Radio Silence
You might have noticed that I haven't been posting here much over the last year. More likely, you haven't noticed at all. Blogs are often like that. They come and go depending on the whims of the blogger.
The reason for my silence is that my focus has shifted from pure content management to lean product development, web application development, and cloud-base architecture. At Lionbridge, I have been helping to build a business called Lionbridge onDemand. It has been a little over a year since our first sale and I am in a constant state of amazement about how things are growing. Like most of my projects, we followed a lean product development model of launching a minimum viable product and continually improving it to support the needs of our growing customer base. In this case, we started with a tiny website to translate videos. Since then we have grown to the point where:
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We now have a wide array of services that support nearly 40 different content types. We even have services that do not involve translation at all such as proof reading and CRM data cleanup.
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There are enterprise sites for many name-brand clients. It turns out that large organizations are full of individuals who prefer a simple consumer style eCommerce experience. With onDemand Enterprise, we can quickly create a custom site for a corporate account. These enterprise sites have the same simple "consumer" feel but they also have the ability to offer custom services and can tap into corporate payment channels.
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We have a Public API with a developer program. We started with an API for eCommerce systems to translate product catalogs; but then we grew into a full featured translation API that can handle our full complement of content types. While there are other translation APIs out there, ours is unique because it exposes different translation services ranging from pure machine translation to professional translation by subject matter specialists.
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We are now a global team working around the clock to deliver projects with industry leading quality. We have operations specialists in North America, Europe, and Asia. Managing a service like this requires a special mix of problem solving skills. This is content management at a level of complexity that I have not seen before. The process requires the constant attention of highly skilled and conscientious individuals.
The last point is my favorite. I am currently en route from Warsaw, Poland where I have spent the last five weeks working with the operations core team. It was an incredible experience to meet the people that I had only known through email and conference calls. From the start, I was impressed by their dedication and can do spirit. Now they feel like family.
So, back to this blog. What has made Content Here a worthy endeavor so far was that it provided a useful place for me to explore observations and concepts that I encountered as a content management professional. If I learned something, I would flesh out my knowledge by writing it here. If I did a decent job of explaining something to someone, I would reproduce that explanation here. If that was all blogging did for me, it would have been enough. But blogging provided so many more benefits. In particular, it was a way to connect with other people. I made many business connections and friendships with this blog.
I am hoping that I can continue experiencing these benefits by shifting the focus of this blog to be more aligned with my day to day work. It won't be a total departure from my older posts. My involvement in web development and open source software has stayed the same. But I will probably write a lot less about content management software, product selection, taxonomy, workflow, and other pure content management concepts. To be honest, I feel like there is not much more for me to write on those topics. There will be more posts about my experiences from growing a web business. Topics will include things like working with distributed teams, lean product development, customer support, web application development, and web operations.
Hopefully, along the way, I will meet new people who are struggling with these same topics. The web is a pretty big place so I think that chances are good.