A few weeks ago I highlighted an article by Acquia's VP of Marketing Jeff Whatcott. In it, Jeff came up with a definition of something he calls "social publishing." He described it as a blend of what we currently expect from a web content management system, aspects of online networking such as blogs, wikis and sites like Facebook and YouTube, plus the ability to create web applications using a common framework.

I liked Jeff's terminology then; I like it even better today. For the purposes of this discussion, I include Joomla, Drupal, Plone and other similar software as content management systems and WordPress, Moveable Type and Blogger and their kin as personal publishing, or blogging, platforms. But as open source developers have extended the capabilities of these packages, they are coming closer to each other's niche markets.

Plenty of bloggers are using CMS software to run their blogs; New Tech Heroes is just one of many sites that are primarily blog-driven using Drupal in that way. With the modules and extensions available for WordPress today, and more expected when version 2.5 is introduced, it's more than just a blog platform now. Is it a CMS yet? Does it matter?

Bryan Ruby examined the "social publishing" terminology on his CMSReport blog last Thursday. Noting that we're now dealing with "something more than a CMS," Bryan writes:

What do you call a Web application capable of publishing and managing not only content, but is an application that also manages wikis, social networking, documents, forums, photos, and blogs? Some people will tell you these diverse features are best described under such terms as social software, Web 2.0, social networking, and Enterprise 2.0. While these terms may help create a lot of buzz, I have some difficulty in using these terms to describe the information system model being used by the applications. If you think the definition of a CMS can be a fuzzy or limiting term, wait until you start using the term "social software" in a business setting. Personally, I don't think my boss is in the mood to deal with such vague terms.

The imprecision of terms does make selling this technology difficult to our employers and clients. Not only is "content management" difficult to define for them, the whole idea that there's any "content" to "manage" is baffling to many decision makers. Don't we just want a web page? Haven't we progressed enough if we get that far? Now we're supposed to be "social," too?

It reminds me of the rise of "desktop publishing" twenty years ago. Large print shops hated the term - and the technology - because it implied anyone could do what they'd been doing with their big Linotype machines and composition tables for years. (The fact that not anyone could actually do good layout work became apparent soon enough. I still see brochures laid out using Microsoft Publisher that feature eight or more fonts.) Yet we needed some term back then to describe what PageMaker could do, and desktop publishing did the trick. Interestingly, you rarely hear the term "desktop publishing" anymore, because now everyone - including the big print shops - does layout work on computers now.

So maybe in the long run it won't matter with social publishing, either. For now, though, it seems like we need to have a term that describes this evolving type of software that's driving how individuals, businesses and organizations are communicating in 2008. "Social publishing" works for me. What do you think?