Concrete the Studio

So I originally architected Concrete CMS in a nice little bar in SE Portland to deal with an adCouncil gig we had with too many stakeholders and not enough time. That was many years ago, and since the early days my dear friend and comrade Andrew Embler has taken the lose direction outlined in my sketchbook of “blocks and collections” and made it work on fixed budgets for demanding clients. Concrete has had some really compelling concepts since those early days, but like any box of tools you use hard – there’s some idiosyncrasies that drive you up the wall. Being the guy finally responsible for training clients, and getting content into working sites that make sense – I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on the complete re-haul concrete5 for some time. I’ve peered over shoulders a lot, but today was the first time I got to play with it on a site I need to deal with.

Today I took the 5.0.0.0.a1 release on sourceforge and installed it where concrete5.org is going to live and started building out the site. All I can say is: “oh yes.” Of course, I’m already filling up notepads with new to-do’s, but the UI and experience is simply a joy. The in-context editing that has always defined the ease of use in concrete is finally as seamless as it was dreamed to be. No popups, all overlays, just like you’re opening up the static page you’ve viewing and changing what’s on it as if it were a piece of paper.

The biggest challenge in front of us right now, I think, is what the default skin looks like. Right now its just our old corporate site. We can go vanilla, we can come up with a dozen simple templates like WordPress.. So much of adoption is how powerful and on target it feels at a glance, we gotta make sure everyone “gets it” within minutes or seconds of installing it.

two good ones going around the office right now:

ManBabies.com

Caruso One Liners

enjoy.

Some sites that I think are making the world a better place:

Minti.com – a parenting site that people seem to really use to reach out and find solutions and fellowship in parenting.

FreeRice.com – a mindless game you can play where the more you play the more rice they donate to the World Food Program. Does it make a difference? I dunno, but I like the idea of the energy people put into games being recycled into something useful.

SchoolPulse.com – full disclosure: we made this. That being said, the idea of teachers, parents and school administrators having another way to communicate appeals to the BBS guy in me who thinks that people can open up in different and sometimes better ways through digital media.

current.tv – I actually liked the last version more than this, it was easier to find the indie political videos. I like getting my news from the many, not the few.

I’m not going to name a political site, cause it’s been done to death and frankly I don’t really spend any time on a candidate/issue site.. weird.

Besides, that’ll give you some thing to post about, and tell me what else am I spacing?

If the web can make the world a better place, lets have some more examples….

“Okay so let me get this straight, when we first spoke it was $13k to own it, and now its free? Are you sure about this?” a dear friend and repeat client who runs an agency just asked me.

I get that you want to provide for your family, sooo what are you thinking?
Are we going to offer a “freemeium” model where you get crippleware for free and the useful parts in expensive add-ons?
Nope.

Are we going to have a different license depending who you are?
Nope.

Are we going have a donation button or something?
Yes, but it will point to our favorite charity, which can do more good with the cash than us.

So I give up, why do you think destroying your perfectly viable license revenue is going to provide stability and creative freedom?

Here’s what I see. The biggest challenge my crew has is bizdev. We’re not perfect at everything, but we sure can deliver sweet stuff and we improve every day, execept for sales.

We’ve only really won good gigs through word of mouth. We’ve tried just about everything, and without marrying yourself to a particular vertical, it’s very difficult to define a meaningful marketing strategy for a web/IT services company that wants to do “cool stuff.” From my experience you do your best, and try to cultivate as many life long associates and friends who will recommend you as you go.

As the network slowly grows, things get easier over time, but it doesn’t really deliver with security and creative freedom if it ties you to a limited local gossipy scene. (yeah i said it).

So while completely giving away something we have and can charge a lot for, we’re actually doing ourselves a practical favor. Sure, we’ll be giving up a revenue stream, but we’re dropping a expensive business development challenge that we’ve never been good at or interested in solving. We certainly will still spend some real resources to make Concrete5 known – but a lot of that can be our time instead of cash. Moreover, if what we’ve been working on all these years is really as good as we think it is, we stand to jump-start a process that would traditionally take much longer. I’m interesting in seeing what a larger open source developer community might contribute to the project from a code standpoint, but I’m hungry for their evangelism about concrete5 to their clients. I don’t need (or want) to own every dollar that is made off of concrete5. Why not just get out of the way and respond to opportunities as they arise as thousands of people deliver concrete5 powered solutions to their clients?

That’s the practical reason to go “free beer.” The real one is better:

Content management is a basic human right.

It costs next to nothing to write your thoughts on a piece of paper and nail it to a door, it should cost about the same to make a basic website without it having to be a blog. If we can do that, we’ll win one way or another.

Just catching up on my New Yorker articles and read this interesting one by Eric Alterman about the death of the newspaper.

Yes, newspapers are dying, in fact – they predict the last one will be delivered to the last door on 2043 (not sure how they came to that, but yay for trees.)

The real point I took from the article was “good God! this is horrid, because original reporting is HARD and EXPENSIVE… Blogging is all well and good, but all bloggers do is pontificate and comment on other original sources”… which to a great degree is true.. (omg, is that me admitting to being full of bs?)

The reality is, I don’t see any way that the “blogosphere” will support traditional reporting as it functions today. He points out that the Baghdad berau of the Times costs $3m/year to run, and the Huffington Post, which is a leading blogish new media news source, is maybe pulling over 10m a year in ad revenue.

Sounds reasonable.

Here’s the thing that’s odd. Early in the article he points out that the idea of non-biased reporting is actually really new. A late 20th century model at best. Our countries forefathers fought one another with their privately owned papers. Certainly the great industrialists (Hearst anyone) were pretty far from non-biased. Murdoch of News Corp fame is hardly considered fair and equitable to all parties… So where is this dream like non-biased “professional” reporting model we’re supposed to be so in love with.  I get that it’s not easy to be on the ground in Baghdad, but really, isn’t a soldier who is ‘part of it’ a better voice than someone with a pen and press pass? What if you look at the world and say “actually, we should ALL be reporting. Reporting what you see, from a sane, but real bias is your responsibility as a contributing member of society.” Wouldn’t that give us a better world than “reading the New York Times every day” is your responsibility as a contributing member of society? I’ll be the first to admit that we probably don’t have the searching and aggregating logic needed to create some signal out of the noise of 7 billion opinions, and we all should be better writers… But i dunno, something always seems strained about the “But I’m TRAINED to be non-biased” argument. In a postmodern world where our art tells us there is no one single truth – how can we expect a newspaper to do it… and make a profit..

had yet another client meeting today where someone wanted “a corporate blog,” yet when asked “list 100 topics right now” question had little to offer.

the best solution to this in my eyes is a centralized blogging interface for all employees & associates, with tag/category based cross referencing and featured embeds throughout the rest of the site for depth of content and SEO purposes.

Concrete has been around since 2003, this major version update that has been a year in the works and is major version release 5. While our content management system has always been “open source” to our clients, who paid for it; this is the first fully “free beer” open source release we’ve done. We’re giving away our secret sauce and we’re thinking how to protect the years and millions in development that have gone into it.

We’ve come to recognize it’s the brand. We will trademark our name as Concrete5(tm) – and make money by being the official host, trainer, documenter, and support provider. Conversely we may look at any of those roles and tap a better suited partner as an “Official Concrete5 Solution” in return for some license or revenue model.

The Ruby on Rails guy looks to have similar ideas around his brand and license model, which is also MIT.

We just finished a Facebook application for a consumer brand, a fun little ditty to promote a new product launch. We’re partnering with RockYou to buy sign-ups, which works great. For a fixed rate, we know we get someone adding the application. In my eyes, this obliterates pay-per-impression or even pay-per-click advertising. It’s pay-per-action at its best (and it’s very affordable).

I love this approach. A great example is Flake-o-matic. We built FlakeOmatic.com as a standalone website for our winter greeting card. It’s a fun little flash app where you can cut up a triangle which then unfolds to a snowflake. It generates a static image of the flake which it will then email to a friend. Very 1990’s e-Greeting card in vibe. We launched it, sent it to several hundred clients and friends and went to have a beer. We watched the traffic go from a few hundred to 50’s to a few dozen per day over the next week. As with anything on the web, build it and they don’t necessarily come.

We then decided to repurpose the thing into a Facebook app. Since we made something that was designed to be sent to a friend, the idea of putting it on Facebook where people collect stuff to identify themselves made a lot of sense. We turned it into a Facebook app over a weekend, spent a thousand dollars promoting it through RockYou and the thing blew up. We saw hundreds of people a day adding the app. Since making a snowflake was irrelevant unless you sent it to someone, we saw double the signup rates we were paying for and more quickly. I hate jibber jabber (well I love the game) but if something were to ever be made to go ‘viral’, this type of thing was it.

The reason I rant is because I have come from a disappointed call from our client where I had to explain to them they couldn’t rip email addresses out of Facebook. “We need to build our eNewsletter, how does this even help us?!?” Gee, I dunno – people are spending hours customizing a page that represents themselves to their friends, and they want to put your logo on it. This has no value to you compared to the glory of being able to send them some junk mail at the end of the month? You would rather send someone coupons than have them tattoo your logo on their forehead? Hrm.