Businesses connect with customers, providing information and making sales online, across borders and time zones. Friends reconnect with each other across the years. Community groups reach out to their supporters and those they serve across economic and social barriers.

The technology that's created this incredible virtual conversation is powerful, and has given those who may have been ignored previously a voice to create change in their communities, in their careers and in their lives. Even those who aren't checking Twitter, Facebook and MySpace every few minutes are starting to understand the changes these communications methods are having on society. We're seeing it in the response to disasters, like Hurricane Katrina and more recently, the disastrous cyclone in Myanmar (and the even more disastrous reaction by the military government of the former Burma). We're seeing it in the way politicians, in the U.S. and elsewhere, are using the Internet to connect directly with their supporters, raising amazing amounts of money and gaining foot soldiers for their door-to-door campaigns.

But not everyone is benefiting from the power of social publishing.

The barriers to publishing have been lowered considerably with the ease and low cost of personal web pages and blogs, but many people, even in the world's most prosperous countries, still have no access to the Internet or a computer, or lack the education to effectively use those technologies even when made available through a public library or other means.

According to an annual study conducted by Parks Associates, 18 percent of American homes still have no Internet access, a total of 20 million households, and only seven percent of those "disconnected" homes planned to obtain service in the next year. Among American heads of households, one in five have never used email. And the statistics are even more discouraging in less-developed countries and where local governments have placed restrictions on the use of computers and the Internet, chilling the potential free speech benefits of social publishing technologies in their countries.

Social publishing technologies have the potential to advance human rights around the globe, as we take up virtual conversations across national borders and cultures. To make this truly effective, however, we'll need to make sure we're not leaving some of us out of the loop, effectively disenfranchising the very people who need to be heard the most when it comes to human rights.

Today, bloggers from around the world have chosen to participate in "Bloggers Unite for Human Rights." I'm pleased to be one of them. As we celebrate the enjoyment and commercial opportunities social publishing is creating, let's keep in mind those on the other side of the "digital divide" and commit to working to closing that gap and listening for their voices.

I got an email from someone inquiring about my availability for a project yesterday. Another person asked me through New Tech Heroes' contact form about a job possibility last week. Both asked the same question: "Are you available for long-term work?" They enjoyed the blog, and got the idea that I have some idea what I'm talking about and can use the technologies involved (which is one of the reasons that anyone involved in new media should have a blog). They weren't sure, however, if I was actually available for work.

Let me clear this question up.

Yes, I am.

This is a fast-moving time in a fast-moving industry. Startups are launched and shut down in a matter of months. Anyone working in new media or social publishing should be open to new opportunities, and I certainly am. While I have a small list of ongoing clients' projects, I'm also living in Michigan, which a quick peek at the statistics will tell you isn't exactly a hotbed of economic growth in 2008.

So, yes, I am open to opportunities. Full-time or contract jobs, projects, you name it. If it's related to writing or web development, particularly using open source tools like Drupal or Joomla, please consider me if you like what you see here on New Tech Heroes. I have a wide range of media and communications experience, and I'm willing to relocate or travel as needed. My resume is available here.

Image source: Steve Woods (woodsy on sxc.hu), Colchester, Essex, U.K.

It's long been efficient coding practice to reuse proven blocks of program code. After all, if you've already written something that works, why reinvent the wheel the next time you need the same function or operation? With open source coding, the resources for good, proven code are even greater. Thousands of solid scripts and code blocks are available for use in a new project, just by searching online. This not only improves reliability, since the code you borrow has already been battle-tested, but it also reduces development time and costs.

So why are there are so many social media sites apparently being developed from scratch?

I've discussed the positives of building a business site around a blog, or adding a blog to an existing site before. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also listed the pros and cons of converting a website to a blog format in a recent post. I believe that the interaction between you and your customers that a blog-style site can create is essential in today's business communications.

The number of businesses and organizations looking to develop seems to be growing every week. Jeff Whatcott of Acquia took a look at the number of job postings related to social applications and found a large disparity between those just looking for PHP programmers (which he assumes means they're planning to write their own code from the ground up) and those mentioning Drupal (which assumes they understand the advantage of starting with an established, robust content management platform). Jeff notes:

There are currently 816 social app building jobs mentioning PHP skills and only 89 mentioning Drupal skills. As you page through the actual job postings, you see evidence of lots of social publishing application development going on out there, but a lot of it appears to be heading down a path of custom PHP development.

So what's up with this? Drupal is the killer social publishing system. It's built on PHP. It saves a ton of time over building a custom system from scratch. Why are so many people who are friendly to LAMP and PHP in particular decide to reinventing the wheel? Which of the following do you think it is?

1. They've never heard of Drupal
2. They're vaguely aware, but not sure why it might be relevant to their projects
3. They've actively evaluated it in the past, but rejected it.
4. They know Drupal and like it in general, but it's just a poor fit for the current project for some reason

Companies that are looking to develop a next generation web site need to understand that content management systems have matured to a level where, at a basic administrative level, it's not a requirement to be a PHP expert to implement a CMS-based site. It's nice, but it's not absolutely essential unless you're looking to completely customize every element of the site. Requiring multiple years of experience in PHP and MySQL in order to qualify an applicant to create and maintain a WordPress, Drupal or Joomla-based site is like asking someone who'll be using Microsoft Word to be fluent in C++. It'd be nice, but hardly required for the task at hand.

From an evangelism point of view, those of us who are marketing these new technologies to clients need to emphasize the time and cost advantages of starting from a solid, proven base instead of building a web application from the ground up.

UPDATE: Nick Lewis weighs in with "Top 5 Reasons Developers Don't Use Drupal."

Web site owners who allow visitors to post comments or other personal information may be more liable for their users' content than previously thought, if the rulings in two recent court cases are any indication.

As reported by Anne Broache on CNET's News.com today, federal district judges have ruled in two separate cases that web site operators - in these cases, FriendFinder and Roommates.com - may be liable for the content their users have posted. In the FriendFinder case, a narrower interpretation of Section 230 of Title V of the 1996 Telecommunications Act could leave the site owner liable for fraudulent postings alleging to be someone else and portraying them in a negative way. This interpretation is based on the idea that the plaintiff in the case had her "intellectual property rights" violated under state law, which is specifically not included as being protected under Section 230.

The concern is that while previous court rulings have upheld the idea that web site owners are not responsible for user-generated content that is libelous or defaming, this new approach - claiming that one's "publicity rights" have been violated, will cause legal headaches for site operators. Laws covering intellectual property aren't uniform between states, so site operators could find themselves having to conform to the most strict laws in the country in order to meet the minimum standards.

Anne's article made me think of the question Raivyn posted on her Idiot's Guide to Blogging site on Monday. Raivyn asked whether comments are an essential part of a blog. Some say yes, that blogs need the give-and-take that comments allow visitors to have with the blogger. Others, including Raivyn, argue that comments are not an absolutely required part of a blog. (To participate in that conversation, stop by her site and weigh in with your comments!)

I agree with Raivyn on this, however. I think comments are an important way to create the sense of community many bloggers and social publishers are seeking, but they come with a price: extra maintenance to keep the spam commenters away (though services like Akismet and Drupal creator Dries Buytaert's new Mollom do help automate that monitoring). Also, even if legally there's no need to moderate comments that may be defamatory or libelous, I believe social publishers have a moral responsibility to keep the conversation civil, which means having at least a simple code of conduct for their site's visitors to follow when commenting.

Efforts to make web site operators responsible for the actions of their visitors often stem from the "blame the technology" approach to governing society. If we assume that people are going to do bad things, we limit the access to the tools that might allow them to do those things. If bloggers and social publishers refuse to accept the moral responsibility to moderate their communities, the courts - or Congress - may choose to step in and do it for them. I don't think that's a future any of us involved in social publishing would be happy with.

Photo credit: Joe Gratz (see Joe's photos at Flickr)

Outstanding post yesterday by Ann Handley on her Annarchy personal blog. I enjoyed it because she talks about two things near and dear to me: New Media and community theater. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about the parallels Ann describes, but I think she's right. Social publishing tools have made it much easier for anyone to publish their opinions. In the same way, community theater provides an outlet for non-professionals to express themselves as actors and technicians. As Ann says in her post:

Folks who previously didn’t have voice—or, more specifically, a platform—now do. In other words, like the community theater players, all kinds of people have a stage, if they want one. The “unbundling of all sources,” as Dave [Winer] calls it, has given voice to lots of folks previously shut out of the conversation.

and

Those who do climb up on the stage reveal themselves at a more fundamental level. Just like my acquaintance who risked showing a sassier, freer, funner side… bloggers can’t help but reveal themselves to their audiences.... Blogs are honest in a way that professionals aren’t.

Great stuff. Ann also discusses the ever-present professional versus amateur argument regarding social media. It's also present in theater, with a definite disdain by many professional theater artists toward their community theater brethren.

The point isn't replacing professionals with amateurs (although there are those on the amateur side who would perversely rejoice in the fall of professional media - or theater - despite the unlikelihood of that actually happening). The point is creating opportunities for those who don't otherwise have a voice to make themselves heard. And letting that person you "sort of know" from your community express herself on-stage for the first time.

What's a Blogroll - Can I Get a Side of Friends with It? - by Nettie Hartsock from Beneath the Cover - "The best way I can explain a blogroll is that it’s a list of your favorite websites, bloggers you admire, and even blogs that might be good resources for your readership. I think it’s good to have a blogroll because it helps visitors to your blog understand what “neighborhood” you live in."

Open Source Business Conference Day 1 - by Jeff Whatcott from @FIRST_LIGHT - "The social publishing opportunity is even bigger than I thought. The need for integrated systems for publishing content, creating social networks, and enabling collaboration just keeps coming up again and again in panel discussions, customer interactions, and presentations."

The Ready, Fire, Aim, Reload Strategy for Social Media Success - by Brian Clark from copyblogger - "Let’s take a look at the mind and skill set that’s required to develop profitable new media assets with agile content development. It all comes down to understanding the social media feedback and iteration process."

Semantic Search - Web 3.0 for Drupal - by duvien from duvien.com - "Looks like the future is nearer than we expect. Semantic search is created by Jonathan Hendler. The original development was made possible by LINC and CivicActions. It uses an RDF store as a search index. It allows you to dynamically creates default search interfaces, for many searches per site, configurable via admin interfaces.

Website for blind and vision impaired developed with open source CMS - by Stan Beer from iTWire - "IT consultancy Energetica and not-for-profit benevolent group Media Access Australia, have developed a website specifically for the blind and vision impaired community. The site aims to overcome challenges blind and vision impaired users face when accessing websites by enabling far greater access to audio description."

I really enjoyed an article by Josh Bernoff on his Groundswell blog last Friday. He's talking about the difficulties those of us who are pushing social networking and other new technology often find inside our corporate cultures. Here's a brief excerpt:

Companies are like organisms with immune systems. If you’re a change agent, you’re the antigen. Your company wants to reject you, and it’s got lots of systems to block that -- accounting systems, legal systems, management hierarchies, policies and procedures.

Social applications and their champions run afoul of this all the time. Why? Because the people in your social applications – your customers and prospects – are out of control. Who knows what they might say or do? And you want to make that a part of how your company runs? That’s what stimulates the allergic reaction.

Josh has some good advice on how to get around the naysayers within your organization. Take a look at his complete post, and great tips, here.

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?