Looking at CMS Matrix tonight I find an astonishing 1099 listings. How can anyone make a sane decision with that many choices? This ties in nicely with Barry Schwartz's thoughts in a TED video on the paradox of choice: too many choices lead to decision-making paralysis and dissatisfaction. He provides examples with salad dressings, jeans, and cell phones, among several others. To over-simplify his thesis, too many potential choices increase the difficulty of decision-making and heighten expectations. This in turn dilutes satisfaction with one's ultimate decision.
In his book "The Paradox of Choice" he points out that even infinite choice isn't a bad thing if it can be conceptualized in a simple way, for example, in a one-dimensional matrix comparing a simple feature set. But as the dimensions of comparison go up, the computation needed to calculate an optimal choice becomes increasingly difficult. I see this at my day-job where they have been unable to decide on a corporate standard for CMS. In the end, people look for surrogates for quality to simplify the decision-making process, things like the recent Packt Awards or the Idealware report.
Another solution is to follow the herd and make the same decision others before you have made. This can easily lead to an information cascade and sub-optimal results. I've discussed these beasts elsewhere, but want to point out again that herd behavior is fragile--a little correct contrary knowledge can quickly dispel an information cascade.
Of course, one problem is that one size (CMS) does not fit all. In my case workflow and security trump everything else, so the choice is dramatically limited... and simplified. I don't spend my time agonizing about if I made the right choice or second-guessing myself.
Along those lines, in a bookstore tonight I saw a copy of "Blink," also about decision-making. After only a short skim, I'd say that I agree with the author: we often make an optimal decision within seconds but then our slower conscious analytical processes talk ourselves out of it. (This is not to say that reflective decision-making is always a bad idea, just that we should weigh our initial impressions more heavily in the reflective process.)
I see this all the time grading tests at college--the initial correct answer is erased and an incorrect answer finally selected. I tell my students all the time to not second-guess themselves unless they have a good reason.
This resonates with a number of usability studies that indicate that we make web choices within seconds or fractions of seconds. This article by Jakob Neilson has a good discussion and references on this topic. BTW, almost 60% of visits to Plone.org are less than 10 seconds. On the other hand, about 30% of the visitors stay 3-30 minutes. My guess is that Plone.org visitors aren't generally making a "use Plone" decision in 10 seconds.
Now here's an experiment for you: go to Plone.org and count off 10 seconds while you look at the site. What did you remember? Branch with bud, Plone South America, "powerful, flexible, easy to install, use, and extend."
Do the same for Drupal.org: two simultaneous releases, "critical security vulnerabilities," Whitehouse.gov.
Try OpenOffice.org: productivity suite, learn, download, help, do more, participate. Hmm? Simplifying choice, but letting the user make an informed decision about what to do next. Maybe Schwartz is on to something...
Showing posts with label CMS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CMS. Show all posts
Friday, November 20, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Cygnus atratus and CMS
A friend sent me a copy of Taleb's book, The Black Swan, and I've been giving it a read. One might wonder where a discussion of extreme events fits with Plone and CMS in general and I hope to close that loop before I'm finished today.
Let's start with a concrete example: the Dec. 2004 Sumatran earthquake and tsunami. Without getting into a debate about whether large earthquakes are true black swan events, this certainly fit the bill for millions of affected people.
In Nov. just prior to that, Enfold Systems launched Oxfam America's newly designed Plone portal. From an item at AllBusiness.com,
Let's take this concept a step farther back and look at the general CMS environment. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we've seen CMS go from twinkle in someone's eye to dozens of major systems. The diffusion of the CMS innovation has been marked by a rapid evolutionary radiation into hundreds of web niches.
Many CMS niches are characterized by what are called path dependencies and network externalities. A path dependency explains how one set of decisions is constrained by what previous decisions. Vendor lock-in is a classic case in point that results in positive feedback for a particular, although possibly suboptimal, solution.
An organization that has drunk the Microsoft coolaid may very likely go with SharePoint as their document management solution and try to foist that off as a web publishing solution as well. But the original choice to go with MS may be a black swan in that it was a very rare, high consequence event from a software perspective.
Network externalities are where outside events drive a decision. Often this means that someone makes a decison to implement a particular CMS because its considered easier to find PHP programmers. (Don't get me started on the ease of learning Python and the readability of Python code.) What was the black swan that led to PHP predominance in web apps? I would hazard that the success of Apache running largely on Unix with tools like AWK led straight to second generation software like Perl and PHP.
I'm now seeing items in the innovation literature that point to yet a third factor that drives acceptance: lack of information. This lack of information on the relative merits of systems leads decision-makers to base their choices on whatever data chance has delivered to them. I've heard this refered to as the "PC Magazine-Air Travel Model," where a manager's decision is based on whatever he or she read in PC Magazine while flying back from DC.
In conclusion, I can't say I believe everything that a catastrophist like Taleb writes. As an evolutionary biologist, I'm well aware of the impact of catastrophies on evolving systems (for example, asteroids and K-T extinctions). But I feel the overall grist in the mill of complex systems is the day-to-day micro-improvements, whether a small favorable mutation or a PLIP solved by a Plone developer. Black swans are out there and we want to be the lucky ones who seize the opportunities they bring, but that doesn't mean I'll stop working on the small, almost unnoticed improvements that drive system change.
Let's start with a concrete example: the Dec. 2004 Sumatran earthquake and tsunami. Without getting into a debate about whether large earthquakes are true black swan events, this certainly fit the bill for millions of affected people.
In Nov. just prior to that, Enfold Systems launched Oxfam America's newly designed Plone portal. From an item at AllBusiness.com,
"In the course of ten days during the Tsunami crisis, Oxfam had almost half of its typical yearly visits, and almost 1/3 of its yearly bandwidth -- the system performed beautifully," said Internet Manager Nicholas Rabinowitz.Oxfam raised $14M and credited Plone with a large part of making it possible to handle the scale of the relief response. Clearly this is an example of an enormous negative black swan event for people in the Indian Ocean basin, but a positive black swan event for Plone. This is exactly what Taleb promulgates as a successful strategy for managing risk--maximize your exposure to positive black swans.
Let's take this concept a step farther back and look at the general CMS environment. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we've seen CMS go from twinkle in someone's eye to dozens of major systems. The diffusion of the CMS innovation has been marked by a rapid evolutionary radiation into hundreds of web niches.
Many CMS niches are characterized by what are called path dependencies and network externalities. A path dependency explains how one set of decisions is constrained by what previous decisions. Vendor lock-in is a classic case in point that results in positive feedback for a particular, although possibly suboptimal, solution.
An organization that has drunk the Microsoft coolaid may very likely go with SharePoint as their document management solution and try to foist that off as a web publishing solution as well. But the original choice to go with MS may be a black swan in that it was a very rare, high consequence event from a software perspective.
Network externalities are where outside events drive a decision. Often this means that someone makes a decison to implement a particular CMS because its considered easier to find PHP programmers. (Don't get me started on the ease of learning Python and the readability of Python code.) What was the black swan that led to PHP predominance in web apps? I would hazard that the success of Apache running largely on Unix with tools like AWK led straight to second generation software like Perl and PHP.
I'm now seeing items in the innovation literature that point to yet a third factor that drives acceptance: lack of information. This lack of information on the relative merits of systems leads decision-makers to base their choices on whatever data chance has delivered to them. I've heard this refered to as the "PC Magazine-Air Travel Model," where a manager's decision is based on whatever he or she read in PC Magazine while flying back from DC.
In conclusion, I can't say I believe everything that a catastrophist like Taleb writes. As an evolutionary biologist, I'm well aware of the impact of catastrophies on evolving systems (for example, asteroids and K-T extinctions). But I feel the overall grist in the mill of complex systems is the day-to-day micro-improvements, whether a small favorable mutation or a PLIP solved by a Plone developer. Black swans are out there and we want to be the lucky ones who seize the opportunities they bring, but that doesn't mean I'll stop working on the small, almost unnoticed improvements that drive system change.
Monday, December 29, 2008
2008 Recap
Not much new in the CMS world this evening, although with all the distractions in my life at the moment, I'm sure to have missed something significant. I did turn up a December "how to choose a CMS" article and a nice write up on Plone in Italy. Also worthy of note from late November, is the announcement that Joel Burton and Roberto Allende have been named to the Plone Foundation's Advisory Board.
All that aside, I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing 2008 from the point of view of Plone Metrics. You'll have to set your way-back machine to 5 Jan when I endorsed Obama based largely on his tech-savy approach and alignment with my international work. After that I explored Google trends, where Plone's slow downward slide continues to this day.
Of particular note is that World Plone Day (labeled 'E') made a blip in the news references and a significant peak in search volume.
Since then this blog has explored YouTube stats like Eben Moglen's 2006 Keynote (still getting dozens of views per day), comparative analysis of CMS entries in Wikipedia, and an initial look at the numbers in CMS Matrix.
February brought the first Plone Strategic Summit and some introspection about who was searching for what when they stumbled across Plone Metrics. Some permutation of "CMS file sharing" turns out to be the winning search terms.
March found excitement in Tibet, Plone Symposium East, and some JBOSS musings. April turned up the first references to World Plone Day and the NOLA Plone was getting finalized. I took my first foray into Technorati and blog posts. Plone does extremely well in the metric of posts/blog.
In May I was sent to Turin, Italy to listen to requirements for a UN agency's knowledge management system. I also got to meet Dr. Bates Gill of SIPRI, who interestingly are using Plone for their nuclear nonproliferation portal. In June we took a look at Simpson's Paradox and CMS Matrix ratings plus an analysis of NTEN's CMS satisfaction report and quarterly Amazon stats.
July turned up the SourceForge Community Choice Awards, more anecdotes about file sharing and CMS, and some further anecdotal items from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). August was a month for the Bossies, some political potificating, and some interesting visualizations of various CMS home sites. My first piece about using Plone for teaching back in August turns out to be one of the most frequently visited pages. I hope other database design instructors are using Plone and Zope as exemplars of OO databases.
A discussion of hybrid Plone-SharePoint solutions, the Connexions piece in the NY Times, Hurricane Ike and Enfold, and a look at the Plone.net numbers kept things interesting in September.
October was an exciting month, what with Joel's Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. I converted a set of Drupal online graphs into corresponding ones for Plone and I see that they are "live," continuing to display the most recent time intervals. The month ended with Martin Aspeli receiving a Packt award for Open Source CMS Most Valuable Person followed a day later by Plone taking top honors for Best Other Open Source CMS in Packt's annual survey.
In November I posted about strategies to get high visibility with Amazon sales stats when new Plone books roll out. There were also postings about developer community growth and, of course, World Plone Day. Oh, yes, there was this minor election in the U.S.
December has turned out to be a quiet month for me, not by choice--elderly parents took priority. Even so I managed to sneak in my quarterly Amazon stats and a posting about database design and manual vs automated methods for modeling and normalizing data schema.
In conclusion I'd like to thank the many readers who have supported these efforts. The numbers at Google Analytics show a slow but steady rise in readership. I'm not ready to quit my day job yet and you'll not see ads on Plone Metrics unless I'm trying to determine some parameter associated with Plone marketing.
All that's left is to come up with Plone Metric's Person of the Year. Feel free to make nomenations via comments and I'll take them under advisement.
All that aside, I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing 2008 from the point of view of Plone Metrics. You'll have to set your way-back machine to 5 Jan when I endorsed Obama based largely on his tech-savy approach and alignment with my international work. After that I explored Google trends, where Plone's slow downward slide continues to this day.
Of particular note is that World Plone Day (labeled 'E') made a blip in the news references and a significant peak in search volume.Since then this blog has explored YouTube stats like Eben Moglen's 2006 Keynote (still getting dozens of views per day), comparative analysis of CMS entries in Wikipedia, and an initial look at the numbers in CMS Matrix.
February brought the first Plone Strategic Summit and some introspection about who was searching for what when they stumbled across Plone Metrics. Some permutation of "CMS file sharing" turns out to be the winning search terms.
March found excitement in Tibet, Plone Symposium East, and some JBOSS musings. April turned up the first references to World Plone Day and the NOLA Plone was getting finalized. I took my first foray into Technorati and blog posts. Plone does extremely well in the metric of posts/blog.
In May I was sent to Turin, Italy to listen to requirements for a UN agency's knowledge management system. I also got to meet Dr. Bates Gill of SIPRI, who interestingly are using Plone for their nuclear nonproliferation portal. In June we took a look at Simpson's Paradox and CMS Matrix ratings plus an analysis of NTEN's CMS satisfaction report and quarterly Amazon stats.
July turned up the SourceForge Community Choice Awards, more anecdotes about file sharing and CMS, and some further anecdotal items from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). August was a month for the Bossies, some political potificating, and some interesting visualizations of various CMS home sites. My first piece about using Plone for teaching back in August turns out to be one of the most frequently visited pages. I hope other database design instructors are using Plone and Zope as exemplars of OO databases.
A discussion of hybrid Plone-SharePoint solutions, the Connexions piece in the NY Times, Hurricane Ike and Enfold, and a look at the Plone.net numbers kept things interesting in September.
October was an exciting month, what with Joel's Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. I converted a set of Drupal online graphs into corresponding ones for Plone and I see that they are "live," continuing to display the most recent time intervals. The month ended with Martin Aspeli receiving a Packt award for Open Source CMS Most Valuable Person followed a day later by Plone taking top honors for Best Other Open Source CMS in Packt's annual survey.
In November I posted about strategies to get high visibility with Amazon sales stats when new Plone books roll out. There were also postings about developer community growth and, of course, World Plone Day. Oh, yes, there was this minor election in the U.S.
December has turned out to be a quiet month for me, not by choice--elderly parents took priority. Even so I managed to sneak in my quarterly Amazon stats and a posting about database design and manual vs automated methods for modeling and normalizing data schema.
In conclusion I'd like to thank the many readers who have supported these efforts. The numbers at Google Analytics show a slow but steady rise in readership. I'm not ready to quit my day job yet and you'll not see ads on Plone Metrics unless I'm trying to determine some parameter associated with Plone marketing.
All that's left is to come up with Plone Metric's Person of the Year. Feel free to make nomenations via comments and I'll take them under advisement.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
CMS at SourceForce Community Choice Awards
The results are in from the latest SourceForge Community Choice Awards. OpenOffice and phpMyAdmin did well in the winners circle, but there's a back story among the also-ran.
Finalists for the Best Project category included Drupal and XOOPS. Best Project for the Enterprise finalists included Drupal. Best Project for Educators finalists included Drupal and Moodle. Finalists in the Most Likely to Change the World category also included Drupal. Best New Project included ImpressCMS. In the satirical category Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation, Moodle was a finalist. And surprisingly, Drupal was a finalist in the Best Tool or Utility for Developers category.
One has to remember that this is a self-reporting survey of sorts, which instantly biases the results. However, the SourceForge Awards do attract a lot of media attention--I saw the announcement of the winners in a Yahoo!News item.
Remember that Plone moved off of SourceForge and now uses LaunchPad in order to avoid U.S. export control issues. That said, SourceForge ostensibly opened the competition to all open source, whether hosted on SF or not. I have a hypothesis that all the finalists are SF-hosted. When I get a minute later today, I'll drill down and see if that's true.
Meanwhile, the Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards are open for nomination. Plone has done well here in the past and, importantly, there is a cash prize. Get over to the Packt site and vote for Plone.
Finalists for the Best Project category included Drupal and XOOPS. Best Project for the Enterprise finalists included Drupal. Best Project for Educators finalists included Drupal and Moodle. Finalists in the Most Likely to Change the World category also included Drupal. Best New Project included ImpressCMS. In the satirical category Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation, Moodle was a finalist. And surprisingly, Drupal was a finalist in the Best Tool or Utility for Developers category.
One has to remember that this is a self-reporting survey of sorts, which instantly biases the results. However, the SourceForge Awards do attract a lot of media attention--I saw the announcement of the winners in a Yahoo!News item.
Remember that Plone moved off of SourceForge and now uses LaunchPad in order to avoid U.S. export control issues. That said, SourceForge ostensibly opened the competition to all open source, whether hosted on SF or not. I have a hypothesis that all the finalists are SF-hosted. When I get a minute later today, I'll drill down and see if that's true.
Meanwhile, the Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards are open for nomination. Plone has done well here in the past and, importantly, there is a cash prize. Get over to the Packt site and vote for Plone.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Digital Arts CMS Review
I took the way-back machine six weeks into the past and found Digital Arts piece on CMS. Right off the bat I was pleased with his rational comments about basing your decision on more than just functionality. User community, frequency of updates, and professional support all should figure highly in your evaluation.
I was upset that the author somehow thinks Plone only supports MySQL. In fact the ZODB is the core database and one that I find increasingly makes RDBMS not necessary for many web apps. Plone (and no doubt many other CMS) easily interface with the Microsoft database world via ODBC adapters. Various adapters written in Python have been around since long before Plone.
The author of the Digital Arts review either implies that Alfresco wizards are superior to UML-driven Archetypes or they are unaware of ArchGenXML (and uml.joelburton.com). I find that Plone's use of industry-standard modeling tools a great advantage. Now if I could only reverse engineer the UML from the Archetype...
I was upset that the author somehow thinks Plone only supports MySQL. In fact the ZODB is the core database and one that I find increasingly makes RDBMS not necessary for many web apps. Plone (and no doubt many other CMS) easily interface with the Microsoft database world via ODBC adapters. Various adapters written in Python have been around since long before Plone.
The author of the Digital Arts review either implies that Alfresco wizards are superior to UML-driven Archetypes or they are unaware of ArchGenXML (and uml.joelburton.com). I find that Plone's use of industry-standard modeling tools a great advantage. Now if I could only reverse engineer the UML from the Archetype...
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