I don’t know about you, but I would LOVE a new 17″ Macbook Pro! So, how do you win a new Macbook Pro? Enter the Day JCR Cup 2008! Simply create a content-centric application and submit it no later than midnight September 30th, 2008. Detailed information (more so than what I’ll cover in this blog) can be found at:

http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/cup.c.html

JCR/JSR 170/Content Management:

You may be asking yourself, ‘what does JCR stand for?’ JCR stands for the Java Content Repository. Day Software (Day) has been an emerging leader in the field of Web Content Management (WCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for over a decade now. In an effort to not only promote themselves more amongst the Open Source Community, but also in promoting the concept of Content Management Systems (CMS) (I know, I know, let the acronyms fly!), they created the JSR (Java Specification Request) 170.

The Apache Software Foundation created an open source, fully compatible version of JSR 170 by creating the Jackrabbit project. Day’s commercial implementation of JSR 170 is the Content Repository Extreme (CRX). Day’s flagship WCM, Communique, is a set of API’s built on top of the CRX.

One of the neat things about this contest is that it gives developers a chance to obtain a free, trial version of the CRX. When you sign up for the contest, a trial key is emailed to you. The contest page has links to documentation, quickstart guides, FAQs, mailing lists, and all associated technologies needed to build out a complete CMS.

One final note before I end this blog… I’ve been developing with Day Communique for over 5 years now. I am VERY curious to see what the new version, CQ 5, will look like. I have a sneaky suspicion that all of the technologies involved with this content (JCR, SLING, etc.) are a good indication of what CQ 5 is going to look like…

Until next time…

Todd

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the value of social networking tools, sites, blogs, blah, blah, blah… and it starts me wondering, “How do you build community?” Seriously. So, the social scientist in me takes over and I begin to digg into this deli.icio.us question and see what the rest of the oncomm has to say about it. I’m sure if the information is out there, by now I must have reddit.

This concept of building community sounds great, especially to marketing types who see this as a way to generate traffic “for free” but kind of breaks down when it comes to actually starting to build. Lets consider for a moment the reasons why we might “build community” purely for marketing reasons and then we’ll dive into perhaps the factors that actually drive community which might give us some insight into how community actually gets built.

• TRAFFIC-> Interesting content means interested visitors, right?
• KNOWLEDGE -> Sharing or obtaining. If you write it, they will come.

Now, let’s think about what these factors mean to community.

First, we should probably establish the difference between traffic and community. Amazon.com gets a ton of traffic and plenty of comments and feedback on products. Does it have “community” or “web2.0″ features? Is it a “social networking” site? Hardly. It’s pretty clear that traffic isn’t community. Next let’s consider knowledge sharing and community. For this let me use the example of, well… how about Micro$oft. Like many other software vendors, the redmond elite have used their online presence to produce a great deal of “knowledge” to be shared with the world. This certainly generates a certain amount of “traffic” and “content” but again, hardly creates “community.”

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