Social Publishing ≠ Social Networking – So What Is It?

John Willis recently published a post that equates social publishing with social networking.  While the post is pretty good, and I agree with most of the points, I need to correct the bit about the definition of social publishing.  It’s way more than social networking.  Let me explain.

Social publishing is a blend of three categories:

1. web content management
2. social software (blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, forums, etc.)
3. web app frameworks

A social publishing system combines the above into a cohesive set of technology for assembling a web site that provides structure for people to express ideas and engage each other in proven patterns.   Just a few of the patterns I see today are:

1. Wiki pattern: several people jointly editing a document or group of documents
2. Forum pattern: a structured discussion about an idea or document
3. Blog pattern: a person publishing personal opinions and observations on a regular basis
4. Article pattern: a writer and editor moving an article or story through an approval chain
5. Custom content pattern: a custom content type like an event, a press release, a conference session, etc that is created and published.
6. Social networking pattern: people publishing personal profiles, creating and maintaining their digital social graph, and interacting within their network

Things like RSS, tagging, comments, rating, voting, search, and input formats/editors permeate all of these patterns and need to be built in to the architecture.  And user management, roles, and access control underly the entire system.

It is my belief that most modern web sites (from internal team collaboration to public-facing niche social networks) will be a convergence of these patterns.  Further, I believe that high order software systems that take stock of this entire landscape are going to be in high demand.  I also believe that acquiring completely separate software systems to implement each of the patterns is more costly and risky than using a unified system that handles all of the patterns well.  And lastly, I believe that Drupal is the leader in this space today, and has a great shot at becoming the de facto standard social publishing system for the LAMP tribe.  The combination of great architecture, the open source business model, the incredible community momentum, and hopefully a little marketing/packaging/support help from Acquia should be compelling.

I’m still gathering my thoughts on this whole social publishing concept, but the more I think about it, the more conviction I get.  In discussions with press and analysts over the past two weeks, I’ve seen considerable validation of the underlying trends at work here.  I look forward to your feedback.