Has Social Networking blurred the line between Blog and CMS systems?

Recently, we’ve been working on a lot of sites that are aimed at creating mini social networks, similar to Facebook, and Digg. We’ve also been developing a lot of Facebook applications, and are now starting to develop Wordpress blogs.

When blogs were first introduced, they were a way to communicate with people about what you’ve been doing, let them comment, tagging for Technorati, RSS feeds, and so on. All mechanisms aimed at encouraging people to talk and share links. This was the first step in creating online communities. In this form it was site to site, and not focused in one location, but it really worked - and still does.

On bigger sites, other mechanisms started being introduced that encouraged a different kind of sharing. Content sharing sites and systems such as Digg, del.ico.us and Stumble Upon appeared with the aim of allowing you to submit links from the site you’re looking at, and then encouraged others to look at, who in turn also bookmark the page and bring traffic as well as spreading your company’s message - a key tactic in an SEO campaign.

Sites also started to feature additional tools such as send to friend, and oddly as this sounds, download to PDF. Not strictly a social networking tool, but think about it... By it’s very nature it allows people to create files from any content that anyone can open, and it suddenly becomes much easier for them to send information about your company to their friends and colleagues.

The tools were built into their respective management tools. Wordpress with it’s great system of comments, tagging and pinging. CMS system such as Wiliams's sitedock™ and Ektron include social networking links and send to friend in the template, along with SEO tools.

Now start to look at how ideas have crept from one to the other. Blogs systems now allow you to create pages as well as blogs, making use of image galleries and SEO tools. These pages are structures like a big site, but have the advantage of giving users access to the blog tools on any part of the site. Then add in the social networking tools, and suddenly they have a lot in common with a larger site.

Likewise with CMS systems. They now include a blog by default, and you can create RSS feeds of just about anything. You can add comments to anything, as well as taking advantage of tagging to categorise your content for search engines and linking. These tools sound trivial but can really help to build that community feel, and help to build both brand awareness but also allow customers to give you their feedback.

Larger CMS systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint have big advantages over the smaller blogging systems with their collaborative, integrated nature within the office environment, and the ability to create and manage multiple sites from within one solution. But, with the recent shift and growth of social networks, the tools from these smaller systems will continue to filter into the main stream solutions and feed off each other. Another example of the social nature of Web 2.0.