Here are the slides from OSCOM keynote at Harvard on Friday. The title of the talk was: "Everything you need to know about content management, you (should have) learned in grade school." Grade school lesson #1 was: "Write effective titles." It's surprisingly hard to remember that lesson. On these two slides, I admitted the ironic fact that my own slideshow software did not, initially, create meaningful HTML doctitles. Driving down to the conference, I realized I'd made the same error at another level. The entire slideshow was untitled! I wondered who would notice. Leonard Megliola nailed it. After the talk Tony Byrne, of CMSWatch, quoted an old adage: "Naming and cache invalidation are the hardest problems." How true!
Thanks to Paul Everitt for inviting me to give the talk. The last time that happened was my keynote at the 8th International Python conference in January 2000. Looking back on it now, I can see that some of the ideas have become a bit clearer -- notably document-oriented web services and XML storage. Here's hoping that three years hence some of the ideas from the Harvard talk -- high-quality embeddable XML writing tools, a user-friendly approach to descriptive tagging -- will seem realer than they do today.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/01.html#a708