Content Management Matters ™

Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” broke the news on Facebook, when he opened an account and announced his desire to write a movie script about the founders of the popular social networking site.

The word on the street has it that Scott Rudin (“There Will be Blood,” “The Other Boleyn Girl”) will produce the film for Columbia Pictures.

It's usually easy to figure out what company sets the industry standard by how prospective competitors sell themselves to the public. For instance, a new site to be launched this week called SportsFanLive.com is supposed to be the "Facebook of Sports Fans."

It's so much like Facebook that something just like it had to be created exclusively for sports fans; but it's also incredibly different as to attract users away from Facebook. A precarious balance, to say the least.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, most everyone can agree that how politics is covered online has changed dramatically from four years ago. With political convention season within days of peaking, the impact that online media has on coverage is hard to overlook.

As it turns out, political conventions have very little to do with television anymore.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories from around the blogosphere, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Twitter Cuts SMS Access
• Movable Type Goes Social
• AOL to Acquire Socialthing
• ReplyFeed.com : Social Media Conversation Management
• Google's Failed Acquisitions in Social Media
• Facebook Launches New Social Ad Unit, and Gets Sued... Again

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's major developments, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Google Knol
• Facebook/Microsoft search deal
• Loopt's cheaper GPS deal
• Google buying Digg?
• New APIs/developer platforms
• It's a Miracle! Apparition of Robert Scoble in a Grilled Cheese Sandwich!

We all know that blogs and blogging are a shockingly effective means of sharing your most ingenious thoughts and building or participating in online communities.

Right. You got that message a while back. But considering that there are a number of options to choose from, the final step of getting going can still seem a touch daunting. We've put in a little spadework and here's a quick guide through the woods for the rest of us.

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah...ahem...right.

On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute's worth of scanning.

The very last panel I attended at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was also one that I had the privilege of moderating. Our topic was the big hot topic of the conference: how to integrate social networking features into the enterprise and whether or not they can co-exist happily with a content management system. Specifically in our panel's case, we talked about Facebook's utility. The net takeaway from our panel was -- it's all about the platform; Facebook matters because of its ability to integrate outside applications.

In this guide we show you how anyone can build and embed simple web widgets.

It's free, extremely easy and takes about five minutes to roll out your first creation. One of the best things about widgets is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content. More mashing means more community and more buzz around your brainchildren. For those who love to play and live in the WWW sandbox, this article is for you.

When you mention Facebook, most people immediately think “social network” (or perhaps “application overload”). Not many people will think “content management system.” Adrian Sutton, CTO at Ephox, spoke at Web Content 2008 today about the marriage of content management and Facebook. While the initial Facebook frenzy has somewhat cooled off these days (Adrian went so far as to call the unending list of invites to join groups and add 1,000 applications “a new form of spam”), there are some things that Facebook has done right, and which content management systems can learn from.

It was just a year ago that Facebook elevated their college kids only social networking site from a classier MySpace to a web portal in training with their release of Facebook Platform. Now, the buzz on the blogosphere according to TechCrunch and Facebook news blog, AllFacebook, is on how Facebook is working on an "open source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications."

The more web 2.0 progresses and the more the term web 3.0 shows up the more it seems like social networking is becoming a must for anyone involved in social media at all. Every week and nearly every day the big guns in the social world are releasing new and innovative ways to connect the web, and therefore the world. Facebook is no exception to this rule.

Seems like we can't get enough of that Facebook social network these days. Not only do we constantly hear about all the consumer-based solutions that want to emulate and even overrun it, we now have to contend with vendor after vendor offering their enterprise 2.0 version of the popular social networking platform.

Trampoline Technologies SONAR Dashboard is the latest in a string of solutions for an "enterprise Facebook". While we don't discount the need for social networking inside the enterprise, we just really wish someone would think of a better marketing pitch.

San Francisco-based Six Apart -- makers of Movable Type, sellers of Live Journal -- have just unwrapped a lovely new piece of technology. Some call it blog fire-hosing, but we'll go with rather heavier metaphors and say their new Blog It FaceBook app is double barrel publishing fun. It's buckshot blogging. It's strafing the blogosphere. It's like going hunting with Cheney -- you know, pull the trigger once and you get two birds and all your friends, right in the face.

Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook started an infectious desire from the public for more social-ness on the internet. The people were tired of chat rooms and IM just wasn’t cutting it. So the social network crazy started.

But MySpace and Facebook aren't the only social networks out there...