A Web site is a collection of related HTML pages that is accessible through the World Wide Web at a particular domain name (usually) that are organized and link to each other in some systematic way. A content management system is a software application that provides tools that help people create and deploy Web sites. The functional areas that content management systems address (at varying levels of detail) are:

Web content management systems use some form of workflow to manage the content creation and aggregation process. It assumes that there is a business process - a series of steps performed by different people where content is approved prior to publication. Content is stored in a repository (which could be a database, or on the filesystem), and when published to the Web, the content management system is used to dynamically generate the page using some kind of templating system. Typically, the ability to view content is managed by an user access control system.

A wiki is a kind of content management system, but it takes a different approach to workflow and user access control. Wikis have no workflow and do not limit access to information. In other words, it's a Web site that anybody can edit.

In reality, this pure view of a wiki which is defined as a site that anybody can edit is actually rarely seen in practice. Over time, reality has raised its ugly head and limits on user access have been put in place. Nevertheless, the absence of workflow is consistently part of the feature set. When a page is edited, the "live" version of the page is modified.

Another important feature common to wikis is the use of wikitext, which is a kind of simple markup language whose most important feature is its ability to facilitate creating links from one page to another, both internally and externally. The lack of workflow and easy linking are the two defining features that make wikis what they are - extremely easy ways to publish content online.

Web 2.o and Social Media

Wikis are often mentioned in association with Web 2.0 and Social Media. The definition of both terms is somewhat squishy, but there are some common themes that arise when pundits try to define them. Wikis are participatory. Unlike traditional content management systems where users have distinct roles and where the set of content creators is entirely distinct from the set of content consumers (or, readers, as we once quaintly referred to them), all are equal (or mostly equal) in the public square of wikidom.

It is participatory in the sense that all members of a given population can participate equally, without excessive constraint and approval (it is a conversation and not a publication). It is decentralized in the sense that participants can be geographically disbursed as well as in the sense that the content isn't organized into a hierarchy, and often does not even reside on the same server. This decentralized and dispersed content is structured by way of links, which can be old-fashioned hypertext links from one document to another document, or it can be a conceptual link made manifest by the sharing of a common tag (another word for what is essentially a keyword that represents the subject matter of a given page).

This participatory, distributed and linked collection of ideas is not organized in a top-down manner because there is no top or bottom. Rather, any order that arises is an emergent order. A system arises out of the interactions of many individual agents, each operating under their own set of rules, much like weather patterns emerge from billions of atoms acting the way that atoms do, completely unaware of the larger system they are unwitting participants in.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is a phrase coined by Andrew McAfee at Harvard University and it refers to companies that leverage social media like wikis and blogs to improve collaborative efforts both within the firm and across firm boundaries. As is the case with all such clever phrases, it is touted as a revolutionary advent that will change business forever (see Revolutions Go in Circles if you want to know what I think about revolutions).

It's not so revolutionary in my opinion because collaboration isn't anything new, and wikis and blogs are simply tools that facilitate collaboration. At best, they represent a marginal improvement in efficiency for collaborative tasks, but people were certainly collaborating before wikis and blogs became such fashionable fare. Don't get me wrong - I'm a wiki fan. Marginal improvements in productivity is what business is all about. However, I am skeptical about the prospect that those who adopt social media will attain an ascendent competitive state because of having done so. The reason is this: the software that runs wikis and blogs is free and technically unsophisticated. Anybody can have one and therefore I find it difficult to believe that any kind of sustained competitive advantage can be had from them. At the same time, their ubiquity means that they very well end up being part of the cost of doing business, a basic activity that all businesses perform in order to stay in business.

I'm rambling now. More to come.