Linux Music Toys

I’m a publisher of sorts and I also have a background in content creation and management (can you say SGML?). Anyway the reuse of content and management of content is a fascinating area of interest for me. Some of it comes from my passion for information and the flip side of that, finding information when you have generated or collected a lot.

Of course my goal is to combine these interests with open source software, databases and Linux to have a content management solution to re-purpose my content or at least convert it to on-line content. That may take a while but in the mean time there are some fascinating activity in the area of content management. First some recommended reading.

Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services is a great resource that talks about creation of documents for reuse.

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy is another recommended resource, more about the strategy of implementing a solution but also provide a companion web site with some free white papers at http://www.managingenterprisecontent.com/.

Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery is another recommended resource for content management and as the name suggests is web centric in its approach.

Its ironic that there are some great books on the subject of content management because I suppose in some ways books themselves are an antiquated way of accessing information. Still as I mentioned in my previous post about my beloved Linux in a Nutshell book, sometimes a book is a welcome resource when technology is the topic. Anyway here are a couple of really fascinating projects showing the future of information management and delivery.

Wiley’s custom select is a service provided by Wiley Publishing with allows you to amalgamate information from various sources and combine it into one printable deliverable. All the content providers are appropriately compensated so Wiley’s has even managed to get some competitors to provide content (co-op-petition I believe would be the buzz word for that). Imagine a teacher pulling content from various in print sources and generating a text book. Or perhaps a company developing training materials. Imagine pulling the content from the books above and generating your own manual for your organizations content management implementation. Fascinating, dynamic resource books!

The next activity around content management and future of publishing that I find really interesting is demonstrated by Floss Manuals. Floss Manuals at http://en.flossmanuals.net/ provides a place for authoring manuals for open source software. It leverages a wiki like approach allowing users to edit the content. The presentation however is like a book on a web page with the Table of Content on the left side and the content in the container in the middle. Here is an an example from the Blender 3D on-line manual at Floss Manuals.

Now what I find so fascinating about Floss Manuals is it combines many of my interests specifically:

• Collaborative writing
• New approaches to content creation (for books specifically)
• Content Management (ok, it is a wiki but still)
• Free Open Source Software
• Linux
• Content re-purposing
• A Business Model for all of the above

You see I think that Floss Manuals may be on to something here. You have this dynamic content on-line and if you want a book they will print and bind it for you. Is this a business model for open source software? Maybe. Who knows maybe its the future of publishing!