Image by David Asch via Flickr

Over the past year to year-and-a-half I’ve been working with an “old media” company and a new start-up, then back to the same “old media” company.  The big buzz is DAM or Digital Asset Management.  Everyone is trying to get all their content into a repository.

The other thing you have to know to make this all make sense is my latest “fanboy” idol app – WordPress.  Yea, I admit it – I think WordPress is flipin’ awesome.  I pretty much say it can do everything including wash the windows.  Now granted – a lot of this is through rose colored glasses, I’ve implemented a handful of sites and used a bunch of different plug ins…its not wholesale, mega-leverage action; but this is smokin’ hot-hot-hot.

People are spending big bucks to find the holy grail in the DAM world, I know of a few that are north of $250,00 and they go up from there – and that is a base package.  Then the other day I stumble on this WordPress plugin, yea a plugin that is free.  It’s called WP-O-Matic.

This is a killer little plugin.  I think it was designed to kind of leverage the SEO world by converting RSS to WordPress posts…yea – RSS to WP posts.  By dumping RSS news feeds into a website, it will draw search engine traffic and bring more eyeballs.

Check out these options, I have added comments…mostly for humor, but seriously, this is good stuff – this is classic DAM bullet points:

• Campaigs Feeds and all settings and options are now organized into campaigns for the perfect organization and comfort.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “You contorl “campains” for organizational purposes – great for our DAM.”

• Multiple feeds / categories: it’s possible to add as many feeds as you want, and add them to as many categories as you want. It’s not obstrusive, so you can also write your own posts to any of those categories.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “all the feeds and categories you want, plus we can add hand entered posts.  cool and cool.”

• Every form of XML syndication supported. This includes RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 formats, the popular RSS 2.0 format, and the emerging Atom.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

• Feed autodiscovery, which lets you add feeds without even knowing the exact URL. (Thanks Simplepie!)

  TOM’S COMMENT: “I’m not sure what this means – but I can tell you this.  IT IS COOL!”

• Unix cron and WordPress cron jobs For maximum performance, you can make the RSS fetching process be called by a Unix cron job, or simply let WordPress handle it.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “looks like it is flexiable as far as how the automation happens…can be an external bot – or part of WordPress”

• Comfortable interface. The admin is powered by a state of the art ajaxy interface that lets you handle your feeds with ease. Updated!

  TOM’S COMMENT: “Me loves the AJAX.  Got ot have some buzz words – yes?”
  
  

• Images caching for extreme performance and hotlinking bypassing.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “Um, thank you – I’ll take it.”

• Words Rewriting. Want to replace the word “Poker” with “Texas Holdem”? We have it covered. Want to use regular expressions? We have it covered.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “I’m sorry – are you telling me I can replace some of the words…OK, if it must be included – I can only think of 1,000,000 ways this will be helpful.”

• Words Relinking. Define custom links for words you specify.

  TOM’S COMMENT: “Nice.”

• Post templating. Define a global header and footer for the posts, or even for a specific feed. Add ads

  TOM’S COMMENT: “So after this gets pulled in I can reformat it?  Wow – what of a guy could use hidden fields and ‘hide” meta data int he post.  Ummm, sure.”

• Campaigns import/export using OPML files. Easily import hundreds of feeds into new or existing campaigns!

  TOM’S COMMENT: “ok – this might be helpful!!!!”

You can see why I’m excited.  This is truly a valid option, I know I’m being a bit cheeky – but this is a real, super inexpensive option.  Plus the database is MySQL and open source.  This means we can add some more magic after we get things into the database.

That is when something like Zemanta steps in – after you have the content data in, you hit it with a dose of Zemanta.  Systematically charaterizes the content for quicker use later.

So, as my buddy Nick says – there are a million ideas out on the intranets; its solutions that are hard to come by.  I really want to work on this myself, but I’m too excited – so I want to put it out to see if someone else has the time and energy…if you do – let me know, I’d like to help – or at least watch.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ICMF – Integrated Content Management Framework
• Feed Awareness (or the lack thereof)
• We’re All Publishers Now: My presentation for Digital Asset Management?

Image via Wikipedia

One of my favorite ideas of our CEO Chuck Peters is the idea that “old-media” is like a megaphone.   We  broadcast a message in a one-way fashion rain the news down to all within earshot.  I like that analogy.

But I guess I’m thinking that we better starting using the thing to engage some people really soon – or we’ll have nobody left, or a lot of deaf ears, to talk to.

I think sometimes people are trying to make this all too complicated, I see three main points.

1. Focus on the community – for me this is more about fostering relationships and just being real.  Let’s not get hung up on who own’s it, what the rules are or that…but the conversation, is it meaningful?
2. Use the megaphone – not in the obnoxious, “see how loud I can holla”, Ty Pennington way – but people are listening and they want to know what to do.  Let ask them what they think.
3. “Don’t over think the room” – this a quote from the great philosopher Colin Cowherd.  I guess it speaks to me – let’s see what the people will use, not analyze to death the exact mentality of each person and their “true” motives.  Damn – put something up, try it, see how it works, revise, put something else up, see how it works, revise.

OK – enough rambling from me – let’s crack the switch and see if anyone wants to talk.

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