As you know, I have tried to pull a feed of lots of ECM and related blogs together on pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com/ecm) and have started to emulate you ‘oh great one’ by starting to blog at http://www.ecm-stuff.blogspot.com but what your talking about is building a conversational dialogue in a ‘community’ where many of the possible contributers do not actually know each other, and therefore there is an element of trust which is missing. You touched on this in your post, the blogosphere can be unforgiving, even if you do know what your talking about, and this to puts people off too !

As you know, but others won’t, I work for a very large distance learning university, with 200,000 students at any one time, and getting those students to be actively involved in a ‘community’ takes a lot of effort, with Professors designing activities into their classes etc. Just look at AIIM or CM Pro’s sponsored groups in Facebook – not a lot of chat going on in there either. Certainly Alan and co at CMS Watch try their hardest, and there are a number of AIIM blogs too, one focused on standards as it happens – but I am sure that as ECM becomes more central in enterprise IT / information management, then the online community around it will start to gel and become more vibrant

Just for clarification, the standards discussion was an example of dialog, not the driving reason for this post.

As for Standards bodies, I plan on becoming more involved this fall, once my personal life streamlines into a new chaos constant. So I will hold off on commenting. However, we shouldn’t just wait for them. We should push them. However, this is a topic for another post.

There are standards bodies out there for this, in fact these were discussed in many of the blogs, do you think the standardisation cannot be achieved through these bodies?

Happy to discuss offline if you wish to.

I think you have a point – but from my perspective things are getting
better – there are more ECM blogs now that are worth reading. Where it
fall’s apart a little is in the vendor focus. EMC Documentum is covered
well, but beyond this particular vendor there is scant coverage. Would
love to see more bloggers who have experience of IBM Filenet, OpenText
etc etc
I cover 30 ECM vendors in my report (20 in depth) and there is very
little blog discussion about the vast majority.
Just to be contrary though – I would also like to see a lot more
discussion around the practical and business application and
implications of ECM (there is even less on this than the technical
stuff). We try through our CMS Watch blog to stimulate debate – and in
bursts I do so through my own blog (www.doingitbetter.blogspot.com) -
but it’s hard.
All in all though – the picture is quite rosy – don’t underestimate the
value of some of these debates (security & standards for example) they
certainly inform my research at CMS Watch!
Best
Alan