTM and previous research at Starbase). At the core of our design is a CMS platform that allows us to address (with grace and extreme agility) business requirements, many of which have not yet been encountered. But fundamentally, our target for MyST (in the year we designed it) was "knowledge content management". This has morphed slightly because we have allowed customers to push and prod us in certain directions (Blogsite.com and Enterprise RSS services being two lines of business built on the MyST platform). In designing MyST, our objective was to create an abstract information space, together with supporting services, designed to help companies solve their own specific "content management" problems. We designed MyST (the web services platform) around two basic concepts: agility and security. The platform defines a relatively simple and highly abstract model for dealing with information objects. This architecture includes a pervasive security model that permits granular permissions control over every aspect of the platform. It is useful to think of the objects at this level as elemental objects from which more specific (i.e., less abstract) content-oriented solutions are built. As I wrote this post I decided to look back to see what I had previously written concerning content management. It's nice to be able link to MyST objects that are two years old (that still work) and read about ideas that are still relevant. A few are listed below. It's no surprise that we've drifted from describing MyST as a CMS; the terminology is far too different and the business requirements that we can address with this technology to are far too many in number to simply call it content management. | 
