Tools automate Web Development but the magic is in content development
Babu Ghanta
Feb. 15, 2005

A lot of tools have been developed to make Web site publishing easier. Automating Website development is an effort that started in 1995 and still continues. Now syndication and collaboration tolls allow easy publishing of information.

But according to industry experts the action really lies in creating interesting contents. Creative, innovative contents are rare in the Web. You may have all the tools in world but you got to know creating information of interest and that is just not easy.

According to media reports a new crop of tools aims to help turn the Web — be it on the public Internet or a company network — into much more than a collection of documents one visits like a museum: Look, but don’t touch.

The idea is to make it easy to quickly post and remove stuff from digital bulletin boards where the online communities of the future will gather to catch up and trade ideas, images and work.

"We’re turning the Web into a conversation," said Glenn Reid, chief executive and founder of Five Across Inc. Reid's startup and several other companies will offer their visions for accomplishing that on stage at the DEMO conference in Arizona, an annual showcase of tech innovation.

All are trying to address in one way or another an emerging trend of making the Web less disjointed and more democratized — a richer, more organized forum for gathering and sharing information. These companies, and many others, are all part of a growing industry specializing in what Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li calls "social media." JotSpot Inc., a Palo Alto-based startup, is betting on Wikis, a type of Web page that can be edited by anyone. Wikis could become a staging area of sorts for information, and JotSpot's new Web service targets businesses that want to give authorized users a common location in which to collaborate. Co-workers can take a spreadsheet, build upon it, customize it, integrate data from the Web or e-mails and have all the information reside in one place on a Wiki Web site.

Revisions are tracked and archived so nothing is ever lost. Behind JotSpot is Joe Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded the early search engine Excite. Kraus became a believer in Wikis after he and fellow co-founder Graham Spencer got fed up with exchanging hundreds of e-mails and attachments and tried using a Wiki instead while working on a business plan.

That ultimately led to JotSpot's birth in October, competing against Socialtext and a handful of others in the fledgling market. "We’re in this transition of making it ever easier to publish (on the Web) and integrate previously siloed information and personalizing it," said Kraus, who is also JotSpot's chief executive.

Others, like Five Across and iUpload, aim to use the power of another form of Web publishing, online journals commonly known as blogs, to help businesses or individuals streamline their teamwork or communication. Easy to use and update, blogs have gained traction in the past few years and are used by everyone from political pundits to pre-adolescents. More than 8 million Internet users have created blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, and a growing number of businesses are experimenting with blogs as tools for internal and external communication.

At DEMO, Palo Alto-based Five Across is introducing speedy technology that lets bloggers instantaneously update their blog pages with text, photos, audio or video clips, even spreadsheets and presentations, using easy drag-and-drop motions. Called Bubbler, the tool allows members of a group to make a single blog more of a community than one person's mouthpiece. Say someone has built a Web site for their child's soccer team. Setting up a community-style blog could help make the task easier, Reid said. A single person wouldn’t be burdened with all the work. The Bubbler blogging platform could also tap Five Across'''' existing software for instant messaging and file-sharing.

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