With the release of WordPress® 3.0, the popular Blogging platform has taken another step toward becoming a full-fledged CMS (Content Management System) along the lines of Joomla® and Drupal®.

The first thing a user will notice about 3.0 is the new default theme. “Kubrick” has been replaced by “Twentyten.” Twentyten allows you to choose your own header image, and with the click of a mouse, you can determine whether a Page layout should be one or two columns. WordPress 3.0 also includes a greatly improved menu management system, so that a non-technical user can create customized menus on a Page-by-Page basis.

Version 3.0 has not changed the fact that WordPress allows you to choose from a wide array of plug-ins. Again, with a few clicks of a mouse, you can download and install a plug-in that will give you a contact form, manage comment spam, optimize your Pages for SEO, and even go so far as to provide you with an e-commerce solution.

The role of a website is changing. It is no longer the unique representation of a company or individual on the Internet. Today you can follow a company or individual on Twitter or and Facebook, connect on Linkedin, and post comments to a Blog.

For each Page you build in a WordPress website, you have to confront the questions–is this a Page or a Blog? Do I allow comments or not?  In a way, it provokes the question: what is now a Website vs. what is now a Blog? With modern tools available, a Website should no longer be just an online brochure. It should, similarly to the example cited above about the use and “conversational” aspects of Social Media platforms, encourage active dialogue with site users, including information seekers, consumers, those who are interested in what you have to say and what you show/demonstrate on your site, and more. Because WordPress started out as a Blogging platform, it is highly suited for this interactive world.

A fascinating article appeared a few days ago on Mashable.com regarding the ongoing Content Curation debate. Defined in an article on Social Media Today titled “Manifesto for the Content Curator,” by Rohit Bhargrava, “A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

We at Mitra Creative believe that conducting research on, aggregation, and posting of content on various Social Media channels to promote ideas, thought, education, and more, adds value and depth to a topic or issue. Our team has found it valuable to augment our/our clients’ self-published information, which may appear to be “self promotion” even when self-published material represents original thought, with additional, more “objective” content.

The Mashable.com article, by Steven Rosenbaum, states, ” ‘Curation comes up when search stops working,’ says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter. ‘Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.’ ” This is, in our opinion, one of the great examples of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Web 3.0 concept, where metadata is now blended in a large virtual repository and used to aggregate thought and even solve problems.

Read the article and see the video here.

As all of us at MITRA CREATIVE wish our families, friends, clients, colleagues and followers a very Happy, Prosperous New Year, we want to share with all of you a great article that we read on the popular and highly informative, “social, media, brand” information resource/Blog called Penn Olson. The article, by contributor Willis Wee, speaks of the “4 Reasons To Employ Social Media in 2010″:

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

We usually comment on what we read, but this article — containing a compelling, concise video called “Social Media ROI: Socialnomics” (from the insightful work and writings of Erik Qualman) — brilliantly summarizes the Business Social Media landscape and we feel it does not require further narrative.

We very much look forward in 2010 to providing valuable information, articles, information about Mitra Creative’s happenings on this Blog, and working with many of you to support your interactive/media design and development, marketing communications strategy, corporate digital video production and Web 2.0/3.0 and other needs!

Yahoo! News published an article today that nicely summarizes the impact of collaborative digital communications platforms in the first decade of the 2000s.

The article’s author, Laura E. Davis, quotes Professor Paul Levinson of Fordham University who states in his book “New New Media”: “In particular, what makes these newer media so important is that it turns the consumers into producers.”

READ THE ARTICLE HERE.

The Mitra Creative team has not been Blogging for a while. Several reasons:

1. Our President, Karl Joseph Ufert, lost his father in July 2009. This temporarily slowed Karl’s activities, speaking appearances and trend-watching.
2. We have been hard at work throughout the end of summer/beginning of fall on a number of important, but time-consuming projects–we will launch three new full-scale websites in the next several weeks for clients in the Technology (Microsoft® Partner/Solution Provider), Fashion/Media and Advertising spaces, and we just upgraded the WordPress platform for the Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley project Blogsite.
3. We have been developing a series of new offerings, including our Digital Video Production/Video Marketing and SEO/Social Media Consulting practices.
4. We are working on a number of collaborations/partnerships, including furthering our activities with the important marketing strategy firm, The Nurture Institute (creators of the Microsoft® Partner Essentials Marketing program).

We look forward to updating you on all of these exciting projects, events, business practices and alliances, as well as continuing to provide valuable information regarding the marketing, interactive, Web 2.0/3.0, digital video spaces and related topics.