interactivity

Night before last, I had nearly finished writing an item for this blog into the Web entry form offered by Drupal, the open-source site management framework that powers SI.

In wrapping up the post, I went fishing for a link, forgot to do so in a new browser tab, found the article, grabbed the link ... but when I went back to look for my post in the entry form, it was gone -- lost in browser history.

Argh. Argh!

Please understand, I really like Drupal. But losing 45 minutes of work reminded me that WordPress, which I used to use, has Drupal version 6, which I use now, beat in two key areas:

So yesterday eMarketer tells us social network users have started to tire of those services. Today we learn, from eMarketer again, that fatigue might not extend to mobile users.

Analysts, naturally, offer a range of estimates for worldwide use of social nets via mobile devices. At the conservative end, ABI Research says 140 million users by 2013. On the wild side, Pyramid Research says 950 million users -- about one seventh of the world population -- by 2012.

If that holds true, by then it will be so very 20th Century to use a mobile device just to make a lowly phone call.

EMarketer gives us two interesting tidbits regarding adoption of online social networks:

• Per research from Synovate, 58 percent of adults worldwide do not know what social networks are at all.
• In the same study, 36 percent of current social network users worldwide (45 percent in the United States) said they are losing interest in online social networking.

That last point matters most to Internet innovators. This year alone, we witnessed sprouting of several new branded social networks, some on the backs of existing networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

News alerts that lit up pixels on my screen the past two days got me thinking:

• CNN.com sent a breaking news email just after 10 p.m. Eastern last night: "Barack Obama tells packed stadium he accepts Democratic nomination 'with profound gratitude and great humility.'" His nomination long ago secured, this speech was a media-friendly event planned for many weeks; I can think of no urgent need to know he accepted the nomination in it. (All such CNN alerts carry the same subject line -- "CNN Breaking News" -- which seems silly but may, in fact, be a clever ruse. I would not have opened the message if the subject line clued me in on its content.)

Links in search of steady work:

No one told me this was Top 5 List Week. I spotted another useful list in Webland, this time, the five hidden costs of content management systems over at Vitamin.

In a nutshell:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost of quality
3. The cost of functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my experience, over the years training costs on modern CMS have dropped, but costs of commitment -- which I will extend to include costs associated with keeping internal customers happy -- keep growing no matter how good, or new, the system.