The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and attract readers. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place.

There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie "Wall-E" where, after having floated in space for centuries in a self-contained shopping mall, the remains of the human race return to Earth. There, upon realizing that food once grew on trees and that trees must be cared for, the people ponder for the first time in their lives just how the pizza and ice cream sprouted forth from these stem-like thingies.

What he said 4.5 year ago is largely true today...

November 15, 2004

I did some research recently at OpenSourceCMS.com — a fantastic site that lets you play with dozens of CMS installations — and left pretty depressed. What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks.

The experience cemented a theory of mine: Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it doesn’t have to be that way.